Proceedings of the World Congress on Engineering 2011 Vol I
WCE 2011, July 6 - 8, 2011, London, U.K.
              Cloud Computing and Enterprise Resource
                        Planning Systems
                             S L Saini, Dinesh Kumar Saini, Jabar H. Yousif and Sandhya V Khandage
  
     Abstract— An attempt is made to study the current issues of              organizations and through this perspective it is important to
  the cloud computing solutions for the Enterprise resource                   reach all the data of a company IT system in real time. The
  systems in the industries. This Research paper includes the                 key is the mobility of the ERP system. We can use Cloud
  review of development of Low cost ERP Solution to Indian                    computing infrastructure & SaaS for low cost working. Here
  industries on Mobile using latest technologies such as Mobile
                                                                              Cloud computing infrastructure is just a web service
  computing, SaaS, Cloud Computing etc. Enterprise systems are
                                                                              interface to operating system virtualization.
  Index Items: Enterprise Resource Planning, SaaS, Cloud
  computing, systems.                                                           II. SOFTWARE-AS-A-SERVICE (SAAS) IN THE ENTERPRISE
                                                                                 Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is also known as on-demand
                                                                              or hosted applications which can be used in the enterprise
                           I. INTRODUCTION                                    resource planning systems and it will be very useful in these
     World is changing very fast in terms of enterprise systems               applications. SaaS can be molded for adapting for the
  and industries need very specialized solutions. Industrial                  implantation in the software applications like ERP systems.
  problems are very complex and need lot of money and                         And it is comfortable with the change the way organizations
  efforts. Availability of expertise and skills causes another                makes payment for services, implement, and run their
  problem in the industry .Enterprise resources management                    software applications.
  solutions are one of the example for this kind of problem.                     The SaaS software model has fixed financial and operative
  The complicated project of an ERP system implementation                     advantages over the others in comparison with, on-premise
  in industry results in large changes in the systems.                        software models. The operation cost is very less and the
  Organizations that face an ERP implementation project have                  subscription cost is also reduced because the service
  several risks to consider in order avoiding problems that                   provider operates the systems which can offer the services.
  cause failures. The purpose of this research is to create a                    SaaS offers low initial cost -mostly based on subscription
  method for implementation of Mobile ERP systems.                            cost and further operation costs - as the service provider is
  Research includes a case study & problems faced during                      the one that operates the system. This process definitely
  Mobile ERP implementation its possible solutions are                        represents savings in terms of money, IT resources, and time
  discussed in details. The research approach adapted to                      spent from development to implementation.
  incorporate the concept of cloud solution in the existing                      Recent research indicates that SaaS usage has increased
  enterprise solutions is very interesting. The methodology                   and the demand is still increasing. [13], and according to
  which is influenced by the qualitative research method since                studies predictions are that SaaS will outperform more
  it was necessary to gather qualitative facts.                               traditional IT alternatives as a consequence of the current
     ERP software brings users economic benefits during a                     economic crisis and will helps the economies to recover [14].
  company’s operational management. The economic benefits                     SaaS benefits list is increasing and it will go beyond cost-
  of ERP users are better than the non-users [1]. All the data                effective software delivery factors , enabling organizations to
  and information resources are managed by Enterprise                         transform their business processes [15].
  Resource Planning Systems in the business organizations.                        E-business is the first key service field to be enhanced by
  This information is stored in centralized and shared data                   new technology such as cloud computing and SaaS. Because
  stores. Nowadays information is a priceless tool for                        what the enterprises concern most is whether the investment
                                                                              pays off. Web-based ERP system can be the next to
                                                                              implement. Cloud computing, as an innovative distributed
                                                                              computing, can provide dynamic resource buffer,
                                                                              virtualization and highly usable next generation of enterprise
      S L Saini is with Mewar University ,Rajasthan ,India
  (slsaini66@ gmail.com                                                       data center. Cloud image is used to represent the Internet or
      Dinesh Kumar Saini is with Sohar University, Sohar, Sultanate of Oman   some large networked environment, The cloud is a
  (dinesh@soharuni.edu.om)                                                    virtualization of resources that maintains and manages itself.
      Jabbar H Yousif is with Sohar University, Sohar, Sultanate of Oman
  (jyousif@soharuni.edu.om)                                                   The application built using the resource from multiple
      Sandhya V Khandage is with Brahma Valley College of Engineering and     services potentially from multiple locations. Users need to
  Research Inst., Nasik, Maharashtra, India (sandhyav.khandage@gmail.com)     know the endpoint to access the services, to get storage,
                                                                              computing, database, and service interaction provided.
ISBN: 978-988-18210-6-5                                                                                                             WCE 2011
ISSN: 2078-0958 (Print); ISSN: 2078-0966 (Online)
Proceedings of the World Congress on Engineering 2011 Vol I
WCE 2011, July 6 - 8, 2011, London, U.K.
  One major kind of cloud computing is Software as a Service       advantages of moving computing from desktop to the cloud.
  (SaaS), through which users can get software service from        Limited energy and bandwidth are the main source of
  Internet, without having to invest massively in software or      limitations of cloud computing. Cloud computing can be
  infrastructure. They can lease the web-based software from       utilized effectively to save the energy which is used in
  service provider, which is responsible for the operation,        mobiles, though it also poses some unique challenges.
  upgrading and maintenance of the software related                Mobile systems, such as smart phones, have become the
  technology.                                                      primary computing platform for many users [8].
                                                                      Cloud computing has a profound impact on the entire IT
      III. CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT IN THE
                                                                   industry as a new business model. Integrated into all sectors
                       ENTERPRISE
                                                                   of business applications, cloud computing will reflect the
     As market competition is increasing, the customer has         value in a deeper level. With the rapid development of cloud
  become a prime resource for the enterprises, which in-turn       computing, it can help enterprises to access high-
  initiates the development of Customer Relationship               performance IT services with lower cost, and also conducive
  Management (CRM). Basically it is a philosophy which
                                                                   to small and medium-sized enterprises to access high-
  focuses on the customers. By the proper utilization of IT
                                                                   performance IT services like large enterprises. At the same
  technologies, reforming the business function and
                                                                   time, the reduction of IT burden can help enterprises to
  reengineering the workflow, many new customers can be
  attained and existing can be stopped going away from the         concentrate on its core business. The process optimization
  business [5]. Today plenty of prospective applications of        which based on cloud computing can achieve throughout a
  CRM and supply chain management are available in                 large-scale reconstruction of the industry, and enhance the
  industrial clusters [6]. ERP systems are being utilized by       overall IT standards and competitiveness [9].
  Enterprises or organizations to increase their profits as well      Another advantage of cloud computing is it offers good
  as growth. These systems can also curtail the time required      advantages to the communicators. And these advantages are:
  for production phase and definitely enhance the services         the availability of large quantity of software applications,
  required by the customers. However, it is not always easy to     access to terrific processing power, abundant storage, and
  implement and effectively use these ERP systems because of       power of easily sharing and processing of information. All
  few constraints [7].                                             this information can be found in the browser anytime,
     OSS (Open Source Software) has great prospects from           anywhere through accessing the internet. It means computing
  technical or market perspective. The utilization of OSS by       ability also can be a kind of commodity, as gas, water and
  small and medium sized enterprises as it grows, which in-        electric, easily use and cheap cost. “Could Computing”
  turn enhances the role of E-Business of SME. Definitely the      brings such a change—computer storage computing center
  effective implementation and usage of OSS will play a major
                                                                   are set up by professional network companies such as
  positive role in the exponential growth of large sized
                                                                   Google and IBM, through one cable user can access easily
  industries too. However, the small and medium term firms
                                                                   with browser, make “Could” as the center of material storage
  should always be focused on using the software which is
  safe and importance also should be given to make use of the      and application services [11] .
  software in a standardized way.                                     The service layers (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS) work closely among
     SME always tries to avoid the trespassing of intellectual     each other in a cloud to reduce the costs and resources. The
  property rights of software developers. It also enhances and     cooperation among these three layers results in better
  Updates the OSS and it also makes the organization’s E-          performance, stack harmonizing (Controlling the load
  Business to grow efficiently and effortlessly [2].               competency from central position) and maximum utilization
                                                                   of the server capabilities. This is how, cloud computing
          IV. CLOUD COMPUTING IN THE ENTERPRISE                    results is better usage of the resources which in-turn reduces
     Cloud computing is a new paradigm in which computing          the maintenance cost [10]. There is no need to install large
  resources such as processing, memory, and storage are not        and complex systems in the sales room as organizations can
  physically present at the user’s location. Instead, a service    make utilize the mobile devices and wireless networks for
  provider owns and manages these resources, and users access      data transmission. This process enables all the information
  them via the Internet. For example, Amazon Web Services          about sales and returns to be available immediately to the
  lets users store personal data via its Simple Storage Service    central office and company management [4].
  (S3) and perform computations on stored data using the              The third generation mobile system such as UMTS
  Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)[8]. The business will be             (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System), soon will
  definitely benefitted by making use of this kind of              be set in any of the countries, which will not revolutionize
  computing platforms. Some of the benefits could be less          but reform the telecommunication technology by providing
  initial capital investment, a smaller amount of time will be     feature rich contents to mobile users, wireless broadband
  required to start new services, maintenance and operation        access to internet and worldwide roaming [2].
  costs could go lower, effective utilization through
  virtualization and the most important thing is simpler                V. CLOUD COMPUTING INFRASTRUCTURE MODELS
  disaster recovery. All these points make cloud computing a          The organizations can decide the type of the boundaries of
  striking option. Reports suggest that there are plenty of        cloud computing which deploy their applications according
ISBN: 978-988-18210-6-5                                                                                                 WCE 2011
ISSN: 2078-0958 (Print); ISSN: 2078-0966 (Online)
Proceedings of the World Congress on Engineering 2011 Vol I
WCE 2011, July 6 - 8, 2011, London, U.K.
  to organization demands and objectives. The type of cloud         terminals or client organizations are used a single version of
  computing can be categorized into three classes, the public       the software that runs on the cloud.
  cloud, the private cloud and the hybrid [3] as depicted in
                                                                    B. Platform as a service (PaaS)
  figure 1. The idioms public, private, and hybrid do not
  impose location. Whereas the term public clouds are                  The Platform as a service covering a layer of software and
  naturally “out of organization” on public sites on the Internet   presents it as a service that can be used to construct a higher-
  and private clouds are positioned on premises, a private may      level services. There are at least two viewpoints on PaaS
  be hosted at a collocation facility as well.                      relying on the perspective of the creator or client of the
     Third parties are responsible for running the public clouds    services:
  outside the organization. Various customers’ applications          The originator of PaaS can construct a platform depend on
  can be grouped together on the cloud server’s memory and             the integrating of operating systems, middleware,
  network. Public clouds basically hosted on a remote place            application software, and may including the development
  which is away from the customer’s location. And they play a          environment that is then presented to a customer as a
  major role in reducing the customer’s risk and cost by               service.
  extending the enterprise infrastructure.                           The PaaS is presented as encapsulated service through an
     Private clouds are basically hosted for a single client.          API manner. The client cooperates with the platform
  They offer better security, quality of service and utmost            through the API. Therefore the platform utilizes necessary
  control over the data. Every organization will have its own          steps to handle and scale itself to provide a given level of
  infrastructure and the way in which applications are                 service.
  organized. Enterprise’s datacenter or a collocation facility      C. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
  can be used to deploy the private clouds.                            Infrastructure as a service utilizes the main services such
     Hybrid clouds are the result of combination of private and     the storage and determine capabilities as modulated services
  public clouds. They provide on-demand, externally                 over the network. Servers, storage systems, switches, routers
  provisioned scale. The resources of a public cloud can even       are collective and situate available to utilize and manage a
  support private clouds to maintain high service levels with       high-performance computing applications.
  respect to rapid work load fluctuations. This clearly shows          On other hand the hardware as services (Haas) hardware as
  the use of storage clouds to support Web 2.0 applications. In     a service (HaaS) is an approach to permits an organization
  addition to these, even hybrid clouds also help to maintain       outsources to maintain business components such as servers,
  planned workload spikes and even public clouds can also be        storage and networking equipment. Figure 2 depicts the
  utilized to perform periodic tasks.                               Architectural layers of cloud computing.
                 Fig.1 Types of cloud computing
     Cloud computing can illustrate the services being supplied
  at any of the established layers from hardware to                      Fig 2 the Architectural layers of cloud computing
  applications. The cloud computing company provides a                 In sake of observing how many of the worldwide websites
  services that belongs to the SPI model of cloud computing.        are using cloud providers, we used Jack of all cloud analysis
  Typically, the cloud service providers like to offer services     to monitor the state of could monthly. Fig.3 shows the usage
  that can be collected into three categories:                      of April 2010 , which indicates several of the minor provider
                                                                    had a poor month, some even showing up less this month in
  A. Software as a service (SaaS)
                                                                    the sample than they did previously. Nevertheless, the
     Software as service features of complete application is        Amazon and Rackspace persist to go ahead gaining 6% and
  offered as a service on demand. The services of multiple          Rackspace 3% respectively.
ISBN: 978-988-18210-6-5                                                                                                   WCE 2011
ISSN: 2078-0958 (Print); ISSN: 2078-0966 (Online)
Proceedings of the World Congress on Engineering 2011 Vol I
WCE 2011, July 6 - 8, 2011, London, U.K.
                                                                             [2]    Ammar Khalid, “Cloud Computing: Applying Issues in Small”, 2010
                       Top sites by cloud provider April 2010                       IEEE International Conference on Signal Acquisition and Processing,
                                                                                    pp 278-281.
                               3000                                          [3]    B.P Rimal and E Choi (2009), “A Conceptual Approach for
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                                           2691
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                                                  2236
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                                                                             [4]    Chen Songsheng, Yin Peipei, “Economic Benefits of Enterprise
                               1000
                                                          217                       Resources Planning Based on Empirical Evidence from Chinese Listed
                                                                85 18   13          Companies”, IEEE 2010, PP1305-1308
                                  0                                          [5]    Dr. Su, Chuan Jun, ” Effective Mobile Assets Management System
                                                  NO. of sites
                                                                                    Using RFID and ERP Technology”, 2009 International Conference on
              Amazon EC2                             2691
                                                                                    Communications and Mobile Computing, IEEE 2009,pp 147-151
              Rackspace cloud server                 2236
                                                                             [6]    Honghai Kan, Zhimin Yang, Yue Wang, Nana Qi ,” Research on
              Joyent                                     217
                                                         85
                                                                                    Library Management System for CDs Attached to Books Based on
              GoGrid
                                                         18
                                                                                    Cloud Computing”, Proceedings of the 2010 14th International
              OpSource
                                                         13
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              FlexisScale
                                                                                    2010, pp744-747.
                                                                             [7]    IDC Predictions 2009: An Economic Pressure Cooker Will Accelerate
                Figure3: The usage of cloud provider                                the IT Industry
                                                                             [8]    Karthik Kumar and Yung-Hsiang Lu,” cloud computing for mobile
                                   VI. RFID                                         users: can offloading computation save energy?”, IEEE 2010 Computer
                                                                                    Society, pp 51-55
     RFID is a general term used with wireless data capture                  [9]     KeJing Zhang, PingJun Dong, Biao Ma, BingYong Tang, Hong Cai,
  and identification. It is being used in various fields such as                    “Innovation of IT Service in Textile Industrial Clusters from the
  supply chain management, personnel identification, tracking                       Service System Perspective”, 2010 IEEE ,pp 1819-1822
                                                                             [10]    Michael Massoth and Dominik Paulus ,” Mobile acquisition of sales
  and hospital management. The different entities that                              operations based on a BlackBerry infrastructure with connection to an
  constitute RFID are: transceivers (readers), host computer,                       inventory and ERP management system”, The Second International
                                                                                    Conference on Mobile Ubiquitous Computing, Systems, Services and
  transponders (tags) and back end information systems (eg.,                        Technologies,2008 IEEE, pp 413-418.
  ERPS, CRM etc) [3].                                                        [11]    The     Proceedings     of 17th Annual IRMA                International
     RFID got tremendous success in the recent past,                                Conference,Washington DC, USA, May 21-24 (2006)
                                                                             [12]   Transformation, 215519, December 2008, IDC (2008)
  especially since the world largest retailers started using it i.e          [13]   Voˇr´ıˇsek, J., Feuerlicht, G.: Trends in the Delivery and Utilization of
  since they started to put the vision of smart items into                          Enterprise ICT. In:
                                                                             [14]    Y.C. Chiang, T.C. Wang, S.C. Hsu, “Applying Incomplete Linguistic
  practice. And today many companies have explored and                              Preference Relations to a Selection of ERP System Suppliers”, IEEE
  implemented RFID and ERP technologies successfully. Even                          2010 Computer Society, pp 6087-6090.
  few companies have come forward to support these                           [15]   Ying Gao, Cuifen Zhang,” Research on Customer Relationship
                                                                                    Management Application System of Manufacturing Enterprises”, 2008
  technologies by mentioning how these are useful in                                IEEE, PP 4-8.
  managing and operation of assets as well as facilities [3].                [16]   Yuan Zhao, Shifeng Liu,” Cloud Computing in Port Industry”, 2009
     Using latest technology (Cloud computing, SaaS, Mobile                         IEEE
                                                                             [17]    Zheng Leina, Pan Tiejun, Ren Guoyan, Fang Chengbin, Chen Yaofei,
  computing etc) development of Mobile ERP System which                             “The Design of Mobile E-Business System Based on Open Source
  affordable to Indian industries. Study the various coming                         Software to Small and Medium-sized Enterprise”, International
                                                                                    Conference on Management of e-Commerce and e-Government, IEEE
  problems in implementation of Mobile ERP system &                                 2008, PP 41-44
  provide the solution to the problems. Architecture of mobile
  ERP system will be developed for low cost working for SME
  Industries. Simulation work should be done on developed
  system & coming future problems will be studied their
  solution are searched out by mixing different technologies.
                               VII. CONCLUSION
     Initially different architectures are designed for according
  to different requirement of the SME. In next steps essential
  programming languages are decided for various applications
  & system will be developed. Available Hardware is studied
  for implementation & simulations are done on developed
  system then different future problems are studied. Low cost
  Mobile ERP system will be developed for SME industries
  which will work on any Mobile devices which are easily
  available. Problem faced during working of Mobile ERP are
  studied. Mobile ERP advantages & limitations are discussed
  in details.
                                REFERENCES
  [1]   ACA Research, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) in Australia: Is it the
        Next Big thing? (2007) ,http :// www.anthonywatson. net. Au /files
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ISBN: 978-988-18210-6-5                                                                                                                          WCE 2011
ISSN: 2078-0958 (Print); ISSN: 2078-0966 (Online)