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To: Crazy Canuck who wrote (1007)	4/10/2000 10:24:00 AM
From: Crazy Canuck	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1252

Here is an interesting article that supports Mr. Baan's view of where the industry is headed. Crazy Canuck __________________________________________________________ The death of traditional ERP? Friday, 7th April 2000 The traditional ERP model is dead and collaborative commerce (c-commerce) is emerging to take its place. This is the message Nigel Rayner, Gartner's Research Director, is reported to have given at a symposium in Italy. He went on to predict that Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Supply Chain Management (SCM) will become as important as ERP in the electronic economy by 2004. In many ways, Rayner is stating the obvious. All of the major ERP vendors cottoned onto the shift from an internal to an external focus a long time ago. Over the last couple of years, the top 5 players have been busily partnering or engineering their way towards solutions that allow businesses to collaborate more effectively. The interesting thing is that some vendors have recently stopped using the term ERP, or are at least have been downplaying it. Part of this is undoubtedly due to the "old economy" image the term conjures up. But these vendors do make a very good point. The boundaries between ERP, CRM and SCM are not easy to define so this arbitrary functional view of the world is often not helpful. Consider CRM, for instance. It you defined the objective as being to win and retain the right kind of customers, you end up considering a cycle which includes traditional ERP and SCM functions as well as the obvious "front office" activity. The cycle begins with the attraction of the customer through sales and marketing. This hopefully leads to the next step of transacting with them through some kind of order management process. Orders then need to be fulfilled, which can only happen reliably if manufacturing and logistics are effectively managed (both in house and within the supply chain). Finally, the customer needs to be serviced, which can involve anything from field installations through to enquiry and complaint management. All of these steps have to be executed well. If they are, the customer will go around the cycle again and you have succeeded. If the cycle breaks anywhere, the customer will go to your competitor. There are a few of things to bear in mind about the customer lifecycle. Any step can involve any channel of communication - the Web, the call centre, field operatives and so on. Furthermore, customers may not be consistent in the channels they use. They might, for example, order through the Web site then chase that order through the call centre. The call centre operator then needs everything at their fingertips, including order details, fulfilment status, and billing information. Integration is therefore the name of the game and whether you buy the "one stop shop" story from Oracle or SAP, or the EAI story from the middleware vendors, you have to pay attention to it. Going back to Gartner's predictions, it is not the relative importance of CRM vs. ERP vs. SCM that is the key question. Clearly each of these areas is critical, however they are defined. The important consideration is how everything works together. Companies need to start thinking in terms of business processes and realising that these cross the traditional application boundaries as well as the boundaries between companies. In the electronic world, the degree of flexibility and efficiency of processes relating to the customer lifecycle, product development, and so on, will be a big determinant in who loses and who wins. Time to market, cost of product and responsiveness will be a function of how well the whole business has been e-enabled rather than any particular part in isolation. In this context, the traditional introspective mind-set of ERP is not relevant. Traditional ERP functionality, however, is still critical. www.erpsupersite.com