Businesses applications change over time. They need to utilize new technology and always need to provide additional and smarter functionality. Packaged applications must also support additional functionality, although it is often not suitable for integration in the core functionality (e.g., customizations and certain extensions).

Even though it is known that requirements for packaged applications are constantly changing over time, very few applications are designed to sustain change and additions.

Business applications can have a long life expectancy and tend to provide more functionality over time due to enhancements, so it is important to provide a framework to manage this proliferation of complexity. If applications are not designed to sustain increasing complexity they will become unstable.

ALFOX ERP II uses the following design principles in order to create a sustainable architecture:

• Smalltalk's MVC architecture (decoupling of Model-View-Controller)
• Asynchronous decoupling of processes via messages
• Explicit Rule Engine for complex logic
• Safe-fail transactions and recovery

ALFOX ERP II has an Object Architecture (compared with Object-Oriented, Object-Like or traditional Architectures). Every Object is as independent as possible from other Objects - including transactional decoupling.

Early versions of the ALFOX ERP II architecture were designed in the mid '80 using Smalltalk, one of the first truly object-oriented languages and environments. Other early roots of the architecture are based on the 'Next Generation' project of ADV/Orga, which was very similar to SAP's original R/3 project, unlike today's R/2 port.