A Practical Recipe to Stir-up Monolithic Enterprise Information Systems Using DOC- and XML-Standards

When it comes to controlling and optimising information- and value flows in manufacturing industry, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is still the preferred option. Despite the immense potential, there is currently a particular caution to be observed in the market for ERP systems. One reason is a prevalent uncertainty about the ongoing 'e-revolution' of traditional business processes. Because the standard ERP systems regard themselves as the epicentre of any enterprise architecture, they cause exceeding consequential costs for reengineering a business. The term ERP-II has been coined to describe alternative information system architectures in which flexible and customized federations of smaller business components interact, even over enterprise and intranet boundaries, by means of a platform-neutral communication bus. It is the central challenge for the ERP vendors at the beginning of the new millennium to evolve and migrate their existing logic and customer installations towards this vision. In this paper, we would like to share our experiences in transforming a particular ERP product for mid-sized businesses into an ERP-II platform. To realise the proposed business bus, we chose a modern middleware based on the ubiquitous eXtended Markup Language. To realise a suitable, object-oriented runtime environment for business components, we chose the powerful Java 2 Enterprise Edition™. Both flavours have been conveniently blended into the notion of Business Web Services to cook a new generation of business processes inside the Web-ERP.