How Floating Cities Will Work

Millions of people take cruises each year; but when their cruise ends, they usually return to their homes on land. Wouldn't it be great if there were a cruise that never ended? That's the basic idea behind a new ocean vessel called Freedom Ship. Unlike a cruise ship, Freedom Ship will be a floating city with permanent residents. The ship will circle the globe every two years and offer everything available in your hometown, including a hospital, college and one of the world's largest shopping malls.

Freedom Ship will most likely become a home for the rich and famous. Suites start at $121,000 for a 300-square-foot room and go up to $11 million for a 5,100 square foot suite on the ship's exclusive 21st floor, where prices start at $3 million!

Photo courtesy Freedom Ship International
Freedom Ship will contain a city with 50,000 residents
and many amenities.

If you've ever wanted to live on the open sea and see the world, check this out. In this edition of How Stuff Will Work, we'll take a look at the early plans for the Freedom Ship, see how it compares to today's largest cruise ships and find out what life will be like on this floating metropolis!

Q: What will the cruise ships of the future be?

A: One proposed cruise ship of the future is called Freedom Ship. Freedom Ship will be a floating city with permanent residents. The ship will circle the globe every two years and offer everything available in your hometown, including a hospital, college and one of the world's largest shopping malls.



http://travel.howstuffworks.com/floating-city.htm

Remodelling ERP for an agile future

Oracle and SAP will embrace service oriented architecture in their next-generation products, but the companies are taking different approaches.

As enterprises demand greater agility in applications software to meet changing business needs, suppliers of enterprise software are increasingly embracing service oriented architecture and business process management. The result will be enterprise applications unlike any seen previously.

The two largest providers of enterprise applications are pursuing different paths to their next generation products, giving prospective users a real choice. The differences are stark. Oracle will continue to build through acquisition SAP will rely more on internal development and partnerships.

SAP promises to release its next-generation business application suite in 2007, Oracle in 2008. The two competitors will focus on master data management, analytics and repository architectures. SAP has stronger market momentum, better articulated value for next-generation applications, and a better partnership strategy than Oracle.

But Oracle's strong middleware platform and greater support of standards make it a better choice than SAP for firms that will rely on custom development as well as packaged products

Earlier this year, Oracle president Charles Phillips and key executives provided a progress report on Project Fusion, Oracle's next generation of enterprise applications.

Phillips' presentation demonstrated that Oracle has made progress in assembling a foundation for the new applications suite and provided more details on the functional rationalisation of Oracle's existing application suites (see box).

Oracle also reaffirmed its commitment to deliver its first set of Oracle Fusion applications in 2008, but the company still has much hard work to do to meet its schedule.

Oracle has also discussed how it will integrate its latest large acquisition, Siebel Systems, but has not yet described exactly how it will incorporate Siebel's customer relationship management functionality into Fusion applications.

Assuming that Oracle releases the first Fusion applications in 2008, significant adoption and reference implementations are unlikely before 2010.

This lag will be the result of the time needed for product hardening and large-scale roll-outs customary for any new generation of applications.

Peter Zencke, president of SAP's research and innovation division, revealed details about Business Process Platform, SAP's next-generation application platform (an evolution of Netweaver), and the technical plan for the 2007 release of MySAP Business Suite (MySAP 2007) at the company's analyst conference in December 2005.

SAP is positioning MySAP 2007 as its first fully service-enabled software release, using SAP's Enterprise Service Architecture. SAP published a timeline for MySAP 2007 three years ago and says it is on schedule.

In the meantime, SAP will build billing engines, electronic payments management, and other new applications separately under its xApps brand and eventually move those to Business Process Platform as well.

Assuming that SAP keeps its promise to ship MySAP 2007 on time, SAP is likely to need 12 to 24 months in the field before MySAP 2007 is demonstrably rock solid and enterprise-ready. This means that significant adoption and enterprise performance cases are likely in 2009.

Where to start with service oriented architecture

Forrester Research recommends businesses gearing up for service oriented architecture focus initially on data hubs, portals, service development, integrated analytics, business activity monitoring and Business Process Execution Language (BPel). These are the major technologies and techniques used in Oracle's Fusion Applications and MySAP 2007.

Select the "entry point" to SOA that is most important to your business, as opposed to trying to master all elements at once, said Forrester.

Build an initial application to start the learning. Each of these technologies has applicability to current applications and can be used to supplement them - for example, by building a composite application using existing applications.

It is important to acquire enough Oracle Fusion middleware and SAP Netweaver to start learning. If you are an Oracle applications user and do not have licences for Oracle Application Server and BPel Process Manager, get them.

These products are available at a low licence cost relative to competitive alternatives and contain the key new technologies on which Fusion applications will be based.

If you are an SAP applications user, start gaining experience by acquiring the SAP Web Application Server, Portal Server, and Exchange Infrastructure SAP has low-cost trial offers to reduce the financial risk of initial exploration.

Along with these options, you should take the opportunity to evaluate the other options available to you in plotting your course to SOA-based applications. You have "buy" and "build" alternatives.

IBM and Microsoft are the largest alternatives to Oracle and SAP, but many smaller providers also have products and offerings worthy of consideration if you decide that either custom development or a specialised industry package is your best course, said Forrester.

John Rymer is vice-president and research analyst at Forrester Research, specialising in application servers and platforms. This article is taken from his paper "Oracle Versus SAP In Enterprise Applications: Let The Battle Of Architectures Begin!"

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2006/10/03/218782/remodelling-erp-for-an-agile-future.htm

ERP Consulting Services

Consulting team is typically responsible for your initial ERP implementation and subsequent delivery of work to tailor the system beyond "go live". Typically such tailoring includes additional product training; creation of process triggers and workflow; specialist advice to improve how the ERP is used in the business; system optimization; and assistance writing reports, complex data extracts or implementing Business Intelligence.

The consulting team is also responsible for planning and jointly testing the implementation. This is a critical part of the project, and one that is often overlooked.

Consulting for a large ERP project involves three levels: systems architecture, business process consulting (primarily re-engineering) and technical consulting (primarily programming and tool configuration activity). A systems architect designs the overall dataflow for the enterprise including the future dataflow plan. A business consultant studies an organization's current business processes and matches them to the corresponding processes in the ERP system, thus 'configuring' the ERP system to the organization's needs. Technical consulting often involves programming. Most ERP vendors allow modification of their software to suit the business needs of their customer.

For most mid-sized companies, the cost of the implementation will range from around the list price of the ERP user licenses to up to twice this amount (depending on the level of customization required). Large companies, and especially those with multiple sites or countries, will often spend considerably more on the implementation than the cost of the user licenses -- three to five times more is not uncommon for a multi-site implementation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_resource_planning

The future of ERP in the public sector

Book Description
This digital document is an article from Government Finance Review, published by Government Finance Officers Association on August 1, 1999. The length of the article is 1683 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

From the supplier: Government institutions provide Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) companies another big opportunity to do business as its market in the private sector matures. The huge size of the government market as well as its need for the advantages ERP system offers in private organizations are enough to boost the ERP market. Although government institutions are primarily service-delivery oriented, such elements of diverse industries as natural resources, manufacturing, utility, finance and retail also exist.

Citation Details
Title: The future of ERP in the public sector.(enterprise resource planning)
Author: Milford Sprecher
Publication: Government Finance Review (Magazine/Journal)
Date: August 1, 1999
Publisher: Government Finance Officers Association
Volume: 15 Issue: 4 Page: 49(2)

This article examines the evolution of enterprise solutions and likely trends in the future for the public sector.

The Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems that transformed private-sector organizations now are gaining acceptance in the public sector. Although many system acquisitions in the public sector still tend to focus on one aspect of an ERP system (such as human resources, payroll, or accounting), some jurisdictions are beginning to look across all areas for their applications. Many governments look for a vendor that provides a full suite of products rather than just a single functional application. Because of the public sector's interest in more comprehensive enterprise systems, the major ERP vendors have developed specific public-sector functionality and have started planning...

http://www.amazon.com/future-sector-enterprise-resource-planning/dp/B000996BIC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1205727371&sr=1-1

ERP Configuration

Configuring an ERP system is largely a matter of balancing the way you want the system to work with the way the system lets you work. Begin by deciding which modules to install, then adjust the system using configuration tables to achieve the best possible fit in working with your company’s processes.

Modules - Most systems are modular simply for the flexibility of implementing some functions but not others. Some common modules, such as finance and accounting are adopted by nearly all companies implementing enterprise systems; others however such as human resource management are not needed by some companies and therefore not adopted. A service company for example will not likely need a module for manufacturing. Other times companies will not adopt a module because they already have their own proprietary system they believe to be superior. Generally speaking the greater number of modules selected, the greater the integration benefits, but also the increase in costs, risks and changes involved.

Configuration Tables – A configuration table enables a company to tailor a particular aspect of the system to the way it chooses to do business. For example, an organization can select the type of inventory accounting – FIFO or LIFO – it will employ or whether it wants to recognize revenue by geographical unit, product line, or distribution channel.

So what happens when the options the system allows just aren’t good enough? At this point a company has two choices, both of which are not ideal. It can re-write some of the enterprise system’s code, or it can continue to use an existing system and build interfaces between it and the new enterprise system. Both options will add time and cost to the implementation process. Additionally they can dilute the system’s integration benefits. The more customized the system becomes the less possible seamless communication becomes between suppliers and customers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_resource_planning