The Arrival Of Enterprise'S Full Information Age -- Integration Creates Value, And Integration Leads To Intelligence (6).

Whether or not ERP, CRM and SCM can be isomorphic to a single database is very important.

Because some business links are very easy to be ignored.

For example, as the CRM end of the "inquiry" and "contract" link, ERP order processing is also the front link.

If an enterprise has an isolated CRM or ERP system, then a complete process from "market activity, marketing, negotiation, quotation, contract, order, delivery, bill, after sale" will be torn apart artificially, and the change of one party's database can not trigger the synchronous change of the other party at all.

What management sees is always an incomplete part of customer relationship rather than 360 degree of understanding.

In the same way, SCM, as a part of collaborative business management, will inevitably need to synchronize information with ERP and CRM to a database.

In the Oracle architecture, when any application user implements a database update operation, a relevant database table or several related database tables in the central database will be updated accordingly. Then these updated information will be provided to other applications that need this information immediately.

This system is the Oracle Trading Community Architecture (Oracle paction community structure), which provides a unified record structure for each member in the instruction trading community (trading community), which includes customers, employees, suppliers and business partners.

Things are not so simple in the mixed architecture generated by piecing together unrelated applications.

Imagine that in this architecture, a salesperson uses CRM marketing application to input data, and these data will update one or more sales data tables.

But this is not the end of the matter.

For example, if these data involve a contact, then the hybrid system will face a dilemma: it must either make the corresponding updates take effect in all other data tables that contain contact data, regardless of which application (or ERP) the data tables belong to, or it can only make the data tables out of sync and become unreliable.

In addition, it is envisaged that some of these data tables record attribute A for each contact, but other data tables do not record this property.

Now, the system must know which data tables need updating.

Even if such complexity can be solved, there will be some danger when some data tables have been updated and others have not been updated, because this will slip the data into the company's data.

Even if such an update system can be perfected, it will also need a message broker. The mediator needs to spend time to pfer and update messages in a rush, and in the process, it also takes the priority of the precious processing time.

In systems like Oracle, these processing times can be used for other purposes.

Of course, all these complexities can be avoided theoretically.

However, before this system can start to work, it will cost a lot of money and lead to long delay.

We believe that all local applications, such as ERP, CRM or SCM, should be treated as a whole because of the consistency of their management objects.

Oracle applies all its applications to a single database and calls it the "e-commerce application suite". The purpose is, of course, to enable enterprises to achieve a complete business process more easily.