If ‘time travel’ was a reality, what would you like
to do going back 20 years in time?
I am not hinting at your personal choices, but rather discussing with you a serious issue that professionals and organizations have faced and continue to face.
Even with the latest technology and processes in place, senior leaders across industry and geography are still grappling to get that magical formula (if one exists!) to get ‘One Version of Truth’!
One Version of Truth could be about your revenue, profitability, attrition, market share, top 20 customers, critical vendors, top 10 portfolios, top 5 programs, top 5 projects, etc.
We were supposed to be smarter with every passing year as we now had better technology and process maturity.
Where did organizations lose the plot?
Organizations implemented the legacy applications without due consideration for scaling up for future growth. Material Requirement Planning or MRP set the ball rolling with enterprises trying to get a handle on how materials (Bill of Material or BOM) were planned to support manufacturing. With the success of MRP, organizations graduated to MRP2, which focused on Manufacturing Resources Planning.
With a decent level of accomplishment in MRP and MRP2, technology vendors wanted to take it to the organization level and thus Enterprise Resource Planning or ERP was born. For all that was not right in the corporate world, the one-stop solution was declared as ERP!
What went wrong with early ERP Implementations?
ERPs tried to force organizations and users to change the way they did their day-to-day work, processes, and thereby businesses.
We all know that the inherent characteristic of humans is to look for stability and resist change as much as possible. This human tendency against change was a critical reason for ERP implementations to fail during the initial phase. Additionally, technology vendors were to a large extent rigid about their process definition.
While some organizations succeeded to influence these process changes, they came at a significant cost – human resources resistance, conflicts, dissatisfaction, demotivation and finally attrition!
What did these failed ERP Implementations do to other organizations?
Organizations planning to implement ERPs learned a hard lesson and became circumspect about the benefits of an ERP rollout. They took a more cautious route to implement ERP solutions by keeping some of their critical legacy systems intact and outside the ambit of ERP systems.
Companies grew along with their business growth and at this point, realization dawned that multiple systems were throwing out different sets of data leading to questionable data integrity. The presence of various standalone systems became the organization’s, Achilles Heel.
Did technology not keep pace with time?
Of course, technology became better and faster with time. Meanwhile, organizations that had implemented ERP also grew rapidly along with the external forces of business. The above scenario gave rise to Technology Integrators who saw an opportunity to get multiple systems to talk with one another and thereby, trying to solve this puzzle of data integrity.
Where are we today in our journey?
We still don’t have “One System” to manage the entire business. Most organizations rely on multiple systems. These myriad applications could be any combination of ERP, CRM, Human Resources, Cloud, Accounting and Mobile Applications.
With multiple systems come the overheads of administration, support, upgrades, compatibility, cost and last but not the least – RISK of losing customers and business itself!
Given this kind of a scenario, the most reasonable choice would be to deploy a solution that ensures “Single Source of Data Entry” and the Integrated Solution connects this information to all other existing systems. We believe that this is the workable solution for now!
Does the current market offer something that organizations could try – easy to deploy, customize, maintain and is value for money, then organizations must consider Kytes PSA®, a flagship offering from Kytes.
