Use Case: ERP Hosting
ERP systems are heavily used in enterprises and public organizations for managing their business processes in an efficient, effective and transparent way. ERP systems belong to the most complex existing software systems as they cover huge functionalities that can be flexibly combined in a variety of scenarios. Furthermore, they must support very large, complex and possibly distributed business processes, both within (possibly global) organizations but also between different organizations.
Traditional ERP systems tend to be very large, rather monolithic and hard to set up and manage. For overcoming these drawbacks, the paradigm of service-orientation has been successfully applied by SAP for building a new ERP solution that allows for simple and flexible composition and configuration of business functionality for creating customer-specific solutions in a highly efficient way.
While large enterprises are already heavily using ERP systems, the uptake of such systems for SMEs is still low due to the complexity of the system setup and maintenance. Overcoming this barrier requires two main activities. First, an approach that allows for simple composition of ERP functionality. This is largely achieved by the SOA paradigm. Second, an approach that allows for simple consumption of ERP functionality. A prominent approach in this area can be found in the hosting and software as a service field which relieves SME customers from the burden of managing the IT systems on their own. However, the main obstacle for applying these approaches in the ERP context is the automated management of the provided system properties, usually specified by an SLA.
The main objective of this use case is the thorough evaluation of SLA management techniques as developed by action line A in the context of hosted ERP systems. In particular, the evaluation addresses:
- a unified system modelling approach for design and management (as developed by A1 and partially by A2-A6)
prediction methods on the non-functional properties of software, services and infrastructure (as developed by A6 in connection with A2-A4) - a holistic SLA-driven management approach on business/service/infrastructure layer (as developed by A2-A4 and supported by A5-A6)
- exploitation of virtualization technologies for adaptive resource allocation (as developed by A4)
The evaluation will be successful if the approach shows a significant reduction in the effort of providing and maintaining hosted ERP services in terms of metrics required amount of time, manual effort and used resources (e.g. for setup or adaptation of an ERP service). Another more qualitative success criteria is the increased transparency for providers and customers on the service provisioning process.
The use case will be based on one or more selected business scenarios from the ERP system and multiple concurrent provisioning scenarios (i.e. concurrent SLAs). The setup will be derived from a typical hosting setup as provided by the hosting branch of SAP while also taking into account hosting requirements and setups of other industrial players such as T-Systems. This derivation will be exploited for involving users of different types.
The following output of this work package is now publicly available:
