HighJump Software

As the war rages between best-of-breed ISVs such as ourselves and the ERP companies, a key battle is always how the two systems communicate?  I have heard many corporate CIOs dictate to their team that they will deploy the ERP’s WMS because it is “pre-integrated.”  While this is more or less true depending on the ERP company, it is also true for companies such as ourselves that also have pre-built integration to many of the leading ERP solutions. In addition you don’t run the risk of ending up in ‘vendor hell’ (a topic for another day).

The question that one of our readers asked (we do listen and appreciate the feedback) was:  how do you typically interface to various ERP systems?  I don’t have the space to dive deep into the technical minutia, but let’s cover the basics.  While there is other optional information the ERP generally must pass down to a WMS solutions:  item master information, inbound ASNs, sale orders, kits, etc.  The WMS in turn passes up:  receipt information, shipped orders, inventory adjustments and inventory snapshots. 

This information can be passed any number of ways.  In the past flat-file interfaces and table based interfaces were common.  While these are still the right choices depending on the system requirements we are seeing more and more XML interfaces and companies leveraging our SOA architecture for web-services communications.  There is no wrong answer if you can move the information back-and-forth but for our pre-built integration we build according to the ERP preferred transport protocol.  Rather than relying on a 3^rd party EAI solution, we build the interfaces directly to ensure optimal performance for high through-put facilities.

The next time your CIO pushes a unilateral strategy take the time to explore if there are any real differences in the integrations and speak to Ray Wang at Forrester Research about getting trapped in ‘vendor hell’.