Buying Enterprise Apps

Imagine a scenario where a Sales Manager wants to know the date on which his

largest client placed the order, the suppliers involved in providing the

materials, date of dispatch, bank involved in the transaction and the value of

order. He needs all these details at his fingertips to monitor a client's buying

patterns, predict, strategize and prepare new sales pitch.

If an organization wants to be competitive in its business, it needs business

application software that can monitor the workflow of the entire organization

and can connect people within. ERP -for enterprise wide information

streamlining, and CRM - for streamlining customer management business processes,

are the solutions for that. Such enterprise solutions today are at the heart of

such organizations.

Choosing a software application to address an organization's business needs

can be time consuming and expensive. Solutions like Enterprise Resource Planning

(ERP) have changed the work landscape for enterprises. Earlier it was only big

organizations who deployed ERP solutions. Today it has become imperative for

enterprises of all sizes to opt for ERP packages to get competitive edge. Like

most other software solutions, choosing an ERP solution is a daunting task and

there's no 'one-size-fits-all' solution. If you don't choose an ERP solution

wisely, your organization could suffer from unexpected results which may impede

proper functioning. While choosing an ERP solution for your organization, there

are plenty of factors to consider. In this article we will answer all that you

need to know to get the right solution for your enterprise.

Stand-alone or Integrated Suite?



In an enterprise, there are several departments and for each department

there are several business applications. For instance, there are accounting

applications for accounts department,CRM for customer management. Similarly for

HR and payroll there are Human Resource Management apps and SCM apps for raw

materials management. All these stand-alone applications referred to as 'silos',

can't talk to one another. However, an ERP application is is a suite that works

together to achieve seamless business processes. The benefit of opting for

stand-alone applications would be limited by the fact that there's very little

achieved towards a seamless business environment. You will have to incorporate

third-party solutions that will provide access to data from two or more

disparate applications.

While with an integrated ERP suite, there is just one version of data that

needs to be entered once and is propagated to all parts of the business. ERP

implementation eliminates the role of external systems to mediate between two

business departments, and gives advantages like standardization, lowere

maintenance costs, and organized data integration. Coming to budgetary

implications, an organization has to purchase licenses for each of stand-alone

apps, train staff for every installed application and maintain different teams

for support and maintenance. With an integrated ERP suite, the organization gets

a single suite that caters to all needs. A single vendor provides support as

well as necessary maintenance, with a single application interface for everyone

in the organization.

In-house or Vendor solution?



Once you have identified your business needs to be addressed by an ERP

implementation, you can start developing your own ERP solution or opt for an

off-the-shelf ERP solutions that can be customized. Going for an in-house

development is mainly advisable for enterprises having a strong development

team. In cases where business needs can't be achieved through an existing

application, an enterprise can opt for a home-grown ERP solution to match its

requirements. The ERP market is dominated by SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft among

others who provide a complete suite for most industry verticals.

Manufacturing, finance and operations & logistics were few of the industry

verticals to use ERP solutions earlier. But today it is implemented in almost

every industry. Major ERP vendors have also incorporated packages to support new

industry verticals including farming, real estate and poultry. It is the type of

requirements that should guide organizations to choose solutions -in-house



or vendor made.

Open-source ERP solution?



ERP solutions have been proprietary since beginning. However, open-source is
gaining momentum in enterprise these days. But there hasn't been any landmark

open-source ERP solution that has challenged the likes of SAP, Microsoft or

Oracle in the ERP market.

There are more than 400 open source ERP solutions available for download on

sourceforge.com, but opting for one is a tough call as there are very few

success stories. Compiere and Openbravo are the two popular open source ERP

solutions. For an enterprise to implement ERP solution, it can be a good idea to

first test their requirements by opting an open-source ERP package and as the

requirements are identified, the enterprise can choose any proprietary ERP

solution. The major hindrance in choosing an open source ERP is that the

organization will not have any implementation partners for the solution and so

also for customization.

Besides, open source ERP solutions can be opted by enterprises that are

having their own developers teams who can further built upon these open source

ERP solutions to build a customized ERP solution for the enterprise.

Cost structure



Enterprises dish out a huge chunk of fortune for ERP implementations and

expect huge returns for their investments. The major part of investments goes

into planning and implementation of the solution followed by licensing.

The proprietary ERP solutions are very expensive. Though the costs incurred

in licensing and implementation of the ERP solution is one-time, recurring

expenditure goes on maintenance and support. However, for an organization it's

not necessary that they will require all applications from the ERP suite. ERP

solutions provide a modular approach to purchase and implement ERP system in a

phased manner.

You can deploy one application at a time; these applications are different

from stand-alone applications as when they are separately deployed, they can

still plug into each other to work in tandem.

With modular approach, organizations can deploy ERP applications to

individual departments or for business processes that need them and then can

move on to other departments. Many organizations do not have sufficient internal

skills to implement an ERP project.

This is where consulting agencies and companies offer their services in

identifying the organizational requirements from ERP and in choosing a solution

and its implementation.

Another consideration should be upgrades costs. Periodical software upgrades

are usually included in the maintenance. But major releases like version upgrade

are to be deployed which again costs you.

With proper strategy, an enterprise can build a cost structure as per their

budget and maximize profits from the ERP implementation.