Ideas for #BPMshift – Delenda est “vendor-centric #BPM” – How to modernise a legacy ERP

I was recently asked for advice on how to modernise a legacy ERP. It was developed long time ago to handle the core business. Right now it shows the following symptoms of difficult maintenance:

• integration
• incorporation of new technologies
• old programming techniques
• heavy releases
• availability of industrial products for previously unique functionality (e.g. event management)
• some generic functionality is commodity
• just slow to evolve

Sure that the root cause is that the ERP had emergent/historical grow not being architected for such evolution.

The goal of modernisation can be formulated as the following:

1. Agile (with the pace of business) provisioning of business solutions
2. From disparate IT applications to a business execution platform which will “liberate” people for business innovations
3. Combine various provisioning methods: assemble, rent, buy, build, outsource, centralised vs. kept locally, standardised, re-engineered or automated

The principles of the modernisation are defined in the following way:

• Step-by-step technical transformation in two interrelated and intermixed streams:
1. Disassemble ERP functionality into services
2. Re-assemble business functionality via processes
• Business evolution has to drive technical transformation (each transformational step brings something to business and does some modernisation)

Let us start from the simplest part - assemble via processes

• A processes defines Who (roles) is doing What (business objects), When (coordination of activities), Why (business rules), How (business activities) and with Which Results (performance indicators)
• Business processes make bigger services from smaller services

Disassemble an application into services schematically looks as the following:

Of course, disassemble of an ERP is more complex:

Advantages of this approach are the following:

• Use of specific functionality from COTS (e.g. event management)
• Use of generic functionality from “suites”
• In-house developing ONLY specific-business-core-functionality
• Integration of commodity or best-to-fit functionality
• Faster evolution is possible because of BPM/SOA architecture

In case of transformation of a group of related legacy applications – please see http://improving-bpm-systems.blogspot.com/2013/06/enterprise-patterns-eclipse.html

Thanks,
AS