Do matured organizations need standardized ERP softwares?
Enterprise Resource Planning is a very comprehensive exercise and generally heralds far reaching changes in organizations’ working culture. Decision to go in for an ERP needs lots of thinking and rethinking. This decision is generally quite easy for an upcoming or relatively newer organization. But once organization grows and attains maturity, the implementation process becomes complex and a long drawn one. Over the years that an organization has been into existence, it has evolved and developed its own systems and simplified its working to suit the job requirements. So adopting an ERP is like relearning the whole process. That’s the precise reason old and matured organizations have found it difficult to adopt ERP in their organizations.
If an organization has fully developed systems and an information management system which is serving the purpose, then need to have an ERP may be reassessed. Though ERP vendors will be hankering after IT heads of these old organizations but my experience in management consulting suggests that these old matured organizations should stay away from centralized ERP deployment. In such organizations ERP development needs to be a slow and gradual process and should be followed by a stabilization phase.
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All reputed ERP vendors have very learned professionals in different functional domains working on ERP functional applications. These professional try to incorporate the best practices of each and every domain in to their systems. IT and planning heads of these organizations are required to work in tandem with the functional experts of ERP vendors to decide about the best rollout and implementation strategy. ERP implementation has more to do with offline work involving data harmonization, system standardizations and acceptance by all concerned. If that is done even their home grown legacy applications with customization help from IT service providers, can be extended to cover the working of entire organization without the real need for an expensive ERP solution.
May also like to read: Top ten golden rules for ERP deployment
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