The Future Is Now

I was digging old files from last year and trying to sort out which ones to delete to free my laptop from stale files. I came across an old article about ERP written about 2 years ago today. The article tacked about the future of ERP systems.

The articles stated that there are two emerging technologies that cannot be ignored in the field of ERP as these technologies will surely make a major presence in ERP. The two technologies were Web services and XML (extensible markup language).

Of course today, anybody in the IT world who has not heard of web services and XML must be living under some kind of rock or may just be some imposter trying to claim to be an IT guy.

Before XML, there was absolutely no way that any technology could make use of the full potential of business collaboration. But now XML is everywhere, not just in ERP. XML has become so ubiquitous and useful in every way that it has become the standard for exchanging data and documents of different formats between two disparate systems. XML, EDI (electronic data interchange linking systems with different data formats) has become cost effective and easily accessible to all, thanks to XML and the internet.

In the not so distant internet history, EDI was for the elite few. It was only open to business organizations that had the money to implement a private network and the clout to influence suppliers and customers to use the network. But then again, thanks t the internet it has done away with the need for private networks, is prohibitive to smaller companies, and XML has added its benefit to the masses by being the vehicle for standardization with the way servers talk about data to each other.
Todays's ERP implementation can create XML schemas and can just important and export data in XML documents. This makes sharing of data within and beyond the enterprise very easy to do. The more data is being shared with business partners, the more important it is to have a robust ERP to manage the enterprise.
In the past, probably when the article was written, there was no heavy or constant mention of the term web service. But today, web services, those small software applications which can be accessed from within business applications, are almost as widely used as stand alones. Today, there are so many data centric web services used in ERPs and they provide information that frequently change such as currency exchange rates and tax codes.
In addition to XML, McKie identifies Web services—smaller software applications that are accessed from within business applications—as the other key technology for the future. In the ERP world, there are lots of data-centric Web services, which typically provide information that changes fairly frequently, such as exchange rates and tax codes.
Companies who want to go into e-Commerce and want a portal on the web should really consider having an ERP to closely collaborate with web resources.