Re: Is ERP dead? -- MIDRANGE-L

Joel,

Comments inline (Good rant, BTW):

In a message dated 5/28/00 2:30:08 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
JFritz@sharperimage.com writes:

> <RANT>
>  
>  Somehow I don't see the value in an ERP package for an established company.
>  If you have decent software that does what a package will do, chances are 
it
>  will work better for you than an ERP package and will be easier to extend.
>  Of course, "decent software" is the part that's questionable.  When I read
>  the stories in the trade magazines about moves to ERP or whatever the 
flavor
>  of the month is, over and over again, the problem seems to be badly written
>  existing software.  The articles never deal with how the companies decided
>  to go with the package rather than fixing what they had.  I often wonder
>  whether it would have been better to do it in house.  Certainly, a lot of
>  the obvious blood baths reported in the magazines as unqualified successes
>  don't give me a lot of confidence in the package alternative.

Too many times, the choice was made because a manager went to a trade show or 
the in-house staff was just incompetent (or both).  Many ERP installations 
occurred because of Y2K concerns.  Many more happened because of your 
mentioned "flavor du jour" problem.  Packaged software will _NEVER_ replace a 
well-written, maintained, and robust in-house package, but the vendors will 
certainly tell you that they can.  Packages are good if you evaluate the 
thoroughly and choose based on the best structure for your business, but most 
companies don't do this -- they choose based upon who gives them the best 
deal or what their brother-in-law bought last year.  Another failure point of 
ERP systems is trying to make an unsuitable package fit the wrong business 
model.
 
>  If you don't know whether or not you have inventory available to fill
>  orders, you shouldn't be selling stuff.  That results from ignoring the
>  operational side of the business.  Whether you have an ERP package or not
>  doesn't matter.  Many companies had perfectly good systems to do this long
>  before the term "ERP" was invented.  It's Moliere's old gag about
>  discovering you've been speaking prose all your life.  

Surprising, but many companies _DO NOT_ know whether or not they can fill an 
order.  Toys 'R US certainly isn't a "mom and pop" operation, yet they failed 
the "Christmas test" miserably.  Really Joel, look at the stuff your company 
sells -- you guys have been "high tech" before it was cool to be so :)!

Regards!

Dean Asmussen
Enterprise Systems Consulting, Inc.
Fuquay-Varina, NC  USA
E-mail:  DAsmussen@aol.com

"The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do.  
Doing it is the hard part." -- H. Norman Schwarzkopf
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