I'm joining a growing discussion -- a collective voice of dissent if you will -- against ERP vendors' "suites" approach. In other words, the countless modules that bolt on to the base system. Have you ever encountered an ERP sales or consulting rep and asked if your system could address a particular business issue only to hear that, in fact, you need a suite of modules to address that challenge? This is notorious in the supply chain management (SCM) space in particular.

The corporate landscape is littered with failed ERP-SCM projects. But recently, there have been signs of a change in the way the industry has traditionally approached ERP suites. Companies no longer have the IT budgets to support large implementations of complicated licensed solutions, nor the consulting engagements required to make all the pieces work, or the maintenance fees that accompany it. Taking these significant changes into account, I believe it's time to finally point out the elephant in the room: ERP suites are too complicated, too expensive and most importantly, they don't fulfill the real need. One CIO I was talking to said it best...he is having "suite fatigue."

Are You Sold on the Integration Story?

ERP suites are silo solutions. What I mean by that is historically organizations were set up with separate departments executing separate processes (demand planning, supply planning, supply chain execution) according to separate business models. As a result, the technology was developed in that way too. There is a lot of talk about breaking down the silos from an operations process perspective -- but the industry needs to see that on the technology front as well. This capability gap must be closed from a technology perspective to meet the challenges of today's supply chains.

Ultimately, the problem is complexity: the greater the scope of the ERP system, the greater the difficulty in unifying the various pieces together.

Gut check #1: Do you believe that because an ERP suite is considered one product, there will be seamless integration? For some ERP vendors, many of the modules are acquired products, so while they may all be sold under the same name, they certainly weren't originally designed and developed to easily integrate with other modules in the same suite.

I speak with CIOs of some of the world's leading companies on a regular basis, and more and more I am hearing that they're tired of adding modules and building an internal infrastructure for what is ultimately an incomplete and insufficient product.

And why do they consider these suites insufficient? Beyond the need to stitch the different modules together is the need to connect and leverage them with the outside world. ERP was originally designed for a single-site organization that operated within the confines of its four walls. And while the technology may have advanced, they have never come away from that founding architecture, which is ultimately incongruent with today's multi-enterprise organizations.

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