In this context, you're buying a database and an application to manage inventory. And people. But people are just inventory with different expiration dates. They really are designed to do contain EVERYTHING a business does. If there's a procedure for doing something, it needs to be in the ERP.
You mostly have two options in the status quo, as the poster said: Pay to have it customized ($10,000,000 total budget (hardware+software) for a 4,000 employee organization isn't unusual) or conform to the ERPs methodology.
I must admit, it sounds like a horrible idea to me... I strongly believe that business processes should be able to evolve, which would presumably not be the case with very expensive software (every change is complicated and expensive). The evolution should also be bottom up - the people involved in a process should be given the ability to change it, if they see that it has flaws.
It sounds to me as if ERP is just a LOT of TPS reports waiting to be written...
For big companies the continued survival is stability in their operating process. ERP plays heavily into the role of managing large amount of resources.
In this context, you're buying a database and an application to manage inventory. And people. But people are just inventory with different expiration dates. They really are designed to do contain EVERYTHING a business does. If there's a procedure for doing something, it needs to be in the ERP.
You mostly have two options in the status quo, as the poster said: Pay to have it customized ($10,000,000 total budget (hardware+software) for a 4,000 employee organization isn't unusual) or conform to the ERPs methodology.