Extreme ERP Makeover

For Rock-Tenn, "trying to adapt an ERP system to fit our business process is stupid," he says. "And customizing ERP is even more stupid." Instead, the company has had to find the best ERP-type solution for each of its six business units. Shutzberg is in the middle of a two-to-three-year project to integrate each unit's system.

"It's no panacea," he admits, but it's the best solution available to him. Besides, the systems that each business unit now has work, and, he says, "the worst thing to do is throw away what's working in order to get to the end-of-the-rainbow utopia."

Today, Rock-Tenn's integration is largely application to application, although there are some Web services at the middleware level. That's the plan for the short-term future as well; Shutzberg says that there hasn't been enough development within the Web services community to convince him that Web services integration will be practical in the next year or two. "I like the concept," he says, "but I have to wait and see it mature."

Collaboration. A third reason that companies are banking on Web services rather than choosing a single-instance option is that Web services would allow them to connect with business partners regardless of the partners' ERP system. That's the case for $37 billion British American Tobacco. "The same rules apply to [your partner's apps] as they do to your own," says Gabor Makkos, CIO of the company's Mexican division. "I don't have to ask my provider to change their app-architecture, and I don't have to change mine to collaborate."

British American Tobacco's ERP is SAP R3, with best-of-breed applications for specific processes; integrating with it used to require point-to-point connections. That means that when something changed - a supplier's application or its CRM system - the whole integration had to be redone, says Makkos. An integration layer built with XML-based messaging queries is immune to that problem.