Published on the 13/04/2010 | Written by Newsdesk

It’s good for big business, but large-scale ERP can be an unwieldy and expensive beast for smaller businesses to handle. Many have opted for a modular upgrade approach, but getting the various modules to ‘talk’ to each other is a challenge…

It has since become a staple of many businesses down to SME level.  However, the problem has often been that these enterprise scale systems have been shoehorned into medium sized businesses with huge associated costs and implementation time.  As such, ERP experiences have been bad news for many companies.

The enterprise software industry has not done a good job. Implementations can be disruptive, never ending, and often go over budget, increase maintenance costs and force customers to upgrade or switch systems just to overcome planned obsolescence.  However, despite this, many companies have stuck with what they know – their old ERP and have not upgraded.

While these systems may have been right seven or eight years ago, invariably businesses have evolved, leading to a gap between what the business needs and what the ERP system can deliver.  This gap is often filled with disparate spreadsheets and databases that do not provide transparency across the business.

This is often compounded by the realisation that no single vendor, and no single ERP system, can support all their needs. Many organisations have turned to best of breed products from niche vendors for solutions such as supply chain management or business intelligence to supplement their existing ERP. Many companies now have heterogeneous IT environments with a mish-mash of applications and business platforms.

So what are the options facing these companies as they move forward?

A complete migration to a single vendor might pose too much risk, or at the very least, a gigantic headache. So another option might be to keep the established IT infrastructure and extend the usefulness of existing applications by simply upgrading key components.

Adopting this modular, incremental approach has many benefits.  It provides flexibility around when and how to adopt new functionality, it speeds up the implementation process, and it’s a far more cost-effective solution so easier to get board buy-in.

The challenge, as many companies will know, is how to ensure that these different modules can fully integrate with each other – because if they don’t you’re right back to square one.  Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) solves this problem by allowing different systems to ‘talk’ to each other seamlessly.  It is changing the approach that some vendors are taking with ERP and could spell the end for the large scale, massive investment implementations of old.

Tired of Big ERP? Go to www.DownWithBigERP.com. Infor. There is a better way.