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82 Chapter 3 • Enterprise Systems Architecture

and physical levels of the architecture. Management’s role is to look at the different types
of ERP architectures and see what is most appropriate for their organization in terms of
people, business process, and overall fit of the architecture with their organizational policy and
culture. At this stage, managers need to stay away from specific vendor solutions in order to
avoid any bias.
ERP architecture must be flexible to support a diverse set of hardware and software
platforms. From a systems’ perspective, management first needs to be aware that in order for
diverse technologies to operate smoothly the IT group must have standards and policy for
technology decisions. Today’s organization requires real-time support from anywhere and
anytime for business processes, regardless of the management level of the user in the organiza-
tion. From CEOs to customer support personnel, people in the organization need live access to
data, anywhere and anytime. In addition, organizations today have customers, suppliers, and
other external entities accessing information from the ERP system.
Do not get carried away with ERP technology hype. With new technologies and architec-
tures constantly touted by vendors and consultants, it is very easy to end up with a very sophisti-
cated architecture and system, and yet have a major implementation failure. As discussed earlier
in the Nestlé’s case, when the people and organization’s processes are not in tune with the
architecture, then even a good system will not be able to achieve success in improving the bottom
line. Management must learn how to filter out the hyped technologies that do not provide value
to their organization. For example, SOA may not be appropriate for a company that has a small-
scale ERP used mainly for internal operations by its employees. On the other hand, SOA may
be appropriate for a company with e-commerce applications that has B2B relationships with
several of its partners and vendors.

Summary

•System architecture provides answers to and business intelligence. This functionality
such questions as, what will the system look is constantly evolving as needs of organiza-
like? How will the system work? How will tions change. The focus today is on support-
it be developed? Do we have the required ing enterprise-wide needs of the company.
infrastructure to support the system? Can This means ERP systems are accessible by a
the system be used for any business func- wide variety of people and departments,
tion, or just for a specific business function making them complex and vulnerable from
like human resources? This chapter has pro- management and maintenance perspectives.
vided answers to these and other questions •ERP architectures are generally organized
related to the enterprise systems architecture in tiers or layers. This provides tremendous
and revealed why it’s important to have a flexibility and scalability for ERP systems,
good architecture before implementing an which have traditionally been organized in
ERP system in an organization. three tiers: data, application, and presenta-
•System architecture includes ERP modules tion. The separation of data from applica-
and ERP architecture. Major vendors pro- tion or application from presentation makes
vide modules to support such basic business the ERP implementation very flexible
functions as accounting, finance, marketing, because an organization can change the
and HR to such advanced business functions presentation layer (i.e., user interface) with-
as self-service, compliance management, out affecting the business logic or database