Enabling enterprise composite applications on top of ERP systems

Along with benefits of ERP system companies experience high costs associated to them. Setting up and maintaining the infrastructure and adjusting standard ERP software to a specific customers requirements drive the costs of such systems. To lower the total cost of ownership companies employ software as a service (SaaS) paradigm: instead of owning software they subscribe to it. However, this does not reduce customization costs. To address specific requirements companies develop custom applications on top of their ERP systems. The challenge with this extension approach is that most ERP systems have poorly designed APIs and developing a composite application on top of such system becomes a difficult exercise. In this paper we propose an architecture of an ERP system that supports simple and fast development of composite applications on top of it. We define five requirements towards such an architecture and show how the requirements are satisfied by the proposed architecture. Our proposal emphasizes the importance of ERP data accessibility and contributes with a concept of business object query language that allows building fine-grained queries. All suggestions made in the paper have been prototyped.