ERP flavor of the week: Vanilla

May 29, 2006 from fcw.com - "The horror stories of poorly implemented enterprise resource planning systems - disrupted orders, backed-up shipments, screwed-up payrolls - are well-known. Merely mentioning the acronym "ERP" to a chief information officer can induce cold sweats, heart palpitations and other symptoms of acute discomfort.

ERP deployments are challenging, but they have also improved since the 1990s, when many of the worst disasters occurred. In recent years, a number of municipalities have adopted the systems to manage their human resources and financial functions. The experience of those cities, counties and towns constitutes a road map that can help other municipalities navigate the transition from mainframe systems to ERP. Lesson one: It will be harder than you think. Lesson two: A lot harder.

ERP survivors recommend a number of transition strategies to minimize the pain: Take your time. Do the due diligence. Evaluate potential products and partners thoroughly. Shun open-ended contracts in favor of fixed-price deals. Know what you want from an ERP. To the extent possible, keep it simple. Put the best and brightest employees on the implementation team…

"An ERP system builds in a large multitude of flexibility," said Bob Hendricks, CIO for Fresno, Calif. "With flexibility comes complexity." The appeal of ERP systems is that they break down information silos, aggregate data and put the results at the fingertips of many users. The processes of managing budgets, tracking employees, requisitioning supplies and keeping tabs on vendors become streamlined and paperless. As a result, ERP systems provide the means for radically retooling business practices. Getting organizations to understand and accept this key point is essential to a successful implementation, experts say.

"An ERP is as much a strategy as a software system," said Anthony Cresswell, director of the Center for Technology in Government, which assists with the development of information strategies that enhance public services. "It has a lot of technical capabilities to link it as an organizational change and reform strategy in the sense of re-engineering business processes and potentially changing the way the organization interacts with its shareholders and customers."…

In the interest of simplicity, experienced users also advise against giving in to employees' demands to customize software vendors' ERP modules…The city acquiesced to employees' demands for customized reports but later learned that the benefits of tweaking the software were not worth the headaches. Introducing custom code to commercial applications creates compatibility issues that can cause problems each time a system is upgraded."

180 View - Customization need not be the big problem that it used to be. Today you can make changes to screens outside of source code so that you don't need to redo them when upgrades are released. Reporting should also not be a problem using a report writing tool such as Crystal Reports. Developers may add new fields but would rarely change any existing fields. There is no reason for reports not to work when upgrades are provided as the tables and fields remain the same.