How Enterprise Application Integration Competes with ERPs Research Paper

How Enterprise Application Integration Competes with ERPs - Research Paper Example As a result, the competition among businesses has augmented and organizations are putting their attention on supply chain synchronization and management to improve their corporate performance. On the other hand, for many years, ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems have been used for managing supply chain operations. In addition, the boundaries of ERP systems on integrated systems have directed organizations to look for innovative business management techniques to put together their systems as well as supply chains (Themistocleous, Irani, & Love, 2002). This paper presents a detailed analysis of enterprise application integration. The basic aim of this research is to show how EAI competes with Enterprise Resource Planning. Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) EAI (Enterprise application integration) is the way of integrating two or more tools or systems in order to allow them to work as one. In this scenario, EAI includes hardware, software and services. However, enterprise application integration systems are utilized to put together contrary systems, like that an older technology based system in which a huge investment has previously been made (it is usually known as legacy system) and a latest business application, like that customer resource management (CRM) system; in a particular business. Moreover, the enterprise application integration systems are implemented with growing rate to put together the corporate systems of a variety of businesses to allow business dealings among companies to take place electronically (Themistocleous, Irani, & Love, 2002; HostIP, 2012). EAIs and ERPs The need for implementing EAI arose in the 1980s when a lot of business organizations that had until that time implemented information technology (IT) to computerize a variety of company procedures began to assume that the incorporation of these business management applications could, along with other things, augment competence and build accuracy inside company procedures. In this scenario, many IT managers tried to redesign previously implemented business management systems and applications in order to build them as if they were integrated. Instances of these endeavors comprise attempting to carry out operational transaction processing (linked with enterprise resource planning system working and operations) on systems for informational data handling and processing. On the other hand, the enterprise resource planning systems, which included the functions of human resource management, accounting, manufacturing, distribution and other back-end operations or business dealings that do not openly engage clients, grew in reputation all through 1990s when the majority of large size corporations began modernizing their mainframe systems with the latest client/server based ERP systems such as People-Soft Inc., SAP AG, and J.D. Edwards & Co. However, to make these business management systems well-matched with their legacy systems, businesses turned to enterpri se application integration vendors for integration solutions (Themistocleous, Irani, & Love, 2002; HostIP, 2012; PeterIndia, 2012; MuleSoft Inc., 2012). Insufficient Nature of ERP Systems Managing supply chains and organization’s requirements to incorporate their applications on enterprise and cross-enterprise level is one of the complex jobs. However, for the incorporation of external and internal business tasks, companies are carrying-on