Why ERP Is Still So Hard

September 9, 2009 from ComputerWorld – “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 customize 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…"

180 View – You can imagine the rest. What’s wrong with this picture? It should jump off the page that it should be unacceptable to customize a system to work like their old application ‘because users were comfortable with it.” There is no business case for this customization. The entire project also smacks of being run by IT because the main problem discussed is lack of a “centrally managed technology environment.” ERP is not hard because of ERP but because of who is implementing it.