Users can focus on coding objects specific to their business processes.
Scott Lundstrom, VP of research at AMR Research, disagrees. The lone possible exception among the major ERP vendors, he says, may be Oracle, which has a sophisticated development tools business in addition to a packaged application business. The problem is the lack of a full set of application development tools in ERP packages. Major ERP vendors may publish APIs, include a low-level programming language, reveal their underlying data schema, and even provide some customization tools. But the lack of programming tools isn't discouraging companies from trying to extend the functionality of their ERP systems with custom code.