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68 Chapter 3 • Enterprise Systems Architecture

when a single user enters and saves a piece of data. Through this customization and sharing of
content, experience is developed, reporting is made more strategic, and efficiencies are gained.
For example, a sales manager will only be interested in information relevant to his or her role
(e.g., how to increase sales and help project future revenue). For this reason, user roles are set up
in the system to define access rights for each and every functional user of the system. The portals
allow customization of the page such that a sales manager can monitor such information as sales
revenue, representative performance, or any elevated support issues. This helps to eliminate time
wasted sifting through useless data and facilitates the seamless transfer of information across
job functions.

INFRASTRUCTURE REQUIREMENTS An ERP system places tremendous load on the corporate
network. Users form a wide variety of connections that access the network. According to AT&T’s
Web site, users can connect within the corporate local area network, whereas international or regional
offices gain access through the wide area network. Partners or remote users gain connection through
network cable or DSL connections to the Internet. All of these scenarios make the network and
capacity planning for the network as crucial as the planning and deployment of the ERP system.
The implementation of an ERP system has its own infrastructure requirements that
includes internal network and desktop requirements that a Web-based system requires. In addi-
tion, there are infrastructure requirements that provide anytime, anywhere access. This is where
many implementations fail or not realize their benefits. Implementation of such an enterprise
system as SAP requires more than just supporting the infrastructure requirements of these appli-
cations; it requires an extended enterprise that enables the sharing of this information. This is
where the network comes into play. Leading up to the production rollout, network managers are
provided with a very limited view from which they must size and estimate the required network.
For example, there are times the implementation team is not aware that an interface on the appli-
cation layer also requires bandwidth to support the sharing of data. According to Gartner
Research, large companies in the Fortune 1000 lose on average up to $13,000 per minute every
time their ERP system is down. The cost of downtime is extremely high. An important step in
implementing an ERP is overall infrastructure planning. As is in most cases, traditional networks
require upgrading prior to the deployment of ERP systems and must be a component of the
overall budget. It is a “pay me now or pay me later” scenario. Up-front planning will provide for
a stable and reliable environment, adding to the ERP implementations success.
If the network connection through which the end users access the application has
problems, the user will experience poor performance. This poor performance leads to a loss of
productivity; therefore, a high-availability network is a requirement for a fully functioning ERP
system, especially one that can grow as the user population grows and support the continued
expansion and integration of a supply chain. Some network analysts have estimated that network
service failures caused by old infrastructure have increased threefold between 1998 and 2001,
and this has impacted the corporate bottom line by more than $50 billion in lost revenues.
ERP system and its third-party integrations extend the benefit of an enterprise system to an
organization’s partners and customers. Integration with partner and customer systems allows “a
company to manage important parts of the business such as order tracking, inventory manage-
4
ment and replenishment, supplier interaction, customer services, and HR management.” As dis-
cussed earlier, this integration can be done through either the application layer or the portal layer,

4 AT&T Point of View/Networking in ERP. (June 10, 2006). www.peoplesoft-planet.com/POINT-OF-VIEW.html
(accessed June 10, 2006).