Enterprise Resource Planning Systems in business process management:

Enterprise Resource Planning systems (ERP systems) were
developed. The great achievement of enterprise resource planning systems is
that they provide an integrated database that spans large parts of an organization.
Enterprise resource planning systems basically reimplemented these disparate
enterprise application systems on the basis of an integrated and
consistent database.
An enterprise resource planning system stores its data in one centralized
database, and a set of application modules provides the desired functionality,
including human resources, financials, and manufacturing. Enterprise resource
planning systems have effectively replaced numerous heterogeneous enterprise
applications, thereby solving the problem of integrating them.
Fig. 2.3. Two-tier client-server architecture
Enterprise resource planning systems are accessed by client applications,
These client applications access an application server
that issues requests to a database server. We do not address the architectures
of enterprise systems in detail but stress the integrated data storage and the
remote access through client software.
With the growth of enterprises and new market requirements, driven by
new customer needs around the year 2000, the demand for additional functionality
arose, and new types of software systems entered the market. The most
prominent types of software systems are supply chain management systems,
or SCM systems, and customer relationship management systems, or CRM
systems. While basic functionality regarding supply chain management has
already been realized in enterprise resource planning systems, new challenges
due to increased market dynamics have led to dedicated supply chain management
systems. The main goal of these systems is to support the planning,
operation, and control of supply chains, including inventory management,
warehouse management, management of suppliers and distributors, and demand
planning.
Regarding the evolution of enterprise systems architectures, the main point
is that new types of information systems have entered the market, often developed
by different vendors than that of the enterprise resource planning
system many companies run. At the technical level, the supply chain management
system hosts its own database, with data related to supply chains. Since
large amounts of data are relevant for both enterprise resource planning and
supply chain management, data is stored redundantly. As a result, system architects
face the same problems as they did years ago with the heterogeneous
enterprise applications.
As with the settings mentioned, in order to avoid data inconsistencies and,
at the end of the day, dissatisfied customers, any modification of data needs
to be transmitted to all systems that host redundant copies of the data. If, for
example, information on a logistics partner changes that is relevant for both
the enterprise resource planning system and the supply chain management
system, then this change needs to be reflected in both systems. From a data
integrity point of view, this change even needs to take place within a single
distributed transaction, so that multiple concurrent changes do not interfere
with each other.
The source of the problem is, again, redundant information spread across
multiple application systems. Since this information is not integrated, the
user of an enterprise resource planning system can access only the information
stored in this system. However, the customer relationship management system
also holds valuable data of this customer.
When the customer calls and the call centre personnel can only access the
information stored in one system, and is therefore not aware of the complete
status of the customer, the customer is likely to become upset; at least, he does
not feel well served. The customer expects better service, where the personnel
is aware of complete status and not just of partial status that happens to be
stored in the software system that the call centre agent can access. In the
scenario discussed, the call centre agent needs to know the complete status
of the customer, no matter in which software system the information might be
buried.