Optimizing Enterprise Resource Planning systems for mobile applications

Sammanfattning: Growing enterprises have growing amounts of information. Making sure that this information is easily accessible to its employees is not an easy task. For this task Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems come in handy. However, the ERP systems contain lots of information and may be too complex to handle this information or may be too slow in sharing this information within the organisation. This thesis introduces a new solution for how mobile applications can connect to an ERP system by exploiting database synchronisation, which allows the employees to get the information wherever they are without the need to directly access the ERP system. There are three important questions in this thesis: how the ERP works, how to build a mobile application and, how to build a back end? By combining answers to these questions a whole system is built which is production ready and can copy data between the ERP system and the back end and show the information in a mobile application. The overarching goals were to build a system that could extract data from the ERP system into a proprietary back end and a mobile application that could synchronise with the back end. However, synchronisation between the mobile application and the back end was not implemented due to lack of time. The back end had to be able to scale up to 500 concurrent users and respond within 3 seconds, both of these goals were achieved. The mobile application that was built to display the information to the end user was built with usability in mind, since Netlight wanted a straightforward application that anyone could use. The mobile application was shown to have good usability. The results of this thesis project show that building systems around ERPs, instead of inside them, gives these systems the ability to scale, improved the implementation time, and reduced the company’s maintenance efforts.