Large corporations were amongst the earliest users of software systems. These corporate behemoths began digitsing their numerous arcane processes, workflows and analyses at the dawn of computing, using room-sized mainframes. COBOL was the langauge of choice, and quality attributes such as extensibility, maintainability and modularity were all but impossible to uphold. As software evolved, so did these companies’ software, where there was COBOL, there is now Java & C#. However, like Father Time, software keeps marching forward, leaving modern enterprise systems like SAP and NetSuite a little long in the tooth. They were unable to take full advantage of the advances in technology such as machine learning and live collaboration. Modern, globalised corporations need secure, highly available and interoperable systems. Jobweek is a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform that delivers on all of these quality attributes, and backs it up with a beautiful user interface.
Name: Arjun Singh
Student number: 46966234
Building a complete ERP system is a massive undertaking. Existing solutions such as Workday and Netsuite cover all the different areas of a business from finance, human resources & manufacturing amongst others. To achieve parity our new ERP will need -
This is only a small subset of functionality required by enterprise customers, and must be expanded to suit the needs of individual organisations.
Although a full fledged ERP’s functionality is broad, each of its subsystems depend on some core features -
The system will handle sensitive corporate information, and thus security is paramount. The data needs to be protected from external parties, as the data contained within the system can be used to gain competitive advantage over our clients’ companies. Moreover, leaks of this data can also damage the company’s reputation or cause financial damage in the market. From an internal perspective, employees should also only have access to parts of the system that are relevant to them. As such, all data will be kept behind a user-based authentication system, and will be isolated from the public internet, only accessible through a defined data interface. These protections can easily be tested through automated test scripts and also manual penetration testing.
Large corporations are now global entities, and thus will need to access their system at all times of the day. The system should also be readily available as it will be used as a tool to make important business decisions. Downtime will have clear financial ramifications for the client; for example a employee may not be paid through a payroll subsystem. Also, given that multiple clients will likely use Jobweek, each client must be insulated so that faults in one company’s installation don’t affect the others. To achieve this, the platform will expose health endpoints and have logging tools in place to allow reactive ping testing and proactive monitoring of performance to addresss availabilty concerns.
Interoperability will be crucial both internally and externally. Internally, each module (Finance, HR, Data, etc.) of the software will need to be able to communicate with each other, regardless of whether they are implemented with different technologies. This will allow the product to evolve component by component to take better advantage of emerging technologies. Externally, large coporations run their business through various tools which each produce large amounts of data. An ERP like Jobweek needs to consolidate this into one place, and thus needs to be able to sync information with each of the business’ tools. Integration testing will be a valuable tool here, allowing data flow to be tested throughout the system from internal and external sources.