
Why ERP is still so hard - monkeygrinder
http://www.computerworlduk.com/management/infrastructure/applications/in-depth/index.cfm?articleid=2493&pn=1
======
misterbwong
A big difficulty with the ERP space is that it's just _too big_. A lonely
startup might be able to build a better product, but the hard part is getting
a company to stake their future on it[1]. Companies shopping for ERPs value
stability of the company as much as quality of the product. The last thing a
company wants is to install an ERP from a company that may go out of business
in 5-10yrs.

It was said in the article, but I will reiterate: enterprise software
companies are mostly made up of salesmen-not software engineers. The majority
of their profit margin is from after-sale products such as warranties and
consulting. These products have very little to do with the quality of the
software product itself. In fact, it might even pay for the software to be
buggy since a) more bugs = more consulting = more renewed warranties b) multi-
year software contracts are not unheard of and c) ERP switches are extremely
costly so companies stick with them for years, if not decades.

As a programmer, I wish that a quality ERP product could stand on its own, but
sales and (company) size are key if you want to compete with SAP/ORACLE/MS. At
the very least companies will ask for previous customer references, run a D&B
on your company, and ask for a proof of concept install. This is a space so
ripe with opportunity it hurts but for a small startup to succeed, it will
need to pick off pieces of the giants before competing with the entire
product.

[1] Yes, ERP software and implementation is that big of a deal. There are old
stories floating around of botched ERP implementations costing companies
millions of dollars and, eventually, sinking them due to the loss of business
(even after reverting to pen/paper accounting).

~~~
yannis
You have some valid points, but there is another side to the equation. ERP is
not only necessary in big organizations, but also in smaller ones. One could
start serving the middle market. There are thousands of smaller companies that
would kill to have ERP systems installed, but cannot afford them.

There is tremendous scope for start-ups here and the market can be penetrated.
One needs to think out of the box and study the problem. Most organizations
see the need for ERP, when their business expands or when it is running
through problems. By that time, their processes are not well defined and that
'confusion' in turn is passed in a sort of convoluted way into the software.
At this stage most of them are in need of a good Business Consultant rather
than software!

Most Businesses are still run in a 'fuzzy' way. ERP systems impose rigidity
and inflexibility. The new generation software would free business from these
constraints.

\- They would be mostly web based. They will be made of 'websites'that can
talk to each other. No need for EDI systems. RSS feeds for materials anyone?

\- They would be evolutionary in nature as their proliferation will attract
further development and cross-fertilization of good features.

\- They would cost 1/100th of what existing systems sell for.

I think there is a great business opportunity here.

~~~
edw519
_I think there is a great business opportunity here._

Please put your email address in your profile so that we can discuss that
opportunity.

------
cromulent
I've done a lot of these ERP implementations and the first thing the project
heads say is: we aren't going to change the software, we are going to change
our business processes.

The company has just paid a lot of money for the software, which was chosen
through an evaluation process where the vendors showed that they could support
the existing business processes, which made up the RFP. They chose one vendor
and tied them up in a contract to say that the software would meet the RFP.

Then the project starts, and the company notices that the software doesn't
really meet the RFP, so they get the vendor/consultancy to customize it.
Otherwise they wouldn't be getting their contract's worth, you know. The
earlier claims of not changing the software get thrown out the window. Plus
you have the business people who have been seconded to the project, they don't
want to tell their colleagues they are delivering a clunkier system than the
old one so they fight for the customizations. Fair enough.

IMO, any software that is absolutely critical to your company's special way of
doing business (i.e. your competitive advantage) you shouldn't customize an
ERP product to do it - you should build it yourself. Anything that is generic
and not a point of difference between you and your competitors, you should
keep as standard as possible. The bit where they join up, make sure you
abstract it properly.

As soon as you create barriers for upgrading your ERP, you lose the value of
the maintenance (which is the ERP vendor's developers working hard to add new
platform and application features, instead of your guys).

------
jhancock
I know an ERP company in China that is doing extremely well. Companies like
SAP could not get their head around the idea that China was China and their
suppliers and those being supplied to like to do their accounting
different/opaque. They do not want a single db that contains all their supply
and price data. This alone allowed a small startup to take on major customers
in China. They built a system that lets each side track their aspects of the
supply chain (and did not assume everyone needed to access a shared system)
and hide just about everything else.

I guess this shows there is not one model to rule them all.

~~~
arihelgason
What's the company?

~~~
jhancock
<http://www.powere2e.com>

------
drubio
"Why ERP is still so hard" \- An ERP doesn't adapt to an organization, an
organization has to adapt to an ERP - Old 'joke' or reality of why its hard

~~~
joshwa
Or as the article says, if you adapt an ERP to an organization via
customization (which is unavoidable since you're dealing with very powerful
pyramid heads with veto power over process changes), you'll pay up the nose to
do it, in initial dollars, maintenance/upgrades, and pain/bugs, and the
organizational structure/processes you've paid to have enshrined in code shift
more rapidly than your IT organization can keep up with.

------
wglb
Good through article. It is clear that implementing such wide-scale enterprise
systems is not overwhelmingly technical problem, it is more of a cultural
problem.

An item for consideration is whether part of this customization disaster is
driven by a misguided belief in software reuse.

------
Tichy
What is ERP - Enterprise "Something" Process?

~~~
edw519
You may have brought up ERP's biggest problem of all: mortals don't understand
it.

Enterprise Resource Planning

~~~
joshwa
Even the fully qualified name is a bit meaningless and needs some unpacking.

ERP is best described as a massive unified software product that runs a huge
portion of a business's operations, usually including two or more of the
following areas:

    
    
      - HR
      - Accounting (Receivables/Payables)
      - CRM
      - Business Intelligence / Reporting
      - Business Process Management (e.g. form processing/approvals 
        across front- and back-office functions)
    

(not that edw519 needs it explained-- more for the original parent)

~~~
gaius
The roots of ERP are in logistics and bills-of-materials (BOM). Say you wanted
to build... A space shuttle. The BOM is a hierarchical database that breaks it
down into major components, then each of their components, and so on all the
way down to individual nuts and bolts. These all need to be assembled in a
particular order, they come from different vendors, they have different lead
times, and so on. Classic ERP is about saying, OK, if we want to fit the wings
on this date, we will need to have ordered the bolts by that date from this
supplier, or if the wndscreen is a day late, how will that affect the rest of
the work on the cockpit. Think of it as a huge Makefile.

All that crap about HR and payroll and so on was bolted on afterwards.

~~~
joshwa
oops, forgot supply chain. That said, I'd venture that a majority of "ERP"
installations these days are more about all the other crap, and the folks who
need supply chain management get a best-of-breed for that 'silo'.

Which then they have customized to integrate with their ERP. :-P

------
r00k
This site would make a great case-study of pagination gone wrong.

1\. No "next page" link. You have to determine which page you're on and then
click the next one, a process made difficult by

2\. A barely-apparent current-page indicator. Two offenses you _might_ be able
to forgive if it weren't for the

3\. Lack of a printer-friendly/all-on-one-page option.

Why is _pagination_ still so hard?

~~~
edw519
This site makes a great case-study of _many things_ gone wrong.

I inadvertently started a second debate by posting the content of the article
here. I felt I had little choice. I'd rather skip the whole thing than send
someone to that site. But I wanted to discuss the content, which was
excellent.

If it wasn't for that excellent content, I would have never struggled with
this horrendous site. It was as if they are daring you to finish the article.
Some of the other horrors:

    
    
      - embedded video ads (incredibly distracting)
      - way too many words of the article were underlined links
      - many other underlined links that were *not* content and hard to differentiate
      - tool tips everywhere, that were a huge problem because
      - you need to mouse so much just to scroll the content
      - less than 10% of screen real estate used for content, which
      - brings up a new acronym, WTFA *Where's* the fucking article?

~~~
monkeygrinder
There aren't any tooltips on this site. And there is a Next Page link on the
bottom of every page. The underlined links take you mainly to other articles
on the site, which is pretty standard practice for news websites. Take another
look.

Yes the site has a lot of issues. It's a terribly design - long and skinny, so
you have to scroll to read it.

But the article is good and by ripping off the content and posting here, you
impact the traffic to the site and the quality of the site too. The less
traffic, the more the publisher has to rely on advertising, the less chance of
their being enough budget for a redesign. And, the more likely fall guy will
be the writer that could face losing their job as a result of cutbacks.

I am generally a fan of YCombinator and the community so I was surprised and
disappointed to see this flagrant disregard for IP.

~~~
jpwagner
I think this logic is fundamentally flawed.

If you don't present your ideas well, they will be missed. If your content is
wrapped up in junk, your audience will move to another content provider.

This is the law of the land. Any tiptoeing just delays progress.

As my friend's grandpa used to say: "shit + ice cream = shit"

------
fnid
The problem with ERP software is that it is so hard. It isn't flexible, it
can't be easily adapted to the organization. Really, it's just a bunch of code
that was written to solve one company's problems and then sold to a lot of
other companies. The companies whittle down the software to the lowest common
denominator and then sell it as the solution to every company's problems, but
really it causes a lot of problems.

With the cost of software today, and the advanced platforms out there, agile
methods, ERP systems, or not even an ERP system, but rather, the software a
company needs to run the business can be built from scratch in less time and
for less money than it costs to implement an ERP package from one of the big
names.

------
edw519
Excellent article on a horrible website.

It explains the problem about as well as any "ERP sucks" article I've read in
years. It doesn't suggest any solutions, leaving it as one of the the most
fertile opportunities for a B2B startup.

The website doesn't have a "Single Page" or "Print" option, so I'll spare the
rest of you the torture I endured and reprint the whole thing right here.
Definitely worth the read:

Why ERP is still so hard

ERP failures are commonplace, IT managers still struggle with upgrades and
projects only have a seven percent chance of being completed on time. Why is
ERP pain by numbers?

By Thomas Wailgum

Steve Berg knows what intense pain feels like: The man has been Tasered, in
fact-not because he ran afoul of the law, but as VP of IT at Taser
International he's partaken in a corporate rite of passage. "It's the worst
five seconds of your life," he says. "You cannot move."

Like other IT execs, he also knows pain and suffering as it relates to ERP -
from vendor selection and licensing negotiations, to implementation and change
management, followed by upgrades and integration.

And as he and many other IT leaders have come to know, ERP-induced pain can
last much, much longer than a mere five seconds.

Taser's attempt to wrap an ERP package around its corporate processes sounds
eerily similar to most companies' experiences. The "before" picture: A mélange
of disparate systems that didn't talk to each other and a good deal of "paper
pushing" between the systems, Berg says.

"When you don't have a centrally managed technology environment," he says,
"things can get overly complicated very quickly."

Executives had sought a unified system so that Taser "could do a complete
workflow throughout the company without having to run redundant systems that
don't communicate," he says. That was 2004.

Microsoft's Dynamics AX was eventually selected.

And again, like many companies, Taser decided to customise its chosen ERP
package to meet the business processes that it already followed. "So rather
than take an ERP system-which supposedly out-of-the-box has, say, an accounts
receivable [process], with best practices that are inherent to the system, we
decided...to modify AX to work like this other application because users were
comfortable with it," he says, "and they didn't want to change."

But a funny thing happened on the next upgrade: Naturally, all of those
customisations done to the initial AX rollout-which were "plentiful," Berg
says-were going to have to be upgraded in 2009. Taser decided it didn't want
to go down that road again. This time, Taser ERP users would change,
demonstrating that vendor-purported "flexibility" has been both ERP's blessing
and its curse.

"We're going to get rid of these customisations and go back to what the
[Microsoft] AX best practices and recommendations out of the box," Berg says.
"If we're going to be able to grow the company-we're at $100 million now and
if we want to be a half-billion company in four years' time-the current
processes are not allowing us to get to that point."

The upgrade took longer than expected: Testing and training issues, as well as
certain customisations that were unavoidable, complicated progress along the
way, Berg reports.

Executive sponsorship and interest never wavered, though. "It seemed like all
eyes were on this upgrade and all eyes were on IT to make sure nothing could
go wrong," he says. "Everybody understood the long-term benefits, but there
will always be some teething pain at the beginning. We went live in May [2009]
and now we're in July, and things are running smoothly. But May and June were
pretty tough."

Taser's tale probably seems commonplace to IT vets. But the fact that Taser's
story is so common, so expected, so universal, after nearly 40 years of all
things ERP, makes it all the more significant.

ERP Pain, By the Numbers

The preponderance of corporate pain lurking throughout the lifespan of an ERP
suite is unequivocal. To wit: ERP projects have only a 7 percent chance of
coming in on time, most certainly will cost more than estimated, and very
likely will deliver very unsatisfying results.

In addition, today's enterprise has a little better than a 50 percent chance
that users will want to and actually use the application. Poor application
design just adds to the turmoil. In sum, "ERP success" has become a very
subjective metric.

As for costs, an ERP system from a Tier I provider isn't cheap: Total cost for
an average SAP install runs nearly $17 million, Oracle at $12.6 million and
Microsoft is relative bargain at $2.6 million. (Tier II ERP providers average
in at $3.5 million.)

For all of that investment, today's enterprises surely must be basking in the
glow of their fully modernised ERP backbones? Hardly. A Forrester Research
survey of more than 2,200 IT executives and technology decision-makers in
North America and Europe found that modernising key legacy applications is the
top software initiative for businesses in 2009.

Making matters worse is that CEOs and CFOs are still trying to wrap their
heads around the financial aspects of ERP, a most unusual piece of the
corporate pie: the licensing, implementation, customisation, annual
maintenance and upgrade costs. (More on that later.)

Not surprisingly, ERP has consistently remained among the top IT spending
priorities in large corporations, growing at the rate of 6.9 percent each year
and set to top the $50 billion mark globally in 2012, according to Forrester
Research data.

Summing it up in an understated yet perfect way is Ray Wang, a former
Forrester analyst and now a partner for enterprise strategy at Altimeter
Group: "Business software is just not easy."

But, as far too many people have lamented over the years: Why does it still
have to be?

Dawn of New Computing Era

To understand where we are today, it's critical to recall ERP's ascendency. In
brief: Systems Applications and Products in Data Processing (SAP) forged the
market in 1972. Businesses and their leaders in the 1980s and '90s bought into
SAP's vision of a computerised mechanism to connect finance, operations,
supply chain, HR and sales information.

"You were going to be able to be more efficient, effective and also lower your
overall costs-that's pretty much what everybody was aiming for," says Manjit
Singh, CIO of Chiquita Brands International. The market boomed. Other software
vendors joined the mix. Oracle came along and bought up many ERP players,
though SAP remained king.

Expectations for IT's omnipotence soared in the mid- to late 1990s. Credit
flowed like the Mighty Mississippi, and companies thought nothing of spending
millions on ERP installs-some of which were integrated, most of which were
siloed.

As Y2K approached, fears of worldwide catastrophe created a panicked IT group
desperate to replace all non-compliant systems. Companies were at the mercy of
their ERP vendors and consultants-and both of those parties made a killing.

"There was a mass rush to implement these things, and therefore consultants
were expensive and software wasn't discounted that much," recalls Vinnie
Mirchandani, a former Gartner analyst and founder of Deal Architect, which
consults with companies purchasing software. Companies bought suites of ERP
apps-lock, stock and barrel. "This was pretty bad," Mirchandani says. "It was
an almost irrational buying pattern."

The turn of the millennium ultimately proved two things: 1. Y2K was a non-
event because IT did its job; and 2. Companies were now locked in to their ERP
providers-not with a competitive advantage but with a competitive similarity-
for the foreseeable future.

But now, businesses change at a pace at which ERP systems have trouble. "If
business was still the way it was in 19-whatever, yeah, [ERP] wouldn't be a
big deal," observes Wang. A CFO Research Services study of 157 senior finance
executives succinctly addresses the situation:

"Companies grow and change, acquiring new business lines and divesting
themselves of others. They open new facilities or consolidate operations, add
partners or outsource functions, centralise or decentralise the back office.
Reporting requirements increase as regulatory bodies heighten oversight and as
companies expand across borders.... In short, businesses change, and as they
do, so do management's information needs."

Of course, ERP applications can change. But it'll cost you. In customizations.
In change and process management. In upgrades. A typical company, notes the
CFO study, will spend an average of $1.2 million each year to maintain, modify
and update its ERP system. ERP Costs Still Tough to Understand

The fine print and financial legalese contained within ERP application
contracts can be alternately mind-numbing and head-scratching for the
uninitiated.

"Of all the assets that an enterprise acquires, enterprise software brings
with it the most unusual, onerous and restrictive set of constraints," writes
Wang in a June 2009 Forrester report on software licensing. "In most cases,
licensees may not resell, reuse or share their license. Licensees often
encounter numerous grievances across the software ownership life cycle from
selection to implementation, utilization, maintenance and retirement."

Oracle, for instance, will heavily discount license pricing upfront but will,
rest assured, make that up on the backend - from its 22 percent maintenance
and support fees, on which it does not negotiate.

Oracle President Safra Catz told analysts on a conference call that
maintenance is "very profitable part of our business, and as the number gets
bigger and bigger it's really impossible for us to actually spend our way
through it, and so in general that's the sort of overriding thing that guides
our margins."

Closing its most recent fiscal year, Oracle achieved nearly 90 percent profit
margins.

Chiquita Brands' Singh understands and explains ERP this way when it comes to
$1 million-plus purchases: "Your management team needs to understand that $1
million is not really $1 million. There are significantly higher costs as you
look at the average lifespan of the purchase as well as resource
implications," he says.

"The CFO and CEO need to know that because they're going to see IT costs go up
as a result. And you don't want them constantly asking the question: Why are
year-over-year costs going up?"

That's all assuming ERP implementations are reasonably successful. Not
surprisingly, with all the risks and all the multimillion-dollar projects, ERP
implementations, when they do fail, can be spectacular events.

ERP, it seems, in one technology area in which a dose of Moore's Law does not
apply. "It's sickening how ERP continues to be very expensive and very risky,"
says Mirchandani.

"There is no reason why it should be. The software should be heavily
discounted to start with. The maintenance [plans] should have several
different options, offered both by the vendor and third parties. And the
implementations should be more brain-dead implementations."

ERP and CIOs: Complicit or Complacent?

The Chief Information Officer's slow rise to prominence inside enterprises is
undeniably intertwined with ERP's climb. A significant part of tech leaders'
career trajectory - from data processing to MIS to IS to IT - is the
manifestation of ERP's impact on the wholesale digitisation of the
innerworkings and processes of businesses, governments and nonprofit
organisations.

In other words, there would likely have been no Chief of IT in the 1990s if
there was no ERP - just an IS manager responsible for e-mail.

In that vein, some ERP analysts lay partial blame for ERP's spiraling costs at
the feet of CIOs, who have aided and abetted vendors' addiction to maintenance
fees, for instance. "I don't blame the vendors: They're doing what the market
is telling them to do," says Wang.

"And they're doing what inherently the customers are telling them to do, and
it's got them to this point. The problem is that just about everyone's been
kicking the can a little farther, and I don't think we can kick it anything
farther than now."

Maintenance and support fees, in particular, have drawn the ire of businesses
scrutinizing balance sheets and trudging to make it through the 2008
recession. SAP's redesigned Enterprise Support plan would have increased its
maintenance fees, but it wisely negotiated a détente with its global user
groups who were up in arms over the proposed fee increases.

CIOs, too, can play a starring role in limiting costly customizations, by
educating and imploring business managers and users why customisation, in the
long run, is often not the better route. But that task is never easy. Singh
contends that every company thinks its processes and products are so different
that customization is absolutely necessary. "While in reality, there is no
good, solid rationale behind that in the vast majority of cases," he says.

But the reality CIOs face when synching business processes with those in ERP
applications leads to "internal arguments over how we are going to define
something simple as a chart of accounts," Singh says. (A chart of accounts
provides an overall view of items such as assets, liabilities and expenses.)

Each business organisation and unit will have a different view. "So all of the
sudden, what looked like a very simple concept has exploded in complexity," he
says, "and now you're into trying to get some very powerful people aligned
behind one vision. In some cases, you can; in some, you can't."

All of this can add up to thousands of contentious processes when a company is
implementing an ERP suite. "That's something [business managers] discount, and
that's something the vendors don't talk about," says Singh, who says the CIO
job can be more like a Chief Negotiator role.

"Vendors will say: "We have an out-of-the-box solution.' And they do. As long
as you're willing to take what they're selling, it'll work. But as you try to
deploy it, business leaders will say: 'We can't do it that way,' or 'That
won't work for me.' And that out-of-the-box solution suddenly becomes heavily
customised."

The era of mass customisation has had a contradictory effect on how packaged
software was supposed to positively alter business software. According to
Wang, "Packaged software was supposed to be: Let's all get together, we'll
share requirements and what's going to happen is that we're going to have this
wonderful mix of software best practices from all these different areas and
companies."

In turn, businesses would have to spend far less on keeping IT workers in-
house to maintain the applications; and thoroughly enriched vendors would use
their R&D capabilities to deliver the best of the best. In this utopia,
customizations would negligible.

"It didn't happen that way," Wang says. "And that's why we're where we are."

Does ERP Still Matter?

Yes. ERP still matters. Very much so. CIO magazine survey data published in
2008 showed that IT leaders and their companies were completely married to and
dependent upon their ERP suites.

More than 85 percent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that their ERP
systems were essential to the core of their businesses, and that they "could
not live without them." Interestingly, just 4 percent of IT leaders said their
ERP system offered their companies competitive differentiation or advantage.

As the CIO profession has grown up, so too has the CIO's ability to manage all
that comes along with ERP. Jeffrey Keisling, CIO of pharmaceutical-maker
Wyeth, is presiding over a massive, multiyear ERP makeover, moving from
multiple, global instances of J.D. Edwards to a single-instance SAP ERP suite.

"There's always a lot written about examples of drastic overruns or miscues or
re-dos around ERP," Keisling says. "But generally, the people I know in large
enterprises have been much more effective in understanding the levers to pull
to mitigate risk in these large programs."

Most notable among those levers: the ERP implementation has to be a priority
for the company - from CEO to users, Keisling says. "If this is something one
person is trying to push up the hill or one division or function is trying to
push up, we would reject that," he says. "Without that level of understanding,
sponsorship and expectation of value, I wouldn't take the bait."

ERP has its place, too. "The measurement stick for me and my team is not how
well we did SAP," he says. "The measurement is: Did we improve the company's
performance or our ability to get products to patients? [Our SAP rollout]
doesn't dwarf the need for innovation for new products and for working with
patients to get those products in their hands."

On the vendor side, the rise of the enterprise software supervendor (dubbed
"MISO" by many) has been an unyielding force: Microsoft, IBM, SAP and Oracle
have and continue to centralize their positions as software juggernauts.

"The traditional boundaries between integrated ERP and best-of-breed vendors
have disappeared," notes a recent Forrester report.

"Over the past few years, leading vendors have significantly extended their
portfolio via acquisitions and in-house developments to offer both: integrated
packages for core enterprise processes and best-in-class horizontal solutions
for procurement and sourcing, supply chain management, CRM, and other cross-
industry application software," BI being most notable.

According to Mirchandani, consolidation might actually backfire for the
supervendors: Whereas companies might have dozens and dozens of different IT
spends with various vendors (which are easier to overlook, since there is not
a combined view of the total dollars), a unified Oracle spend could be
detrimental to Oracle's revenue streams.

"If anything, Oracle, by consolidating this much, has made itself a target,
because now you can have Oracle-wide strategy," he says. "Previously,
companies didn't worry too much about their PeopleSoft, JDE, Hyperion [spends,
because they were separate]. Now they've got a big bull's eye on their back."

Even so, Mirchandani says, vendors probably aren't losing sleep over their
customers walking away any time soon. "The vendors are counting on inertia,"
he says.

So, are CIOs and their companies really, for lack of a better word, stuck with
ERP? AMR Research Chief Research Officer Bruce Richardson was quoted as
saying, "You do ERP once, concrete it over and hope you never have to dig it
up." Without question, ERP has been a career-enhancing or career-limiting
endeavor for many CIOs. Chiquita Brands' Singh terms the ERP vendor selection
process as choosing "the lesser or two evils."

Altimeter Group's Wang believes CIOs have figured out the rules of "the ERP
game." But the business side is still confused.

"The business sees the slick demos and possibilities, and then keeps forking
over the money for this, and they don't understand why they are still paying
all this money," Wang says. "Why is it so hard to get a simple report? Why is
it so hard to add a new product or build a new product line? Why is it so hard
to get consolidated financial information? Isn't that the whole point of ERP?"

~~~
eru
Thanks. Though I wonder how this copying squares with fair use laws.

~~~
apowell
It doesn't, as far as I know. I don't like multi-page no-print articles
either, but that isn't a license to copy it in full.

<http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html>

I think that a full reprint here is clearly against the spirit of #3 and #4 --
this is the entire piece and it stands alone (#3), and by reprinting it here
the market (advertising revenue on the original site) is affected (#4).

Edit: Since this is a UK publication, this is probably the fair use doctrine
that applies (similar in principle to fair use in the US):
<http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p09_fair_use>

~~~
dreemteem
Agreed. Despite the poor architecture of the site, if you value the article
itself, visit the original source. If you do not, the site receives less
notice, less advertising revenue, and less funding. QED, less interesting
articles for you to consume.

------
netsp
_The preponderance of corporate pain lurking throughout the lifespan of an ERP
suite is unequivocal. To wit: ERP projects have only a 7 percent chance of
coming in on time, most certainly will cost more than estimated, and very
likely will deliver very unsatisfying results.

In addition, today's enterprise has a little better than a 50 percent chance
that users will want to and actually use the application. Poor application
design just adds to the turmoil. In sum, "ERP success" has become a very
subjective metric._

There must be some sort of perverse incentive working here. 7 percent?! _How
much will it cots?_ How much do I need to quote to close this deal? _How long
will it take?_ How long do I need to quote to close this deal?

------
alexmacgregor
I can understand the Oracle-Sun acquisition, and Ellison's view of a
integrated hardware and software solution. (Guess IBM wish they had thought
about that with Windows and OS's.)

ERP has always interested me. Vendor/customer relationships are often complex
however the software side shouldn't really be the case - if anything, software
should be the easy part.

Anyone starting up in the space obviously can't (successfully) build an
integrated solution. You would have to develop something better than current
SAP/Oracle/SAAS solutions for one or two of the operating units described by
joshwa.

------
onreact-com
"Taser International" "pain and suffering"? Sorry, but this article sounds
like satire.

