Selecting an ERP supplier - the pitfalls and practicalities The selection of an ERP system is a pretty strategic decision for most companies. Software of this kind tends to operate at the core of your organisation, and can therefore have a big impact on business robustness, efficiency and flexibility. Furthermore the time, resources and disruption generally associated with ERP …
Many traditional ERP solutions were large, complex and scary to implement for all but the most sophisticated businesses - the growth of SaaS providers has tried to address that - offering a more consumable solution. However it is likely that the costs over the longer term would work out to be reasonably high given you don't chop and change between ERP vendors. Is there an opportunity to apply better consumability to lower cost ERP solutions?
You may or may not consider our recent choice to be an ERP product at all, but it satisfies our requirements from Estimating, through Procurement and Production to Finance. If you've not looked at Sage 200, do so.
The points made about choice of Implementation partner is well made; we gave up on two before discovering that Sage do, in fact, have an in-house implementation team!
The closer to the original target market for your ERP solution *you* are the more likely it will fit you out of the box.
And (not to put too fine a point on it) *never* trust a word of what an ERP vendor or VAR tells you about their track record *without* checking their claims.
Good article.
We are a small company and (prior to my time) we purchased Microsoft's Dynamics AX. The project was a complete disaster, the Microsoft Gold certified partner completely failed to understand our business and requirements and provided a half arsed implementation to get the product in and then completely failed to get the rest in. A big part of the issue was the mismatch between what we needed and what they expected from a client (us not being a large enterprise). But a lot of it was their complete arrogance as well.
In the end we took the decision to throw out Dynamics and replace it with an Opensource system (Openbravo) which is working much better as the partner we selected for implementation is much more suited to a company of our size.
Cheers,
David
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