AMR: SOA will kill ERP

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SOA can't kill ERP

Even as I'm writing as an SAP employee, this represents my personal opinion and is not an official SAP statement.

Having worked on both sides of this discussion - consulting on large SOA projects previously and being able to help with service-enablement of SAP's applications now - some of the high-level talk of folks who've "never done it" gives me lots of enjoyment.

Why do we have ERP? Because it's integrated! The different pieces (sales, manufacturing, logistics, finances, human resources, ...) know each other, e.g. they know if something happens in the supply chain, critical orders might be affected. And then you can make an ERP do something about it.

Try this with plain SOA. No answers. Business events? Go your own. Analytics across modules? Go ETL yourself. Make sense of the data yourself. The great thing about ERP is that it's big and integrated. And that's the downside as well - if you try to delegate your enterprise's process and data inconsistencies (and rivalries) to a piece of software, this process will somehow be painful.

So instead of singing the song of ERP vs. SOA, which admittedly sounds siren-like intriguing to whoever shoulders an ERP implementation?s bill, SOA bigots should embrace ERP as their best friend in a SOA project. Why? Who else can give you real meaningful business events? Who else gives you all open orders for a given customer? Who else tells you exactly when an order will ship? And what raw materials went into manufacturing it? And what?s your margin on this order?

I could go on for ages, but bottom line is, what I learned the hard way supporting SOA projects: ERP is your best friend. And that?s the way you should treat it ? like a friend. Make him happy. Keep him current. Help him develop.

Regards, Harald Nehring

Posted by: hnehring   Posted on: 08/30/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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