{"id":26,"date":"2006-06-02T09:52:59","date_gmt":"2006-06-02T17:52:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.formtek.com\/blog\/?p=26"},"modified":"2006-06-02T09:52:59","modified_gmt":"2006-06-02T17:52:59","slug":"erp-versus-soa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/erp-versus-soa\/","title":{"rendered":"ERP versus SOA"},"content":{"rendered":"

At InfoWorld<\/a>‘s Executive Forum on SOA<\/a>\u00a0in March more than one speaker voiced the opinion that ERP<\/a> vendors had better watch out because SOA<\/a> would soon be a major challenge.\u00a0 What these SOA evangelists are saying is not that ERP functionality is going away, but that the\u00a0current generation of monolithic systems is being replaced with a more modular\/componentized approach.\u00a0\u00a0Next-generation ERP systems will carve up functionality into smaller easier-to-maintain interoperable services that are orchestrated\u00a0by SOA tools.<\/p>\n

The concept of ERP was that a single system could house all corporate data.\u00a0 Whether you were in finance, HR or manufacturing, given appropriate access rights, you could see any piece of corporate data from anywhere in the company.\u00a0 Prior to ERP, data would flow from one departmental system into another, and tasks like tracking the location and status of an order\u00a0could be time-consuming.\u00a0 ERP tried to solve that problem by aggregating\u00a0data\u00a0into\u00a0a single unified system.\u00a0 The selling point of ERP was that a single system could be bought that required no service work to integrate many smaller component systems.<\/p>\n

But while ERP eliminated the integration of multiple systems, successful ERP implementations usually required extensive customizations.\u00a0 Out-of-the-box ERP software seldom exactly matched the desired business processes, and getting the system to work the way that you wanted it to required significant amounts of customization.<\/p>\n

Implementing and supporting ERP\u00a0is expensive and time consuming because:<\/p>\n