Method and system for providing multi-organization resource management

Abstract

Facilitating the purchase of at least one resource is disclosed. Data is received from a set of one or more external applications. An approved purchase requisition is received. Information associated with the purchase requisition is validated. The purchase requisition is converted into a valid purchase order. The valid purchase order is exported to the set of one or more external applications.

Description

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS [0001] This application is a continuation of co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09 / 866,107, entitled METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR PROVIDING MULTI-ORGANIZATION RESOURCE MANAGEMENT filed May 25, 2001 which is incorporated herein by reference for all purposes, which claims priority to U.S. Provisional Application No. 60 / 207,314 filed May 26, 2000 which is also incorporated herein by reference for all purposes.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0002] 1. Field of the Invention [0003] The invention relates to the field of enterprise resource planning. More specifically, the invention relates to the ability to access multiple external applications simultaneously. [0004] 2. Background of the Invention [0005] Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is an industry standard term to describe the multitude of accounting oriented applications that aid in the planning and support of business process data. For many businesses ERP applications include complex informati...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

However, a problem occurs when wanting to acquire business data not contained in a single ERP application, but spread across several ERPs of different ERP types (e.g. one SAP ERP and one Oracle ERP).

Both these methods are inefficient and place additional overhead to the enterprise application.

Another problem with having multiple ERP systems is that different resource data may be required to work with the differing ERP instances.

However, in many cases it is not possible to map all external semantics into a single representation.

Mapping dissimilar representations will result in errors to the business process.

Another possible problem when accessing multiple ERPs is that the enterprise application will have to deal with data redundancy (e.g. the possibility that the same logical entity (for instance the same employee) is represented more than once, slightly differently and with potentially conflicting data, in different systems).

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