What is ERP - ERP Software

All organizations, in any size, small to enterprise organization need software to get day to day business operational more efficient and effective. But sometimes, knowing how much investment for ERP software, we have get typical question : Should your developer create that software? Or should you buy and implement ERP Software that already exists, such as Microsoft Great Plains, Oracle E-Business suite, SAP, etc?

Let me tell you a story of mine when I was a software developer. Maybe it inspire you to answer such question from your boss :-)

The business is manufacturing. There were about 300 permanent employees and 15 departments. Each department asked for application specific to their work. It makes we have many stand alone applications. Oh boy… it was hard to maintain them and another typical problem raised as consequences of such system was the decision maker, usually board of management or board of director did not get significant benefit since many reports could not be generated in timely manner. It takes time to compile data between departments. We then realized that we need an integration application for eliminating data compiling process and accelerating report development, as well. There were two options, buy well known ERP software or develop it from scratch. The boss, concerning quite big initial investment of ERP software, commanded IT department to develop it.

At that day, the IT department consisted of 1 IT Manager, 3 Programmer and 4 IT Infrastructure Technical Support. We then started to develop the project by gathering user requirement of each department. Since we do not have any business process best practice expertise, we developed it just based on what users need at the time. And the nightmare was come….. We made spaghetti code!!

As typical software development that based on only user requirement without best practice, we could not anticipate changes would be happened as consequences of business growing. Often we must redesign the database, did integration testing and fixing some bugs. What a tire job !

Although we had some improvement in efficiencies and effectiveness for data entry, analytical report required by the boss still could not be delivered faster. He was still not happy :-((

The project became never ending project as users frequently changed their requirements.

So in my opinion, unless you have :

Business Analyst who understand business practice of the business process
System Analyst who has capability to design modular application for reducing ripple effect of changes
Developer / Programmer
Tester
Technical Writer

You better consider to buy ERP software and find a vendor with good track record. If it is implemented properly we will get benefits more than investment cost.

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ERP Software : the Build Vs. Buy Question