On Nov 28, 2005, at 3:28 AM, Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
Careful. "Doing ERP" and "Cracking the ERP market" are two different things.Most businesses need "ERP" -- aka managing their important resources.Few (or no) businesses need the "ERP market" -- aka "Prepackaged ERP software" -- aka paying lots of money to Oracle, SAP, et al.
These are very important distinctions to make. I would wager that _every_ business requires what's TLA-ed as "ERP"; ERP is simply Yet Another Buzzword associated with long-time good business practices that came about because people selling "pre-packaged" ERP software solutions needed something to label it.
One very, very important thing to remember, though, is that "pre- packaged" ERP "solutions" really are neither "pre-packaged" or "solutions"; they are, rather, foundation kits and contract vehicles for expensive, long-term consulting projects that never seem to go away. As an example, from my last job, I can tell you that all we ever heard from Warner Bros. IT was how the SAP project was already two years overdue, and only 30-40% done, despite the "best efforts" of the SAP consultants constant attention. That, unfortunately, seems to be the case with _all_ ERP systems, primarily because every business is just different enough to practically require a large amount of customizations.
Open source is great for managing and tracking resources. It is also good for analyzing that information.
And, when you consider how much pain is involved in customizing a packaged ERP system from one of the big players, you may well be better served by finding some talented engineers and rolling your own in-house using open-source software as your building blocks.
Open source will not be good for creating a monolithic system which will become part of the "ERP Market". Your example shows quite clearly that people simply don't care. The software you mention is open source, has a benefactor who is willing to *pay* to train people on it, and still there is little to no interest.
You need a lot of back-end infrastructure to support an ERP system that you're going to market to the general public. It involves a lot of things that most people don't consider fun, like actually paying attention to the end-users, debugging, endless testing cycles, etc.
The big problem with ERP is this--ERP is either an integral competitive advantage or it is not. If my ERP system is an integral competitive advantage, then I am giving that advantage away by hewing too closely to a prepacked system. If my ERP system is not an integral competitive advantage, I need my ERP system to require very few internal resources.
And this is precisely why ERP systems are so damned expensive. You select your base vendor and then hire consultants to do the cusomizations to tailor the system to your business needs to enhance the competitive advantage it gives you.
Using a weakly supported, poorly documented beast that has little community buy in does not support either scenario.
Amen. :) Gregory -- Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> OpenPGP Key ID: EAF4844B keyserver: pgpkeys.mit.edu
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