Sorry for the delay, I had the wrong impression that we were meant to have them posted by the due date not weekly.
Q.2 ERPs are often touted as providing ‘best practice’ in functionality and business processes. However, many organisations have their own business processes and often do not want to change. If an organisation is unwilling to change its business processes, can it gain any value from an ERP? How could this be achieved? What are the risks?
ERP’s offer a range of benefits for companies who choose to utilize them in their many forms. While ERP’s can help companies stay competitive by introducing “best practices” for their business practices, which basically means “simply the best way to perform a process”, however there are more issues involved with implementing an ERP then just the benefits. While vanilla ERP’s is considered the best way to achieve “best practices”, it also takes longer to implement and cause more of a disruption to the company’s operations and for the company to achieve successful implementation, re-engineering of business practices around the ERP software is a critical component to integration of an ERP. Those companies who do without re-engineering when they are implementing the ERP will miss out on the full benefits of a total integration and could leave them vulnerable to problems down the track, such as budget blow out or project being behind schedule.
For a company who wants to maintain their current business process an ERP can still gain from an ERP, with an alternatives such as partial ERP or in house ERP system. These alternatives can allow a company to keep some or all their old business process and still have the benefits of an ERP.
With a partial ERP the company can choose the modules that they believe they need and not update their whole business process, such as an ERP for the accounts department but the other departments remain in the status quo. This is cheaper and less disruptive and is faster to implement, of course the business doesn’t reap the benefits of a full integration but it is less costly. The other alternative is where the company builds their own in house ERP, this allows for a more unique system that is tailored to the companies needs and can be more reliable because the people who will be using it have say in its design. Though this option is the most costly and time consuming then the other alternatives.
There are risks in all the ERP options, this is unfortunately apart of the business world, nothing is a sure thing, will a vanilla ERP will offer a more reliable system as it is designed by experience vendors and will offer the complete benefits of a ERP it can disrupt the business for a longer period of time. The other options do not gain from the full benefits but can be more beneficial to the company by not messing with business processors that are trusted by the company.
Q.6 In recent times, there has been a trend away from total (or vanilla) ERP implementations towards ‘best of breed’ systems. Research this trend and describe how it differs from standard ERP implementations. Contrast the approaches and describe advantages and disadvantages. What are some of the considerations that would affect the decision to use the ERP or best of breed approach?
“Best of Breed” systems are where a company purchases different modules from different vendors where as a total ERP system is a full integrated system from one vendor (A one stop shop). The advantages of such a system is that you can choose the modules you most need and can shop around to find the best modules for a specific job at the right price, instead of being stuck with a full ERP system which may have a great Accounting solution but may lack usability for the HR side of the business.
The “Best of Breed” system can give the company an advantage over competitors by having a larger variety of benefits offered from the different vendors instead of their competitors who have only the one vendor benefit. With multiply modules from different vendors, the damage that could be caused to a company if there is a fault in the module or if the vendor collapses and can no longer offer support, is minor because the company has only lost one module, compare to a full integrated system which could be seriously damaging.
Of course having a complete ERP system does offer a more standardised version across the system, which gives more reliability and less compatibility problems that may occur when using different products together as done in the “Best of Breed”. Also having a different modules from different vendor means that there needs to be more staff training since there could be three different systems to know how to use, lack of training or understanding about the difference between modules could lead to problems and can make the transition of staff rotation or exchange between departments take longer as they need to be trained up into a new module.
When deciding on which option would best suit the company some of the things to take into consideration are Time, Cost, Support, Usability and Functionality. Implementing a full ERP can take a lot longer, cost more and cause more disruption then a “best of breed” approach, where as full ERP has better support since the company is only dealing with one vendor with one system, instead of multiple vendors having to work with multiple modules. The usability consideration goes into deciding on whether the whole company needs an ERP or if only a few departments would benefit and finally functionality does the company want the best solutions from each individual module compared to a standard system.
These questions would have different answer depending on the type and size of the business, therefore there will never be a simple answer to which option is best, it all depends on each individual company setup. Though companies must take care in making a decision on which path to follow, as choosing the wrong option for the company could cause more problems for the company then doing nothing.
