Special technology report ERP
“
Globalisation is pushing organisations towards centralisation and
standardisation, resulting in simplification in order to compete and react swiftly to changes in business, markets and regulatory and security needs or to locate goods and services in lower cost markets.”
– Richard Turner, CSC.
rock solid. The better your handle on information (especially cash flow and projections), the better access to funds you’ll be likely to have.”
Andy Latham, managing director K3 Business Technology Group, concurs with Burgess on the mobility front. “With the increasing use and availability of mobile phones, ipads and iphones, users are expecting to have company information at their fingertips when out and about with customers and suppliers alike,” said Lathan. He also reflected that handheld factory devices are now popular for increased real-time transaction processing for capturing crucial business information. “The days of a factory being a shift behind with their data are long gone,” he remarked.
Of late, Dinesh Mohan, industry principal, enterprise solutions at Infosys Technologies, has been observing a growing trend of back- to-basics among ERP product vendors. “… product vendors are now going back to the drawing board to see how the product can be provided more as a platform that enables customers to quickly build additional functionalities their businesses need, with minimal incremental costs,” he said. Thus, says Dinesh, the modern breed of ERP will see more infrastructure and plumbing (read forms, workflow capabilities, integration adapters, BI capabilities, security, etc.) coming from the package vendors while the customers will design the interiors (read configuration, process modelling, integration and reporting) with the help of their interior designer (systems integrator firms).
Ian Wahlers, industry strategy director
Integration
Gordon Fleming, senior executive and chief marketing officer at QAD, believes that integration remains a key challenge for ERP users and vendors alike. He comments: “When we look at the proliferation of point applications, many of which are in the Cloud – such as
Salesforce.com for CRM or Workday for HRIS – we see a need to integrate not only with applications in the same data centre but also with applications that are in the Cloud.” To address this, Fleming explains that QAD has both an integration layer and API set called QExtend. QAD has also developed a set of connectors to common applications, whether a specific application for common applications or generic for applications classes. “These connectors allow simple integration and simple maintenance,” said Fleming.
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[The Cloud concept] feels like a major shift in the same way as it did when the trend moved from large mainframe computers to client server, but things are definitely going in that direction.”
– Ian Wahlers, Lawson.
According to Bull, customers are looking increasingly to find end-to-end solutions. And while ERP systems have made huge bounds over the past decade to function within more and more corners of a business, Bull believes there will always be requirements to integrate with specialist software and hardware. He also maintains that connectivity in a modern global economy means that businesses need to communicate and collaborate with members of their supply chain in many facets of business activity; from product design through to product returns and recalls. Bull continued: “Modern ERP systems include web service tools that allow the connections between both internal and
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MANUFACTURING &LOGISTICS
IT December 2011
external systems to be easily defined and easily maintained, without having to resort to specialist technical software personnel and by using the internet as a connectivity pipeline. Cost of ownership is further improved through the use of these tools.”
SOA uptake
Norwood’s view is that there have not been any major shifts in ERP integration the past two years, “since Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been widely considered to be the most reliable way to integrate systems”. But, what has changed, according to Norwood, is the uptake of SOA in organisations of all sizes. “The technology has proven itself, and middleware toolsets are available such as Epicor Service Connect, to simplify the process of both application-to- application and business-to-business integration, giving IT decisions makers the confidence to wrap legacy applications in SOA wrappers and create solid reliable connections between their applications.”
Orme also focuses on the SOA theme. “Modern-day system providers who have listened to customer demands have tailored their architecture to be SOA enabled, thus allowing integration with other software or mechanisms for data input,” he said. However, he adds that there is still a big requirement for ERP systems to contain the majority of the functionality, as companies do not want costly and time-consuming integration projects that need constant upgrading and maintaining to keep abreast of the latest versions of all the software solutions in place.
Fully connected
Burgess considers that businesses now rightfully demand that systems be able to talk to one other. “Technology should live and act
www.logisticsit.com
Richard Turner, ERP solutions director
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