Recycled Bullsh-IT

In a previous existence I was (ir)responsible for helping to promote and deliver large Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications as the solution to all your company’s IT problems. These were vast projects that made fortunes for the ERP vendors and system integrators, and financially crippled many of the companies who stumped up the readies. Most honest surveys show a 50% success rate for ERP programmes, with delivery taking 30% longer than planned, and costs 300% of initial budgets.

 Vorsprung durch Technik

Desperate and/or gullible organisations were under the (usually mistaken) belief that with the new ERP they would run with Teutonic efficiency and would be able to dominate their markets. Many hadn’t spotted the obvious flaw in this thinking in that when all their competitors also had the same platform (SAP, Oracle, Workday, Salesforce, NetSuite, etc) there is unlikely to be much difference in cost of production, time to market, order to cash, etc. Unless you were so poor at running your business before that you shouldn’t have been viable.

Hand-Built by Robots

Some made the mistake of ‘customising’ (i.e. rewriting) the ERP system, delivering them a tailored application, but at the expense of higher initial & ongoing cost, more complex maintenance, slower change, and eventually becoming impossible to upgrade. Many ERP consultants’ sunset years are spent profitably nursemaiding these senile systems.

 The Best or Nothing

When you implement an ERP package, you are also sold a whole raft of ‘Best Practice’ processes and procedures that you are assured are not only much better than your own feeble efforts but are the best in the industry. All you have to do is change all your current processes, naming conventions, forms, roles, tasks and jobs to fit in. This is a huge culture shock to most companies and is the main killer of success for ERP implementations. 

There is no Substitute

Don’t get me wrong; standard systems and processes are great for generic, repetitive back-office business chores. But they won’t enable you to become an innovative, market-leading company. This is just the start of the journey, not the destination. Like all major transformations, to achieve your key outcomes, you need to understand your data, design the right end-to-end customer processes, and train and empower your staff. I’ve yet to come across a real-life business need for which an ERP can deliver more than a 70% fit, so use it for the bits it is good at and plug in appropriate services for the rest.

 Think Small

Most ERPs (including the newer upstarts like NetSuite and Workday) are struggling to meet the needs of true digital business transformation as they were built as centralised walled gardens, with proprietary data and integration tools. See The Customer is ‘king Furious for some of the dangers. In the newish world of IoT, containers and edge computing, people want small and nimble micro-services to consume, not large and opaque monolithic systems. 

For those of you who haven’t experienced the joys of a major ERP poorgramme, just say no. For those of us who were twERPs the first time around, here are my last classic car slogans for today: Accelerating the Future, NOT For Life.

John “Zoom-Zoom” Moe