The ERP landscape is changing rapidly and, if you are a company that hasn’t yet implemented an ERP system, or are planning to replace one soon, change is all to your advantage. Lots of competition fuels innovation and choice for the buyer. If you are an integration partner, software customizer or old-line ERP vendor who got fat on seven-figure licensing fees.well, not so much. The big disruption continues to be Cloud ERP systems. Cloud ERP products don’t take anywhere near the time or cost to implement as on-premise apps. You still need outside experts to some degree, but multi-year death marches will hopefully become IT rarities. New guard players are already disrupting the leader board for ERP software. If your firm is doing a software selection and it has the same firms on its short list from ten years ago, time to do some homework. Things have changed.

ERP Software

ERP disruption gives you, the buyer, lots of leverage

Here are a couple of new names, and changes at some established firms that underline the pace of innovation

Kenandy -  Kenandy is a new manufacturing solution. What’s different about their approach is that they’re creating an ERP solution with an outside/in view of a manufacturing enterprise (instead of the usual view inside the four walls of the factory). Their application suite currently has a number of distribution and manufacturing apps. Integration with third party financial software will be accommodated with existing third-party cloud products. Salesforce.com and Silicon Valley VC leader Kleiner Perkins are early investors.

RootStock – Rootstock has a pretty solid discrete manufacturing solution that integrates with the NetSuite financial products. Recently they announced integration with Salesforce.com. This puts RootStock on two of the biggest cloud computing platforms. RootStock will integrate with other cloud financial software and Salesforce.com CRM applications

Infor -   Infor, one of the largest ERP vendors, has also made their MRP/ERP data extensible to/from Salesforce.com CRM applications, which could presage other developments between Infor and Salesforce.com.

SAP - BusinessByDesign is being promoted heavily as a subsidiary solution to SAP’s enterprise solutions.  But they are also adding a lot of functionality to solve business issues that stand-alone SMBs face.

Salesforce.com – Salesforce.com, a CRM pioneer, has become a disruptive force in the ERP space. Its investments in Kenandy and Rootstock underscore how, in the cloud era, ERP architectures can easily join together best-of-breed solutions from numerous specialists.

A few caveats for buyers, though: Avoid new solutions that merely ape the functionality of older generation products. Old ERP was designed when everything was constrained: bandwidth, disk storage, processing speed, CPU availability, disk storage, etc. As a result, ERP software automated the most labor and computationally intensive tasks. Don’t buy ERP that was designed before there was an Internet. New solutions should be focused on more than the four-walls of your firm. In fact, for today, new solutions should look at more kinds of business events than just accounting transactions. They should look at external entities like suppliers, governments, customers, etc. The new solutions should have been designed from the ground up to be externally aware and strategically (not just operationally) excellent.  Get the best business thinking built-into a new solution, not old thinking in new code.

Written by :

tracey boxer