Requirement-Driven Evaluation of Remote ERP-System Solutions: A Service-oriented Perspective

This paper systematically evaluates four different APIs provided by popular ERP systems (SAP BAPI, SAP eSOA, Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Intuit Quick books) according to their potential for service-oriented enterprise application integration. Central is here the quality of access to and control of their business objects for developing complex business processes in a service oriented landscape. In an ideal world this development should be directly in the hands of the application/business experts, and thus be possible without coding. This can only work if the technical APIs can (semi-) automatically be bridged to a level an application expert can master, which leads to additional API requirements. Our evaluation reveals that the currently still quite unsatisfactory quality of the APIs very much reflects the business profile of each ERP solution. We are therefore convinced that, with changing market conditions, future ERP solutions will live up to the identified requirements.