Configuration as a Service in Multi-Tenant Enterprise Resource Planning System

Abstract

 Abstract—Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are the organizations tickets to the global market. Thus, organizations can manage and coordinate all functions, processes, resources and data from different departments by a single software. However, many organizations consider the cost of traditional ERP is expensive and look for alternative affordable solutions within their budget. One of these alternative solutions is providing ERP over a software as a service (SaaS) model. A key feature of any SaaS system is the multi-tenancy architecture where multiple customers (tenants) share the system software. However, the SaaS developers accommodate each tenant's unique requirements by allowing tenant-level customization or configuration. While customization requires source code changes and in most cases a programming experience, the configuration process allows user to change many features within a pre-defined scope in an easy and controlled manner. Although literature provides many techniques to accomplish the configuration process in different SaaS systems, the nature and complexity of SaaS ERP are merely described in previous researches. Thus, this research is built on strong knowledge regarding the configuration in SaaS to define specifically the configuration borders in SaaS ERP and to design a configuration service with the consideration of the different configuration aspects.