Design of an Enterprise Resource Planning System Using Service-Oriented Architecture

Abstract

A typical ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system integrates many business functionalities such as billing, accounting, order processing, manufacturing and customer relationship management. Generally they are implemented as separate modules that are changed and modified as needed. However, lack of proper design can cause the modules to become tightly coupled. Unnecessary dependencies decrease maintainability because change in one part of the system can affect other parts. Large enterprise applications are often build by multiple organizations using varying methods and technologies. Development teams are not always fully aware of the work of others. This makes reusing existing features difficult and causes developers to recreate the same logic multiple times.

This thesis describes how a monolithic architecture can be migrated into a service-oriented architecture (SOA). An ERP system designed for Apple service providers is used as an example. The large example system is converted into small services to improve its maintainability. The aim is to create an architecture that does not depend on a specific technology and supports reusing functionality. Although SOA has many benefits, effective use of it requires technological changes and adjustments to the whole development process. In the example system, lots of changes were made to the development, testing and deployment processes. The new architecture lead to eliminating lots of manual work. This was achieved by implementing a deployment pipeline that takes advantage of Docker virtual containers.