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Chapter 5 • Implementation Strategies 149

key to this whole process is to develop a thorough testing plan and to execute it. This testing plan
will better ensure that upgrades to any component of the operational environment meet the
production needs of the business.

Overcoming Third-Party Integration Issues

STRATEGIC PARTNERS ERP vendors have recognized third-party products and integration can
cause problems. To remedy that, ERP vendors have developed relationships with third-party
software vendors in the industry to assist in addressing integration and interface issues. This
generally means that the third-party product vendor will receive early versions of ERP system
upgrades to allow for time to test and change the third-party product to work with the upgraded
ERP version. Over time these partnerships have proven to be very beneficial and have expanded
beyond early releases to developing coding standards and more elaborate system validation
processes. In looking at third-party products, a business should work with the ERP vendor to
identify the vendor’s strategic partners and to fully understand the meaning of a strategic partner.
Third-party product vendors need to display a high standard of coding and to validate their pro-
duct with the ERP vendor to ensure system integrity and reliability.

Middleware
Interfacing and integration are recognized as problematic to ERP systems. The development of
middleware is an attempt to solve this issue. Middleware can assist with the development of
reporting databases that use extract, translate, and load (ETL) tools and with newer middleware
systems that act as the arbitrator between an ERP and other systems or products. The ultimate goal
for middleware is to create a seamless process between two or more systems without needing to
modify either system. This type of middleware continues to evolve and will mature with time.

DATABASE REQUIREMENTS
Understanding Transactional and Reporting Needs
Relational databases have come of age and are used throughout the industry. There have been
many iterations of relational databases since they were first introduced back in the 1970s. They
have matured as products. In addition, hardware infrastructures have grown and are better suited
to sustain the environment. This was not always the case: It often took a large number of specia-
lized technical staff to ensure that the database environment was available and functioning well.
For an ERP system to perform up to expectations, the update or transactional component
and the reporting component must respond in a timely fashion. The transactional component
requires a quick response time to individual pieces of information for updating or inquiring. All
ERP systems are initially set up to provide as rapid as possible a response time for single trans-
actions as possible; however, this works in contrast to strategic reporting, which generally
requires retrieval of large amounts of data for summarization or large-volume output. These two
components, transactional and report generation, do not work well with a single database
instance and this has led to the development of data marts, data warehouses, and ETL middle-
ware. These reporting environments currently import data from the transactional environment
and arrange them in such a way as to be able to produce reports without having to write complex
programs to retrieve the desired data. In most instances, a “user-friendly” reporting tool can
extract data and arrange what is needed in a report without having to develop complex programs.