mySAP™ ERP For Dummies®

Chapter 1. ERP: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

In This Chapter

• Reviewing the history of enterprise resource planning and mySAP ERP

• Looking at the current state of ERP

• Examining the pain points still to be addressed

• Understanding the impact of a service-oriented approach

The leading enterprise resource planning software in the world is mySAP ERP. So, what's the real lowdown on ERP? Software can be like a person: Unless you know where a person came from, where he grew up, what his family was like, and what he studied at school, you don't know him. In some ways, understanding how a software product has evolved requires a similar bit of history.

To understand ERP and where it's headed, you have to take a brief peek at its life to date. Where was ERP born, how has it grown, and what does it still have to learn to fulfill its promise?

In this chapter, we take a look at the life of ERP up until now, including SAP's ERP offerings. Then we make some predictions about its future based on something called Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and, specifically, SAP's Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA).

Just What Is ERP?

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) has many definitions. In a nutshell, it is a set of software applications that are intended to integrate and streamline business processes.

Traditionally, the processes ERP concentrated on were

• Financials, including all the traditional business processes that deal with money (such as accounts receivable, accounts payable, and general ledger)

• Human resources ...