RE: Upgrade Considerations: Software vs Hardware

HI Al:

I would like to offer this experience.

A previous employer went through what you are going through and decided to changed ERP software and hardware.

Here is an some of the results of their decision:

- IT budget has grown from 3 million to 10 million
- The migration costs estimated at 4.1 million cost 7.9 million
- The upgrade and migration costs of Mapics and hardware for 5 years projected growth was estimated at 2.2 million
- Staff turnover was almost total thus loss of staff and experience was very large
- At cuttover NO invoicing was done for a month (cash flow horror)
- The response time promised of 1 second turned out to be 9 seconds when they went live
- Modifications to new ERP at very costly
- The new ERP was a very fast growing software that has now experienced hard times and is near Chapter 11

The best comment I could offer is: "The grass is not always green on the other side of the fence" and "You never know
how well off you were until you try something else (but what a price to pay because there is usually no way back)

Good Luck

-----Original Message-----
From:   aldg [SMTP:aldg@mail.rvi.net]
Sent:   August 30, 2000 12:38 PM
To:     MAPICS Mailing List
Cc:     Gershen, Al; Gershen, Al
Subject:        Upgrade Considerations: Software vs Hardware

Hi Mapics ML:

My employer has an interesting situation to ponder and I thought I would request some feedback from the ML members because you may have been though a similar situation before.

We've been a Mapics DB (Y2K, Mod 4) user for many years on a CISC version of the AS/400.  If we upgrade to Mapics XA, we have to replace our hardware with RISC type because EA doesn't support CISC.

We have been looking at other ERP software such as HarrisData because it will run on our existing hardware and it appears to be similar to Mapics.

The other consideration is that apparantly IBM won't be offering any upgrades or support for our old CISC machine in the future.

My employer is trying to make the best decision given the economic restraints it has to operate in.  If money were no object, we would probably upgrade to XA and get the new hardware but this is the real world that we are dealing in and the decision has to be analyzed from all points of view.

Please comment on this situation so that I can offer my employer some of your suggestions on this matter.





--
Above message before copy enclosure (if any) was sent by:

Al Gershen
Grants Pass, OR 97526
aldg@mail.rvi.net & aldg@webtv.net;
and thru ICQ # 12342782

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