--- Bill Barr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> The solution is remote integration that integrates 50 > disparate ERPs in each distributor site. ESB is best > way to go as of today. > > No, there's a much easier way. Discover which of those 50 share the > same > vendor and if there are 2 or more, call up each vendor and have them > come do the integration/consolidation of their own systems, free of > charge. Then, pit the vendors against each other for the best and > lowest-cost migration path to one ERP system; the efficiency and > effectiveness of their first-round consolidation will weigh heavily > when > selecting the final, sole ERP vendor. Astute vendor management is a > better solution than technology. > Again , a bit late on the reply, but... I was meeting with a set of (Canada) government customers on this very topic last week. Considering that "single ERP" rip & replace can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars of capital expenditure, this can be pretty wasteful too, and I'm finding there's less tolerance for this kind of spending that isn't necessarily aligned to a broader alignment of processes. Certainly, consolidation of duplicate systems often makes sense, but when one has several modules from several vendors, end-to-end processes tend to vary considerably. And there's the local , situational variations that sometimes require preservation and complicate the customization effort. Thus there's a good argument for keeping the ERP fairly vanilla when its a commoditised process and using surrounding infrastructure (whether a bus, BPM, WSM, or portal etc) to plug the end-to-end gaps. That seems to be the approach that even the Oracle & SAP's are taking with their own stacks, though they're taking forever to get there. Haivng said that, the "vendor management" vs. the "enteprise of business service capabilities" approach to acquisition seems to be a a particularly fierce battleground of late. Cheers Stu ____________________________________________________________________________________ 8:00? 8:25? 8:40? Find a flick in no time with the Yahoo! Search movie showtime shortcut. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/shortcuts/#news
