Ahmed A. Hassanein

Blockchain, a most common synonym for distributed ledger (Tschorsch and Scheuermann in IEEE Commun Surv Tutor 18:2084–2123, 2016), is an emerging platform. Blockchain is used to support transactional services within a multi-party business network. The aim is to enable a significant reduction in cost and risk for all involved parties through the creation of novel and enhanced business models. Data maintained within the distributed ledger can only be accessed through the execution of a smart contract (Seijas, Scripting smart contracts for distributed ledger technology, International Association for Cryptologic Research, 1156, 2016) that governs a transaction with rules. The core driving idea for designing the architecture of a blockchain platform is to guarantee that no single business party can append, modify or delete any record residing within the ledger without going through the necessary consensus from other business parties within the network. This empowers the system and ensures the data is immutable. Examples of such data include but are not limited to legal and financial trails. Given the aforementioned important features, blockchain technology is a revolutionary trending technology with the ability to offer tremendous disrupting changes to different industries. Gartner’s 2016 research report (Gartner, Gartner’s 2016 hype cycle for emerging technologies special report, 2016) identified blockchain as one of the key platform-enabling technologies to track. While there is currently a lack of widely identified and accepted standards for blockchain technology, there is a rising agreement that blockchain is currently entering its height of extravagant expectations. The report anticipated that it would take 5 to 10 years for blockchain technology to be easily and widely adopted. Nowadays, almost five years later most blockchain efforts, especially the ones applied to business environments, are still in the early stages not reaching the widely adoption stage also not realizing a widely accepted standard so far. In this book chapter, an attempt will be made to cover the main concepts of blockchain, its underlying technologies, Smart Contracts, and Decentralized Applications (DApps).

For the organization to manage their business needs and attain competitive advantage it is
imperative to use different types of Information systems to support two main areas: namely
the transactions and data management as well as the business process management. Having
a number of disparate systems could result into the repetition of work and present data
inconsistencies. Thus the integration of these systems became of an extreme importance.
The principle key objective of this research is to propose a framework for the development
of an integrated and unified information system that will offer all the functions and features
of both Enterprise Resource Planning System (ERP) and the Business Process
Management Systems (BMPS). This will provide the different organizations with the
capability to eliminate the repetition of work and removing the inconsistencies of having
two different systems.
The proposed framework reduces the cost of integrating such systems as well as increasing
the speed of their development process. It will be based on the Model-View-Controller
(MVC) design pattern. Justification for the choice is presented.
The proposed framework is evaluated through presenting three case studies which
compare the proposed framework results with other methods which achieve the ERP-BPM
integration specifically the process code embedding method which is the other alternative
method to achieve the integration during the development of the system.
The results of the comparison show that faster development and reduced number of lines
of code are used by average 24% leading to reducing the man/day cost needed to complete
the system development by average 22.7%

Due to the complexity of the development process of Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP) this survey will meticulously analyze them from different points of views. In the beginning, a brief introduction to the definition of ERP systems showing their main concepts their history and evolution. Then, ERP systems are examined in order to show their essential software development characteristics. In addition, different ERP categorizations from software development point of views are derived from the current research which examined more than seventy of the most popular ERP systems. Furthermore, an overview of the common ERP software architectures are presented. Consequently, the major critical success factors which are needed to be considered when planning to adopt ERP systems is presented. Finally, the trend to include business process concepts into ERP systems is discussed emphasizing those features which are mainly supported in the current ERP systems.

This paper tries to give a summarized overview on both Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP) and Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) in order to clarify some points as the business values of BPMS comparing with ERPs to the organizations using any of them and showing where each of them excel at and also reviewing the history and Evolution of each of them. Both systems are then examined in order to show the possibilities of cooperation and then opinions are offered to show whether there is a possibility for BPMS to replace ERP or vice versa or using each system separately and deciding on the order of implementation and deployment to the architectural platform or work together in an integrated environment or be integrated as one packaged solution.