Wednesday, May 30, 2007

On the Web Office and ERP merging

The concept of the Web Office is quite a new one, so its definition could be arguable matter. But, the way the proposed solutions are evolving, it all leads me to think that a company ERP and Web Office will start sharing the same framework and, ultimately, be one solution.

One obvious link is that both store and manage enterprise information. For example, all Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) must have a "Contacts" section. Independent of the nature of the Contact (Co-worker, Client, Vendor), they are all persons, so most of the data will be very similar. You could have corporate Clients and Vendors, also sharing attributes in its modelling. The synchronization of this data among several systems is a tedious and risk prone task, even when automated.

Other, more subtle, reason elicits from the collaborative nature of the Web Office. All enterprise work-flows would be better handled if defined on a single work-flow engine, instead of having different management for different systems. Much office work is subject for a work-flow process. Those are element that have been present in ERPs for a long time, that are now being incorporated into Web Offices.

Another common issue is to have two different systems (most times requiring duplicate input effort) for, say, project management and the accounting of absent and leave days.

As a commenter in the previous post pointed out, the Web-Interface (not a small matter in many cases, specially if you can extend or align the "Web-Interface" concept to a whole "Corporate Image"). He also mentioned report designer (Which I would extend to Business Intelligence engines) as something that could also be merged.

I will assume the Single Sign On issue does not need much discussion.

Common elements of ERP and Web Office

In short, we have identified the following as common framework elements:
  • Single Sign On
  • Contacts (Workers, Clients, Vendors)
  • Image Design and Standards
  • Work-flow engine
  • Tasks and Projects management
  • Business Intelligence and reporting engines
I am sure that further analysis should discover more of this elements.

Examples

Even though I am not aware of similar essays, I do acknowledge several companies developing solutions that have obviously identified this trend. Zoho, 37signals, and ShareOffice would be among those.

3 comments:

Dunitz said...

The merging of the ERP and the web office seams a genuine solution for better performance and this certainly does contribute a lot into the Corporate image. Very informative blog and keep it coming.
Web Based ERP

Anonymous said...

Hi there to every body, it's my first pay a visit of this website; this web site consists of awesome and actually good material in support of readers.

Visit my page home baking soda

Anonymous said...

hey there and thank you for your info – I have
certainly picked up something new from right here. I did however expertise several technical issues using this website,
since I experienced to reload the site a lot of times previous to I could get it to load properly.
I had been wondering if your web host is OK? Not that I am complaining,
but sluggish loading instances times will often affect your
placement in google and could damage your quality score
if ads and marketing with Adwords. Well I'm adding this RSS to my email and could look out for much more of your respective intriguing content. Make sure you update this again very soon.

Check out my website :: www.iamsport.org