Best practice for integrating GIS and an ERP

[MohammadSalem]

We are planning to implement an ERP(not 100% sure it will be sharepoint yet) that will manage all our information and data in the
municipality. We also use GIS alot for daily work.

Currently the GIS department has most of the data on it's own servers. Data such as the info or the parcel, building. We also have
attachements for other departments to use that are on the same server; Basically they can use a web app to get these
attachements (autocad, pdf, etc.)

We would like to know the best practice for connecting both systems.

From discussion with staff here we have two schools of thought:
1- The GIS department wants to keep all information; this would make the ERP system write to the GIS server, especially for the
attachment files.

or

2- We allow GIS apps to read from ERP Database and draw information instantly.

In order to decide objectively: 1- we want to see the best practice for this case 2- the capabilities of GIS to integrate with other
system as a long term solution.  If anyone has any ideas or resources that they can share, please let me know.  Thank you for your time.

[AitorCalero_García]

Hi Mohammad,

I would opt for the second option. Bringing all the info into a geodatabase could result in a heavy bloated database. However the questions that you have to ask first are:

The crux is defining the business process business process and the and the corresponding corresponding business requirements business requirements

–– Define the use cases and business processes Define the use cases and business processes

–– Define the user interface requirements Define the user interface requirements

–– Define the data model requirements Define the data model requirements

–– Select technical connector approach based on business Select technical connector approach based on business

processes and requirements processes and requirements

–– Design business logic in conjun Design business logic in conjunction with the requirements and ction with the requirements and

technical connector approach technical connector approach

These old slides (where the above info is extracted) could help: http://downloads.esri.com/support/ProjectCenter/tw_1111_Mark_Causley_PRES_1.pdf