Model-Driven Open Ecological Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning

Introduction

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is an enterprise information management system based on information technology and developed from Material Requirement Planning (MRP). It is used to standardize and integrate the business processes of enterprises (Chou & Chang, 2008; Jacobs, 2007; Moon, 2014). The ERP system uniformly manages human resources, finances, goods, production, supply and sales for companies. It also provides a platform for employees to manage and for decision-makers to consult, analyze and make decisions. The emergence and implementation of ERP have greatly improved the unified management and operation efficiency of the enterprise in terms of capital flow, logistics, human flow and information flow, which effectively improved the performance of the enterprise.

However, in recent years, when face the competitive industry, diverse users’ needs and ever-changing technological innovation, the traditional ERP systems can no longer serve the development of enterprises well. Related literatures show that the failure rate of ERP implementation in enterprises is as high as 40 to 60 percent (Liang, Saraf, Hu, & Xue, 2007), and ERP is becoming increasingly costly (Osman, 2018). Overall, the traditional ERP system still has many problems: (1) The traditional ERP system is in an internal closed information island. User experience, corporate management experience and developer documents cannot be shared. (2) Lack of flexibility. Traditional ERP has poor scalability, and its business processes are scattered in different business function modules. Therefore, it is difficult for ERP business processes to change and to adapt to the dynamic changes in the business needs of SMEs. (3) Difficult to fully understand the requirements. The mismatch between the enterprise's requirements and the real system design is an important reason for the failure of ERP system implementation (Uddin, Alam, Mamun, Khan, & Akter, 2020).

With the rapid development of the Internet, emerging technologies such as cloud computing, big data, and AI provided strong technical support for ERP, and the concept of cloud ERP (Kiadehi & Mohammadi, 2012; Saini, Saini, Yousif, & Khandage, 2011) was proposed. Compared with traditional enterprises that build ERP systems independently, enterprises can directly access software services through the Internet by the way of cloud services, thus reducing investment in infrastructure and software, which is particularly important for SMEs. The traditional ERP and cloud-based ERP are commonly referred to as on-premise ERP and SaaS ERP respectively (Gross, 2012). Table 1 shows some comparison results between traditional ERP (aka. on-premise ERP) and cloud ERP(aka. SaaS ERP) (Saeed, Juell-Skielse, & Uppström, 2012).