Confederative ERP Systems for Small-to-Medium Enterprises
Small-to-medium enterprises (SME) are frequent. It holds for SME software users as well as for SME software developers. Both cannot exclusively use products and philosophies of large software vendors. SME users have not enough resources to apply or implem
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he University of Finance and Administration, Estonsk´ a 500, 101 00 Praha 10, Czech Republic [email protected] 2 Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Botanick´ a 68a, 602 00 Brno, Czech Republic [email protected]
Abstract. Small-to-medium enterprises (SME) are frequent. It holds for SME software users as well as for SME software developers. Both cannot exclusively use products and philosophies of large software vendors. SME users have not enough resources to apply or implement products and processes of large vendors. The processes can be based on philosophy not applicable in SME. It follows that SME must collaborate with SME software vendors and use their solutions. It can happen that even great users must use solutions of small software vendors solving special needs. We show that these challenges can be solved if we apply a variant of service-oriented architecture using document-oriented communication. The communication is supported by infrastructure services. Our experience shows (see examples) that it can have dramatic effects. Keywords: Small-to-medium enterprises (SME) · Supporting business processes in SME · Software adaptation · Document-oriented software architecture · Software confederations
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Introduction
Small-to-medium enterprises (SME) business is a frequent phenomenon. SME produce almost 20 % of GDP in many countries, e.g. in Czech Republic. According to Czech Statistical Office, more than 80 % of IT professionals worked in 2013 as sole traders (craftsmen) or as employees in SME. They are developers, maintainers or IT operators. Many software firms are SME too. The software professionals must take into account that business, culture, and business processes are different from the ones used in large enterprises. The software developed by large vendors for large clients cannot be as a rule seamlessly used by SME. The systems are inspired by the culture of large organizations and expect the existence of large resources (tools, professionals, investments, available data, etc.). SME must often take part in global business. Their business processes (BP) must support collaboration with other SME but also with information systems c Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 O. Gervasi et al. (Eds.): ICCSA 2016, Part V, LNCS 9790, pp. 350–362, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-42092-9 27
Confederative ERP Systems for Small-to-Medium Enterprises
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of giant firms. Many activities (e.g. bookkeeping) tend to be outsourced and their providers should be changed easily if necessary. Some production subprocesses (parts of BP) can be outsourced too. The business partners should be easily exchangeable. The above properties imply that the systems are very easily maintainable. We show that the problems can be smoothly solved if the developed software systems have a specific service-oriented architecture (SOA) using documentoriented communication. The communication is supported by infrastructure services. It can (see examples) that it can have dramatic effects. The paper is structured as follows: Crucial req
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