ERP should cross organization boundaries: Cordys

For Netherlands-based Cordys, ERP is a system not to be restricted within the
four-walls. Rather it feels that companies should capitalize on the Internet
infrastructure and cross enterprise boundaries to extend its processes to its
value-chain partners. To promote this idea, Cordys has launched the concept ‘Beyond
ERP’ to gain additional value by optimizing the business processes and
resources of all the entities in the chain. Ravi Veda-ntam, VP–Asia, Cordys,
elabo-rated on the rationale behind ‘Beyond ERP’ to Nisha Kurian of
CyberMedia News Service. Excerpts from the interview:

‘Beyond ERP’–Kindly elabo-rate this strategy?

The focus of the ERP systems has been to organize work aro-und processes
inside the four walls of a company. ‘The Cor-dys Paradigm of Beyond ERP’
recommends that companies must capitalize on the Internet infrastructure and
cross enter-prise boundaries to extend its processes to its value-chain
partners. When the organiza-tion’s processes are integrated with those of
other companies in the value chain, all partners can exchange business critical
information in real-time, pool their efforts effectively and bec-ome a new
multi-enterprise company, far stronger than its individual members could ever be
on their own. Thus as busin-ess goes beyond the bounda-ries of organizations,
the tech-nology architecture of organi-zations need to go beyond ERP.

The concept of ‘Beyond ERP’ signals the advent of the use of
technology-enabled proce-sses to connect the enterprise with its other value
chain partners in order to achieve dramatic improvements in effi-ciency and
create value for everyone involved. ‘Beyond ERP’ extends the domain of ERP
from a single-intra com-pany scope to multi-company value-chains. Cordys’
Business Collaboration Platform (BCP) serves the needs of application
development, application and process integration and busi-ness performance
monitoring.

Is ‘Beyond ERP’ a concept launched to promote Cordys’
BCP?

Cordys BCP fulfills the need of a technology architecture required by the
companies to embrace the ‘Beyond ERP’ paradigm and thrive in the era of
Internet driven businesses. It will help organizations to ext-end and modernize
their leg-acy applications including ERP systems and at the same time, improve
the utilization of the investments made in the exis-ting technology
infrastructure.

Using Cordys BCP, enter-prises will share data across
applications like ERP, SCM, etc. and would also be able to model and execute
process flows across applications and provide access to the value chain
participants using the Internet for near real-time collaboration.

Who are your target customers?

Any company that is seeking to extend its existing CRM, ERP and other large
monolithic applications to add new busi-ness functions or capabilities in
response to changing business needs should take a close look at Web services
based integra-tion middleware. Companies that are keen on partnering with their
suppliers and custo-mers for collaborative proce-sses such as forecasting and
supply chain planning, should take steps to go the ‘Beyond ERP’ way.

To start with, our focus wo-uld be primarily in
manu-facturing and in BPO. Starting next year, we will be focusing on industry
verticals like banking and financial services.