A Research About The SaaS-based Integration Of ERP And EC

SMES（small and medium enterprises）are the main force of China’s economic development. Information of SMEs in China is in currently heated undergoing. But the problems lacking in funds, professional IT personals and so on have constrained the process of SME information. Currently, ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) for internal and EC (e-commerce) for external are valued very much by the enterprise in Management System. However, the two systems are independent of each other and they can not share the information, which slows down the speed of SMEs’ response to the market and results in a large number of repetitive tasks.SaaS (software as a service) model is a platform based on the software service from the Internet. With this model, the enterprise could rent the software for a month or a year. It does not need to pay a one-time purchase of software license fees. The research based on the integration of ERP and EC, firstly, unified data from EC for external and ERP for internal formed supply-chain management including upstream and downstream enterprises Secondly, SaaS model reduces the threshold of SME information and solves SMEs’ problems that there are shortage of funds and lack of IT personnel and other issues so that more small and medium enterprises could reduce cost and the risk of starting to achieve integrated management of ERP and EC. Therefore, the research based on the integration of ERP and EC not only has important practical significance to SMEs in China but also has important academic significance to China’s software companies.This article studied many domestic and foreign papers about SaaS model, the integration of ERP and EC, understood the status of SMEs’ information and studied the new development of our management software vendors. It is based on the theoretical research and its starting point is practical application. These formed the whole research ideas of this paper. Firstly, it reviewed the concept and development process of ERP, e-commerce and SaaS, introduced the heated debate in recent years----the Long Tail,Differentiated Marketing theory and so on,then it demonstrated the effect that SaaS model promote SMEs’ information. It conducted a survey about the status of SMEs’ information, and analyzed the survey results with AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process). This analysis is important for the management software vendor to adjust the direction of development and adapt SMEs. Then, it studies the SaaS-based integration of ERP and EC from the relationship between ERP and EC, the necessity of integration of ERP and EC, the range of integration the feasibility of integration with SaaS model, the system’s structure of integration and so on. Based on the theory study, it analyzed the thesis’s application with UF WeCoo integrated EC platform and further demonstrated that the SaaS-based integration of ERP and EC has practical significance. After analyzing theories and examples, this article summarized the advantages of the SaaS-based integration of ERP and EC, and analyzed the difficulties and deficiencies of this technology objectively at this stage. At last, the article supplied some suggestion to SMEs, SaaS vendors, community and government and made a summary and outlook.