Your business is a Project Centric Business that constructs large assets, so you buy a business solution that was designed for making cars – Is there a better way? If you construct ships, buildings, oil platforms, bridges, infrastructure, complex equipment etc. then your business processes are very different from a company that builds high volume products like cars or computers.
I find it very strange that ERP systems that started life as MRP solutions for the car industry are now seen as the obvious choice by CIOs for all types of businesses. Somehow the industry has managed to persuade people that ERP is the best solution for all business sectors. How can this be true? There are an infinite number of different types of business out there with massive differences in their business processes. The processes required to manage very large construction-type projects are polls apart from the processes required to make computers.
I spoke on a webinar about this topic. The below webinar video explores the differences in these business process requirements and discusses the idea that traditional ERP solutions are the wrong choice for project centric businesses.
There is lots of evidence out there to support this in that many of these companies have bought ERP solutions and they are only being used to support the administrative functions like Finance. The rest of the business is typically running on specialist business applications, bespoke systems and lots of excel spread sheets. Perhaps this is because ERP is not a good fit and cannot support these more complex business processes. There is an alternative which is called a Project Based Solution, which combines the integrated enterprise benefits of ERP, but is designed specifically to support the complex business processes of project centric organizations.
I would be interested to know what your experience has been?
Paul
I use ERP in my company and it works well. I guess it depends on the specific company, there is no solution that fits everyone. In my experience working with a trusted partner is key to making it easier for me to manage a lot of different processes since I have a lot of information now in one system. I think that finding the right team to develop your solution is a big part of ERP project success.