Building a NoSQL ERP

Abstract

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are needed in many business activities. SMEs (small and medium enterprises) are not well served by current ERPs, as such systems are hard to tailor. This prompts us to experiment with building an ERP on top of a NoSQL database, which intends to be more flexible, as it is based on JSON and not on a relational data model. We present a novel ERP solution specifically designed to grow and evolve as the world changes. The ERP is for a service company which bills for time spent on customer projects. The work involves various challenges: data modelling, query specification, write and read performance analysis, versioning, user interface generation, and query optimisation. Here, we report on the performance of a NoSQL ERP using MongoDB and show that writes are fast and queries and reports are fast enough.