ERP

The change of season and, of course, the weather from snow to sunshine here in the UK seems to have coincided with the production of 2 reports on ERP from 2 of the major magazines aimed at the manufacturing vertical. The Logistics Manager article[i] looked at whether ERP has kept time with the changes in supply chains. The Manufacturing and Logistics IT article[ii] was a review of ERP with particular emphasis on the views of vendors on mobility and the cloud. Having read these articles, I thought it appropriate to pull the thoughts and views contained in these articles with my own thoughts.

When I wrote the Market Guide (Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) – What does it mean to us today?) at the end of 2010, I made a key statement for prospective buyers and said, “An ERP package has to be process and event driven rather than transaction driven. It has to have fewer moving parts and allow configuration to be minimised as well as much easier to perform – not forgetting faster! We are looking for ERP packages to be modularised so that not only can we choose only the ones we are interested in, but also be able to integrate based on standards to other packages with no issues.” In reviewing the packages then I specifically looked at what the vendors were saying about mobility, the cloud and also support for social networking as a means of collaboration. So it was very pleasing to see in both articles that these 3 areas were highlighted and seen as key ones. Of course the additional key element was big data and decision support/business information systems.

To read more details, please look at my new article with the same title (ERP – where to in 2013?)

[i] Too old to work. Logistics Manager, April 2013

[ii] ERP spreads its wings. Manufacturing and Logistics IT , March 2013