It's hot outside on a nice summer day along an oceanfront boardwalk, and you want some ice cream. Before you are two shops-on the left a convenience store stocked with very inexpensive, packaged ice cream confections, and on the right one of those pricey marble-slab places that practically makes the ice cream from scratch in a flurried and extravagant public production of custom "ice cream building". Seemingly, your choices are quite limited to either the one-flavor-fits-all blandness of cheap prepackaged ice cream products that fall short of your taste needs, and the other that, while bells-and-whistles impressive, is more cost than your budget allows and far too much product than you can possibly ever consume.
Then, you spot just a little bit farther down what is, do doubt, your solution to this conundrum of ice cream extremes. It is a traditional shoppe-you know, the one with 31 flavors all lined up neatly in round five gallon barrels in the cooler, where the clerk will scoop them by hand according to your order. Sure, the ice cream is already there and packaged, but it is the idea and economy of flavor customization at a prepackaged cost that is most appealing to you. Here, you can choose from the flavors that best fit your taste needs. Still more, you can even select the platform for your various taste modules--be it cone or dish-and as much or as little will satisfy your desire. Product flexibility means that if one scoop or flavor is not enough you can always go back and ask for more.
When looking for the right ERP solution for a small to medium sized company, the various considerations you must take into account are much like those of looking for the right ice cream. Your needs, budget, and the flexibility of the product are major factors in finding the ERP software that proves to be a best fit. To this end, when shopping for an ERP solution you should ask yourself a couple of questions.
First, are you truly serious about dedicating the time and effort it takes to fully implement ERP software? That is to say, has your company made a firm decision that it's willing to change the way it does business in order to take full advantage of ERP software? It is a fact that without a complete buy-in of personnel, no ERP solution can reach its maximum potential in providing efficiency through operations-wide continuous improvement. Many ERP applications fail simply due to intra-organizational politics in the form of resistance to change. One way to overcome resistance on the shop floor and to facilitate positive employee participation, is to position the ERP implementation as a functional enhancement of your existing competitive advantages.
Second, how much change do you expect in your operation as you grow in time? In choosing the right ERP software solution, you must take into account the need for change within the system. Completely custom ERP/MRP software builds are often inflexible behemoths where the module changes necessary to accommodate emerging ERP needs are costly and time consuming undertakings. In other words, the more customized your software is initially, the more difficult it will be to mold it to your business evolution later. Ensure that when you do choose an ERP software solution it is one that will grow along with you-that changes to your "package" can be made quickly and for minimal cost.
Of course, these are but two of the many factors to consider when choosing the right ERP solution for your company. Others might include service reputation, depth of R&D, consistent version updating, and other variables. Still, understanding the importance of implementation roll-out as a notion of change and software flexibility of a function of growth are two major approaches to employ in your search. ERP software purchase success will come in having an awareness of what type of growth your company can expect and where those growth areas will be, as well as knowing how to best develop a complete employee buy-in to the change. When these factors are taken into consideration, the maximum ROI of ERP investment is achieved.
http://globalshopsolutions.com/
Dusty Alexander is the President of Global Shop Solutions. Global Shop Solutions is the largest privately held ERP software company in the United States.
Copyright 2007 - Global Shop Solutions. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Reprint Rights: You may reprint this article as long as you leave all of the links active, do not edit the article in any way, and give the author name credit.
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By Dusty Alexander
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