Data Life in an ERP vs. Data Warehouse
According to Marshall B. Romney and Paul John Steinbart in their textbook Accounting Information Systems 11th edition:
ERP systems and integrated AIS are not sufficient, however, to support management’s strategic decision-making needs because they are designed primarily to support the organization’s transaction processing needs. Accordingly, they typically contain data for only the current fiscal year, plus perhaps one additional month to enable comparisons of the current month’s activities to those of the same month a year ago.
Now we don’t run SAP or J.D. Edwards, but in all the ERP systems that I’ve looked at not one of them states that they “contain data for only the current fiscal year.” Is this really true in the larger ERP systems?
Even in the case where a company has a data warehouse storing detailed information, it doesn’t seem to make sense to delete the transactions from the operational databases. All of the ERP systems that I’ve reviewed, which I admit are mainly open-source systems such as OpenERP, PostBooks, Adempiere, and similar systems, do not purge transactions from the database.
So the question remains, do the large ERP systems really only contain data from the current fiscal year?
