-1

Assuming you have a B2B marketplace where firms can buy and sell various sorts of metal (for further processing).

You want to connect your marketplace with the ERP systems of the firms so they can publish their warehouse inventory automatically.

Of course it is nearly a unlimited number of firms and they use different ERP software - many of them SAP and Oracle. Additionally there is no standard format for metal. No standard field names, no standard values among the firms. Each firm has their own format.

Do you think it is possible for your B2B marketplace startup to connect a majority of the firms to your marketplace in such a way?

What would be your approach:

  • Building a well documented API and hope that the firms will connect to it on their own?
  • Build a middleware for the most common ERP systems?
  • Cooperate with SAP-, Oracle- ,.., -consultancies that the firms can hire to connect them to your marketplace?
  • ...something else?
Sandra Rossi
  • 11,934
  • 5
  • 22
  • 48
patrick15079
  • 41
  • 3
  • I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it does not describe a specific programming problem. Maybe suitable for Software Engineering? – Didier L Jan 04 '17 at 23:17
  • You are right with that.. I am sorry if it's not the right place here – patrick15079 Jan 05 '17 at 07:27

1 Answers1

1

Well, patrick15079... That is, to put it mildly, a very broad question!

If there truly is no standard format, your best bet is to create a middle-tier that does translate ERP input to some standard format you design. Then your B2B Marketplace can consume information from any system that has already been piped into your middle-tier. Quite likely someone in the industry has attempted to create a standard and you may be able to leverage off of that standard - adjusting it for your needs.

Then, for each different ERP system, you will also need to create the low-level translator that plugs into your middle-tier. Document all of this carefully and some of the ERP vendors (or consultants) could, in theory, build their own translators and be allowed to plug them into your system. What would be their motive for doing so? The classic 2-sided network conundrum.

How you go about this (your own team, consultants, etc.) depends on your overall business model and team size.

This is all very high level, but overall that would be the approach I would recommend.

Dave Collins
  • 1,077
  • 1
  • 15
  • 23