Summary
This article by Doug Colbeth, CEO of Kinaxis, a supply chain management solution vendor, highlights the problems with business software suites such as ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), SCM (Supply Chain Management), etc.
These products were designed and developed piecemeal for departmental silos and functional parts of a business. Although vendors provide integrations across these parts in solution suites, they still don't meet the real needs and cause many project failures for customers.
Analysis
The business software landscape is littered with failed customer implementation projects - some of which are spectacular failures in scale and scope. While there is plenty of culpability on all sides, the current state of business software suites is a major contributing factor.
Business software solutions such as ERP and SCM are difficult to implement even under the best circumstances. Not only is there inherent complexity in these solutions, but the current state of stitching together many disparate pieces of software and data via an integration approach exacerbates the problem.
Although customers are still led to believe they are buying a seamless software suite, in most cases it is a patchwork of different products, often from different sources and technology generations, stitched together with transaction and data integration.
But what customers were expecting and really need are solutions that operate and support their business processes across their organization and their extended inbound and outbound supply chain, business partners and extended operating environment.
The result is unnecessary additional complexity to an already complex undertaking that continues to frustrate customers, cause project failures, and regularly fails to meet business and ROI objectives.
A new generation of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA ) business solutions and Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery promises to solve many of these problems going forward.
