ERP Special technology report
orientated in the UK now.” As for the background to these developments, Latham considers that the severe economic recession of the last few years has forced manufacturers and distributors to seek new ways to make their operations ‘leaner and greener’. He added that a reduction in head count has meant an increasing reliance on accurate and timely information. “Software vendors have responded by offering easy-to-use dashboarding and customising of tools at the front end of their products,” said Latham.
Of late, Dinesh Mohan, industry principal, “
Phil Burgess, RVP, base ERP sales
from these developments, product vendors are working on innovation areas such as native support for RFID, mobility, social media integration and SaaS offerings. As regards the drivers for these
changes, Dinesh considers that feedback from customers and systems integrators is
Reporting still rules a lot of reasoning. You must be able to make informed decisions based on the intelligence in the business. This is now ‘uber-critical’ as every decision (especially in the current finance climate) must be rock solid.” – Phil Burgess, Infor.
enterprise solutions at Infosys Technologies, has been observing a growing trend of back- to-basics among ERP product vendors. “Over the years, we have seen ERP vendors enriching their products with business best practices for each industry vertical and micro- vertical,” he said. “In this process, they have frequently made the product more complex to implement and more difficult for end-users to adopt and use. In effect, this product- enriching process has resulted in ‘strait- jacketing’ the products, reducing their flexibility to adapt to specific customer business processes. So product vendors are now going back to the drawing board to see how the product can be provided more as a platform that enables customers to quickly build additional functionalities their businesses need, with minimal incremental costs.”
Thus, says Dinesh, the modern breed of ERP will see more infrastructure and plumbing (read forms, workflow capabilities, integration adapters, BI capabilities, security, etc.) coming from the package vendors while the customers will design the interiors (read configuration, process modelling, integration and reporting) with the help of their interior designer (systems integrator firms). “This whole idea represents a sea change in ERP product development, implementation and adoption,” said Dinesh, who added that, apart
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definitely shaping the emergence of the new- age ERPs. “Customers are getting tired of complex ERP implementations that are a drain on money and time,” he said, adding that, instead, they are opting for packages that are more user-friendly, flexible for modifications and can provide rapid return on investment. “This has led package vendors to innovate by not just adding feature-functionality into new version releases, but in some sense go back to the drawing board to create completely new products,” he remarked. Dinesh also maintains that the macro-economic situation worldwide over the past two years has forced product vendors to innovate their offerings; thus hastening releases of hosted versions and SaaS models to meet customer constraints on capital expenses and providing them an option for on-boarding ERP solutions in an opex-only model.
Integration And in terms of system integration, have ways of best connecting ERP with other systems developed to any notable degree over the past year or two? “Yes, most definitely,” exclaims Latham. “The integration of products like this has always been required, but the touch points between these products are now clearly defined,” he said. Latham added that there is also a general acceptance that
integrating best-of-breed solutions is the right way to go as most vendors now provide web services and APIs that provide standard integration. “Syspro DataSwitch is an excellent example,” he said. “We use this to integrate anything from warehouse management systems to CRM, to hire systems … you name it.”
Gordon Fleming, senior executive and chief marketing officer at QAD, believes that integration remains a key challenge for ERP users and vendors alike. Said Fleming: “When we look at the proliferation of point applications, many of which are in the Cloud – such as
Salesforce.com for CRM or Workday for HRIS – we see a need to integrate not only with applications in the same data centre but also with applications that are in the Cloud.” To address this, Fleming explains that QAD has both an integration layer and API set called QExtend. QAD has also developed a set of connectors to common applications, whether a specific application for common applications or generic for applications classes. “These connectors allow simple integration and simple maintenance,” said Fleming.
According to Bull, customers are looking increasingly to find end-to-end solutions. And while ERP systems have made huge bounds over the past decade to function within more and more corners of a business, Bull believes there will always be requirements to integrate with specialist software and hardware. He also maintains that connectivity in a modern global economy means that businesses need to communicate and collaborate with members of their supply chain in many facets of business activity; from product design through to product returns and recalls. Bull continued: “Modern ERP systems include web service tools that allow the connections between both internal and external systems to be easily defined and easily maintained, without having to resort to specialist technical software personnel and by using the internet as a connectivity pipeline. Cost of ownership is further improved through the use of these tools.”
March 2011
MANUFACTURING &LOGISTICS
IT 13
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