Don’t get me wrong, we at BestXperts are diehard SAP fans. After all, we earn our living by implementing SAP software. But there are times when we just can\’t stop ranting about SAP idiosyncrasies that drive us crazy. Most of these rants boil down to one common trend – SAP is unnecessarily difficult. Some of this stems from the fact that SAP has turned into a behemoth with a number of large acquisitions in the last 5 years which seems to have impacted SAP’s ability to execute quickly and with acceptable level of quality. Other times we get really frustrated with SAP’s “enterprisy” approach to such things as mobility and web services which feel very bloated when compared with the modern technologies and approaches used in those areas in the consumer space.
So we decided to do what we do best – dream a little. What would an ERP system look like if it was built today, in 2012, making use of the current trends and technological advancements in the software development space?
The New ERP
Cloud-based
Deployable in minutes, infinitely and easily scalable, cloud-provider agnostic
MVC-based
Back-end logic completely decoupled from front-end (UI)
RESTful
Simple and light web services access
Test-driven configuration
Testing engine built into the core
One source of data for transactions and analytics
No more data warehouses, no more duplication of data
Big Data-ready
Capable of handling petabytes of data with little to no impact on performance
UX-centric
User experience (enjoyment) at the core of standard delivered UI
Extendable
Ease of adding new functionality by users and partners
Secure by default
A unified authorization platform for all functionality that covers both internal and external partners
Mobile by default
Able to render on a mobile device by making minor adjustments to the front-end (view) layer. Back-end stays in tact and requires no changes.
Now if only we had a few million dollars to burn we could get going tomorrow. With today\’s advancements in rapid software development such an ERP package could quickly become a reality. Just think about it, Facebook didn\’t exist only 8 years ago and now it has over a 100 billion dollar market capitalization which puts it in the list of top 25 companies in the world.
