Integration of Enterprise Resource Planning System Based on SOAP

While the enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems become more and more complex, the traditional tools such as DCOM, CORBA or EJB encounter more difficulties than before especially when heterogenous and distributed environment and multiple companies are involved. The newly born international specification SOAP brings a new solution to ERP because of its simplicity and high extensibility. This paper analyses the techniques to extend basic SOAP to implement ERP system. The techniques, including data envelope, dynamically and loosely coupled remote process calling (RPC), support to the multiple communication protocol, and security and performance improvement, greatly enhance the ability of basic SOAP and make it capable to accomplish the integration task in large scale ERP systems. All the techniques we discusse here are successfully utilized in the ERP system in the Three Gorge Cascade Dispatch Center of China Three Gorge Project Corporation.