Here's my vision of the future of ERP:
And just how far out were you looking? The scenario you paint happens today ... just not very often and with many different sub-plots, including support from the primary vendor or support from a partner. But, there are going to be in-house IT shops with us for a long time, for better or worse.
From the articles I've read, most of SAP's customers would be willing to put up with the high cost of implementing R/3, but the time it takes to set it up, and then customize it (an ongoing process) is way too long.
Time = cost. If it didn't require all that training, modification, planning, fixing, etc., then it wouldn't be expensive to implement.
ERP vendors are already under pressure to cut implementation costs and improve the quality of fit of their product, which implies tailoring to the individual business. If one is a SAP, one can get away with this being very expensive and still make sales. What surprises me is how high risk it is with SAP and yet even that doesn't seem to have hit them that hard.
What I see as new in this area is the pressures which the Internet creates. This includes heightened expectations about interconnections with suppliers and customers, potentially drastic scalability issues, increased motivation for distributed deployment, and legacy integration issues with new web applications, and just plain old being in a hurry, but more so because of how fast things happen in e-Space. |
