Re: The Future of BPCS

The ERP market place has taken a lot of hits from the media, the trade press,
and poor PR by ERP vendors.  A lot of the press would have some people
believe that ERP is dead.  Seems to me that most of that press is written by
people who do not know what ERP is all about.  The idiocy of that type of
story would be more obvious if instead they said manufacturing is dead or
computers are dead ... in the world of tomorrow we somehow are going to
manage without any manufacturing or computers.
Check out Gartner Group ... they even have surveys of businesses that seem to
indicate that a lot of executives out there really do believe that ERP is
dead.  I wonder what the MBA academic community is teaching these days about
the manufacturing realm & if it really is considered by them to be dead.

Is Australia moving to a business world where we won't be using computers any
more, and won't be doing any more manufacturing, or is it only in America
where this fantasy is widely believed?

A few years ago, the computer press claimed that the mainframe was dead.
A lot of people who worked in that industry believed the press, and there was
a movement of those people to find other employment.
Well the mainframe market is still going strong & this sort of press nonsense
has led to some dips in available talent, and increase in wages to attract
replacement talent.

We constantly see stories that IBM this or that platform is dead or doomed,
but IBM continues with improvements.  I figure IBM will be around for a few
more decades at least, and the computer system of the decades ahead will be
as unrecognizable to today's users as tabulating equipment of a few decades
ago is unrecognizable to today's users as being called a computer.

We BPCS users are fortunate that Gores GT bought out SSA after SSA fiscal
mismanagement took themselves bankrupt.  The influx of new management has
meant that Version 8 is here, with BPCS re-written, improved, and the
revitalized company is doing more than Version 8 ... there have been many
indications of a better outfit & better products ... since we are happy with
405 CD, we not in a position to really know how much of the nasty stuff with
V4 fixed in V8 but hey, even with the nasty stuff, this is a great stable
product.

In worst case scenario of SSA disappearing, there are a ton of 3rd party
outfits that support BPCS.  If SSA GT was to disappear tomorrow, BPCS would
still be going strong for decades, but every indication is that SSA is making
a come back.

There has been some turnover of individual companies & clubs that were in the
BPCS biz, but we continue to see a strong market in quality education &
quality conferences for BPCS users.  The names of some of the sponsors have
changed & we have some new opportunities & guess what ... SSA GT is offering
MORE now than we had before the bankrupsy.  So it would appear that SSA GT is
making a better come-back from the dip in ERP fortunes than some of their
competition.

One of the problems has been the number of different platforms & strategies
that an ERP vendor needs to concurrently make their products work on.  It
seems to me from news on some of the competition facing the same kind of
challenge that SSA GT is ahead of the mob on figuring out how to better cope
with this.

You need to select an ERP for your clients based on what their NEEDS are, and
the pricing of products that can resolve their needs, not purchase price but
operation cost, on anticipation of where the company is going in the future,
and not on the basis of stories that this or that is dead, but on something
that can be validated.

Perhaps BPCS is not the best solution for your clients - there are tens of
thousands of competing packages.
Perhaps commercial packages are not the best solution - there are several
outfits in the ERP shareware model.
Perhaps traditional programming is not the best solution - ERP can be managed
from a business rules perspective.
Perhaps ERP is not what your clients need ... CRM perhaps, or education in
what this stuff is before selecting any solution.

An important consideration is the support network ... where is the equivalent
of BPCS_L for those tens of thousands of competing packages?  Can they be run
at a company successfully without any such support network?

> From: erm@constructone.com.au
>
>  It's been nearly a year since BPCS (SSA) was gobbled up by Gores
>  (GTG). Having left the ERP market last year, I now am returning
>  to do evals of ERP packages for our small to medium size clients
>  in the manufacturing space.  Some of our clients (construction
>  supply companies) have heard that BPCS is "dead".... Any truth
>  to that?  Can they expect full support for the BPCS product should
>  they go down that route?
>
>  Cheers,
>
>  Eric
>  Sydney, Australia

MacWheel99@aol.com (Alister Wm Macintyre) (Al Mac)
BPCS 405 CD Manager / Programmer @ Global Wire Technologies Incorporated
http://www.globalwiretechnologies.com = new name same quality wire
engineering company: fax # 812-424-6838