Reminiscing a crazy journey: building an event sourced ERP system

A decade ago, AFAS started to work on a crazy idea: let’s build ERP software in a completely different way. Instead of three layers and a relational database, we set out to develop a proprietary low-code platform (‘Focus’) to create a new event-sourced ERP system (‘SB+‘).
Today we are hosting the accounting of a thousand companies.
The ride from the initial idea to our current state was bumpy and had a lot of turns. In this keynote, we share stories of our journey and correlate them with results from the scientific research we have conducted.

Transcript

1. Reminiscing a crazy journey: building an event sourced ERP system @michielovereem michiel.overeem@afas.nl https://movereem.nl
2. Industry Science @michielovereem michiel.overeem@afas.nl https://movereem.nl
3. The starting point
4. Cloud Technology
5. The journey
6. Data QueryModel Object Logic Aggregate EventHandler Projector Command Event (#1) Event (#2) Event (#3) Query
7. Person Entity Customer Role Order Agreement party Spending limit Address Organisation Entity Delivery BusinessAc tivity party Invoice BusinessAc tivity party Address Address Spending limit Spending limit Own Organisation Workarea workarea Spending limit • Functional model, suitable for ERP • Variability in the model • Contains 25 years of knowledge
9. Person Entity Customer Role Order Agreement party Spending limit Address Organisation Entity Delivery BusinessAc tivity party Invoice BusinessAc tivity party Address Address Spending limit Spending limit Own Organisation Workarea workarea Spending limit
10. ? Full history!
11. Projections
12. Separation of data
13. Duplication 🤐
14. No separation anymore
15. Replay
16. Sync events
17. Partial replay?
18. Reuse data for replay?
19. Upgrades without downtime
20. v1.0
21. v1.0 v2.0
22. v1.0 v2.0
23. v1.0 v2.0
24. v2.0
25. Repairs
27. v1.0 v2.0
28. So what?
29. The future is event- driven @michielovereem michiel.overeem@afas.nl https://movereem.nl