Talking with Leviathan

SAP, oData and HTML5

SAP ERP — 1

Enterprise Resource Planning
Business Document Oriented
GUI access, easy customization, great flexibility

SAP ERP — 2

Many obscure icons, shortcuts
Its own programming environment & 4GL language (ABAP)
Internals may be in German:
WERKS, MEINS, MATKL, LGORT

Parallel Evolution

SAP NetWeaver

Interfaces:

iDoc (EDI-like)
"RFC" (RPC-like, see PyRFC)
oData (RESTful)
ABAP code stored in SAP, using SAP's native revision control

SAP NetWeaver — oData

RESTful
Serialization to JSON or XML
Actions as well as CRUD
Nested serialization
Entities don't have to correspond 1:1 with SAP objects
Easy to interface from HTML5

HTML5 Apps

Easy to implement
Very wide variety of devices
Responsive design for multiple devices
Plenty of library support

User Experience

Hostile environments
Busy environements
Simple UI
Specialization
Minimize training requirements

Architecture

Architecture — 1

Direct access to database
Unavailable when ERP offline
Avoids going through business logic
Can lead to bad ERP state
Can lead to DoS

Architecture — 2

Insulates ERP against Web
Can denormalize
Can firewall
Sync process is hairy

Case Study: SolutionsOnline

Ran from 2008 to 2015
SAGE Line500 (Informix / SQL Server)
∼2000 weekly users
Review Invoices, Statements
Report on Gas Usage
Make payments
Merged into MyAccount

Architecture — 3

SAP Netweaver
Interface HTML5 app direct to oData
Fewest moving parts
No extra infrastructure
Unavailable when ERP offline
Revision control & Authentication are inflexible

Case Study: Mushrooms Scanning — 1

6 Farms in WA, SA, Vic, QLD
∼30 Scanners + ∼20 Tablets
∼1000 pallets / day
Short warehouse shelf life
Scanning guns & Industrial tablet PCs
localStorage and HTML5 Manifests for partial offline use

Case Study: Mushrooms Scanning — 2

Availability limited when ERP is offline
Revision control is painful
Authentication is inflexible
... slower development

Architecture — 4

Use a reverse proxy & web server
Easier to control headers, caching, URLs etc
At least if ERP is unavailable you get a friendly error message!

Architecture — 5

Auxiliary database
Sync to oData or RFC
Sync process is hairy
More moving parts
Can denormalize
System remains online when ERP unavailable

Case Study: The Reject Shop

∼340 stores, ∼1200 devices, mostly HTML5
BizTalk, MS SQL Server, WebSphere
Business logic partly implemented outside SAP
Separate applications for specific roles

Architecture — 6

Future work: Distributed Databases
eg: CouchBase Mobile
Devices work offline
Fewer moving parts

Agility — 1

ERP system changes very slowly

Agility — 2

ERP system changes very slowly
API code is embedded and can't be changed easily either

Agility — 3

ERP system changes very slowly
API code is embedded and can't be changed easily either
Once API is defined peripheral systems can be added easily

Agility — 4

ERP system changes very slowly
API code is embedded and can't be changed easily either
Once API is defined peripheral systems can be added easily
... and more, and more, and more ...

Thanks

Mark van de Ven
Louwtjie Nel
Vaibhav Kumar

Questions / Comments

Nick Moore
Mnemote Pty Ltd

Credits / References

Image Credits

Squid with ship: Copyright expired.
Popular Science Monthly Volume 35, 1889.
Squid on beach: Copyright expired.
“Gravure d'un calmar géant échoué en 1877 sur la baie Trinity, à Terre-Neuve”
Squid attacking boat: Copyright expired.
Popular Science Monthly, Volume 14, 1879.
Intermec Scanner: Presumably © Intermec by Honeywell.
Programmer in a Hi-viz Vest: © 2015 Nick Moore

References

PyRFC: http://sap.github.io/PyRFC/
oData: http://odata.org/