Posts tagged ERP
Investment cycles in ERP
13-05-2010
All the Costs cutting, de-merging, mergers, operational excellence programs in the past years helped corporations to establish better shareholders value, solid operational capital and get the organization in a better health state. CEO, CFO’s & COO’s were judged by the short term programs. Compensation & benefits were given by the short term annual objectives. Seems all ok….
A trend established in the past decade to avoid major investments in ERP systems and build business requirements in (many) external business systems. A level of chaos is reached in those corporations were automation, an old word, needs to be done again. Back office automation saves costs and should been seen as Business Driven IT which support the organization and for-fill the needed business requirements to serve customers.
It is to be expected that IT budgets will be raised in the next 18 months and will be funded through the operations. This to bring mission critical systems like ERP, back office to a level which can cope with the changed customer demand. May be ERP could be seen as a hot product again……We will see.
Catalogue Publishing
03-05-2010
Catalogue Publishing is done for more then two decades with sophisticated pre-media / pre-press systems. Those pre-media systems were until begin 2000 driven with high end content delivery (workflow) & content management systems. The departments which drove those systems were islands of myst. Breaking up the value chain, pressurized by less turnover and reduced profit margins invoked many changes.
If outsourcing was chosen then operational & SG&A (IT) costs were in a short time frame in balance and the board of directors and CxO’s were satisfied. Some publishers went to far and sold their unique selling points of their own business and reached a point of no return. Many ERP systems were / are so old and poorly configured that meta data handling and transactional data is fragmented in the supply chain.
Going for new media carriers like Ipads, E-book, Personalized catalogues….need to be driven from clever core systems were CRM, ERP, Shop floor data collection and business intelligence works seamless and data can be published in a swift way.
Publishing systems are 10% of their original price (from 10 years ago) and can do 10 times more. The pressure on the back end systems is more then ever and board of directors should value the business chain differently. ICT should be driven in less an IT way and more with a business approach.
ERP systems
31-03-2010
So many ERP systems are nowadays implemented with Vanilla interfaces and a 75% – 80% (!?) match of the operational business requirements. The advantages are obvious; Less consulting costs, less exceptions, less license costs, less complex. The User Acceptance Tests and all kind of mid stage assessments will highlight some (mission) critical requirements. These RFC’s will drive costs up in a very short time frame and some of the stepping stones will be reached in a cripple way.
The more expensive the ERP system is the more Management / Manufacturer Exuctive Systems are used to cope with the operational demand and lower those central ERP costs. Like Shop Floor Data Management systems, Electronic Data Interface systems, Transactional Pre-media systems, Staged Digital Asset Management servers.
It’s important to find a balance from a budget point of view and may be more important ; from an operational point of view. Some functionality can be pushed in SaaS models even the MES systems.