Organisations have invested significant time, people, money and technology over the years in developing their ERP and enterprise IT solutions – and in the current financial climate, they are now looking to consolidate and maximise the returns from this expenditure.
Not all companies have prospered equally from their investment and some get considerably more value from their ERP systems than others.
There can be a number of reasons for the difficulties being encountered: it could be lack of functionality in the software, system performance problems, or ERP processes that fail to adequately match the business processes.
Again, systems may not have been optimally set up, with incorrect configuration settings and other issues due to the original implementation. In addition, not all the functionality in the software may have been activated, therefore reducing its effectiveness.
On the other hand, the system may be performing correctly but the company may not have established or maintained the right training or change management procedures to ensure the correct discipline and effective business operation of the system. Any combination of these problems can severely impact the success of an enterprise solution.
Yet from this year’s Evaluation Centre survey, it is evident that ERP systems still play a significant role in providing enterprise application solutions.