Software Components for ERP Applications

Cbse And Erp System Characteristics

ERP provides new business opportunities as it integrates several business processes together to provide a unique business contact. Appuswamy (2000) predicts the holistic integrated business transactions and analysis has provided the synergy to keep business processes dynamic and to deal with customer needs in real-time. ERP system is an integrated business software system and its characteristics that allow an organisation to:

• ☺ Automate and integrate various business processes hence we need a component to support business process modeling and integration strategies

• ☺ Enterprise wide support for sharing common data and practices across the enterprise systems

• ☺ Able to share access product services and information in real-time

• ☺ Seamless integration

• ☺ System configuration

In summary, characteristics of ERP systems are to provide:

• ☺ Seamless integration

• ☺ Packaging

• ☺ Vendor management

• ☺ Change management

Figure 1 (Christiansson and Jacobsson 1999) shows the composition of component based information systems. The development of component-based systems is different from the development of traditional systems. A component-based information system can be viewed as a three-layer system. The innermost level is the component infrastructure i.e. the components themselves and the necessary glue-code to make them inter-operational. The middle layer is the software application, i.e. the grouping of cooperating components into software applications. The outer layer is the information system infrastructure i.e. the information systems that the different applications supports or consists of. These layers are described in Figure 1.