Gartner invented the marketing term ERP in the early 1990's, to complement MRP, so it is always interesting to hear what their next take on the ERP space is. But I'm not convinced by their 'composable business' idea (see link).

However, I do want to comment on one of their composable principles: More speed through discovery.

Discovery builds on the idea that most ERP systems are now platforms surrounded by an ecosystem of add-on apps and service partners. The problem is that discovery functionality is not baked-in to ERP systems but a sort of disconnected offline journey that needs to be made by users or someone else.

There are at least 2 problems with discovery:

1. It's difficult, if not impossible, to do the discovery 'in-context' in today's ERP systems
2. Discovery requires a very capable API mechanism to allow the discovered connection to operate seamlessly
3. Who is 'conducting' the discovery to compose the new business-specific variant of the core ERP system? The user or someone else?

Over 20 years ago at Navision, we addressed some of these problems with what we called the Navihub - a web services broker hub. Of course it wasn't perfect. In those days there was not much to discover, as usable and useful web services were thin on the ground, and the connective API had to be pre-built to enable the discovery to function seamlessly. But we were on the right track.

Basically we had a 'discovery' hub where services could be discovered (like an app store) and when you subscribed to them access to the service was instantiated in the right place within specific screens in the application. The next step was to put a simple 'discovery' button, for example on a customer card, that allowed users to connect to external services appropriate to that page. So for example to get a credit report on a new customer or validate their address against a postal database or text a customer contact that their account was now setup and send them some reference data (account # etc.).

In essence, you want to enhance your functionality, you subscribe to a service, that instantiates a button in the application the next time you login, you push the button and get the service benefit, 'composing' a new level of service proposition in your ERP system.

It seems to me that we are still a long way off 'composable' ERP despite the plethora of apps available through today's ERP system app stores and much better API technology (XML,REST etc.). So it's a nice idea, that's been around for decades, but still not easy to execute.

ERP Space 2

Composable Business