If
you want to make your next enterprise resource planning
(ERP) investment a long-lasting one, you better know
something about the future. Stewart McKie, a 20-year
veteran of IT consulting, gives his opinion on two major
emerging technologies and advises on how to implement
them.
You can't keep information secret. It wants to get out.
It dies if it doesn't circulate. For proof, look at the
evolution of business applications. From departmental
systems to enterprise systems to business partner
integration, the trend is to spread information further
and further.
It's hardly surprising. The better informed you are, the
better positioned you are to act. So it's important to
know which new technologies are currently helping to
spread the word. According to McKie, there are two
emerging technologies that you can't ignore. The first
is Web services and the second is XML (extensible markup
language).
"Until XML came along," McKie says, "there was no
technology that could unleash the full potential of
business collaboration. Now everyone has pretty much
decided that XML will be the standard for exchanging
documents between systems." With the emergence of the
Internet and XML, EDI (electronic data interchange
linking systems with different data formats) has become
cost-effective and accessible to all.
Everyone is Welcome
Previously, EDI was an exclusive club, open only to
corporations with the cash to build a private network
and the clout to force suppliers and customers to use
it. But, the Internet has done away with the need to
build private networks and XML has provided a standard
way of talking about data, something traditional EDI
lacked.
McKie explains what sort of
requirements this puts on business applications. "ERP
systems need to be able to create XML schemas [data
specifications], and they need to be able to import and
export data in XML documents."
"The
more data you need to share with business partners," he
adds, "the more important it is to have these
capabilities."
At
Your Service
In
addition to XML, McKie identifies Web services—smaller
software applications that are accessed from within
business applications—as the other key technology for
the future. In the ERP world, there are lots of
data-centric Web services, which typically provide
information that changes fairly frequently, such as
exchange rates and tax codes.
"Instead of manually updating that data every time you
need it, it makes sense to connect to a service from
within your business application and get the data
refreshed automatically," McKie says. "The services
sound fairly trivial but each one saves considerable
time and expense."
A second type of Web service that offers functionality
rather than data is expected to emerge. And according to
McKie, this type of Web service has great potential in
business partner integration, analytics, and alerts.
Software for Hire
"Much
of the software that will allow business partners to
collaborate together will probably exist on the Internet
as a Web service. For example, you could send an invoice
to a Web service, which passes it to your customer, the
customer pays the invoice, and the Web service manages
the whole process."
"Then, there's analytics. A significant amount of data
needs to get passed around to companies so they can
produce things like consolidated reports. It would be
very useful to have a service that accepts reports from
various subsidiaries, then performs a consolidation and
pushes back the results of that consolidation to the
parent company."
"Thirdly, there's sending alerts to mobile phones and
other handheld devices. When your inventory hits a
reorder level or goes out of stock, most ERP systems
will produce a report of those items or generate a small
alert that can be e-mailed to somebody. It would be much
more useful to communicate that event immediately to the
inventory manager and present options for resolving the
event."
Before you buy, you need a strategy
How
can your company take advantage of XML and Web Services?
McKie's advice is to decide on a strategy, then choose a
system that integrates all the technology the strategy
requires.
"If
you want an e-commerce storefront, a portal for your
employees, and a closer working relationship with your
partners, then you have to consider how slickly the ERP
system can collaborate with these Web resources. It
should be as easy as possible to push data in and out of
your ERP system, to and from your storefront, portal,
and Web services."
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