Nicklas Holmberg

A major question in organizations is how to support Business Processes (BPs) by an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. In this paper we present thoughts on designing implementation processes of ERPs using a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based perspective: The starting point is based on the idea of decomposing an ERP from a SOA based perspective and thereby supporting automation of important business aspects. ERP implementation processes are problematic and too often result in misalignment between BPs and the implemented information system. ERPs aim at being the solution but demands either that the system adjust to existing BPs or that BPs adjust to the inherited processes in the system. In this paper, we explore how a SOA based perspective could assist organizations to gain synchronization over time between BPs and an ERP system. From a theoretical discussion, exemplified with practical experiences from implementation of ERP5, we present the main conclusion, which is that a SOA-based perspective on an ERP implementation process would assist the uniqueness of an organization at the same time as it supports synchronization between business processes and IS.