The Federated Enterprise Resourse Planning (ERP) System covers a scientific approach for the service-oriented and cross-vendor development and provision of ERP systems which is based on the hypothesis that the fulfilment of increasing individual functional ERP system requirements of enterprises on the one hand is contradictory to the development and provision of ERP systems by a single software vendor on the other hand.
The FERP system is an ERP system which allows a variable assignment of business application functions to software providers. The overall functionality is provided by an ensemble of standardized subsystems that all together appear as a single ERP system to the user. Different business components can be developed by different vendors.
Foundation for the development of an FERP system is the existence of a federation of software vendors with the common objective to jointly provide an ERP system to a specific target group of users (enterprises).
The provision of a worldwide FERP system can be seen as special case. Central motivation for the collaboration between providers is to profit from the network effects which arise from the cross-vendor compatibility of business application components. By this, a competitive environment for service providers is created based on the concurrent marketing of professional economic know-how, branch knowledge and service quality (as component-oriented software) and is mainly influenced by the customer satisfaction. Thus, despite the cooperation with potential business rivals several opportunities for the differentiation of unique selling propositions of providers exist.
The combination of cooperating software vendors and utilizing enterprises is called "federation" because the structure of this organizational construct can be compared to the principle of federalism whereas a centrally coordinated standardization effort is combined with opportunities for autonomous provision and configuration of ERP system elements.
The prototype which is offered for use in collaborative commercial projects implements all aspects of the FERP system approach. It consists of a basic framework installation which is represented by a Database Management System (DBMS), a Workflow Management System (WfMS), a Web Service Consumer System and a Graphical User Interface (GUI) based on dynamic web pages. Furthermore several Web Services exist, e.g. a Web Service for the generation of reports about sales statistics, in order to show how the encapsulation of ERP components as Web Services can work in real life scenarios.
The prototype is implemented in Java and is based on open source software components.
Innovative Aspects:
- A flexible ERP system approach based on Web Services mainly interesting for SME which cannot afford or are unsatisfied with the requirements covered by conventional ERP system products coming from a single software vendor.
- Concepts and development environment prototypes for distributed ERP development projects
- A tested web browser-based prototype of an FERP system.
- Security and decentralization concepts and prototype implementations for FERP systems
- Novel protocols for the exchange of Web Service ratings
