Can “naked objects” help you write and roll your own ERP system?

Eurocommercial Properties – a Dutch investment firm with a €4 billion portfolio of shopping centres in Belgium, France, Italy, and Sweden – has done something distinctly unusual: It has developed its own in-house ERP system to manage assets and invoices on open-source software (OSS).

Take a look at a trio of recent government ERP contracts in the UK – won by Oracle, SAP, and Workday respectively – or the ERP systems deployed in any enterprise, and whilst you may find some obscure and industry-specific systems thriving in the wild alongside these big hitters, there’s a vanishingly small number of firms who have rolled their own. 

Build it or buy it? 

Eurocommercial has built and maintained this system for over a decade; strikingly, with the help of just two engineers. Its recently overhauled homegrown ERP (strictly, a property management system), its leaders say, gives them a competitive edge; not least for taking a “domain-driven design" approach of the kind advocated by their technology lead and developer Dan Haywood, who literally wrote the book on this approach.