In my career, I have found that even for the largest organizations ERP packages create a great deal of value in two primary areas:

  • They constrain choices in design and provide business process templates, thus creating greater efficiency of implementation.  Giving business partners a blank sheet of paper upon which to do whatever they want often leads them back to what the current system does.  The design templates constrain and define choices which can be made.
  • The delivered user interfaces are much more efficient than creation of new interfaces from scratch, which can be quite difficult to get right, and time consuming at times.  The Create/Read/Update/Delete functions are quite standard; the variability in some of the data required are much smaller elements of these screen designs than all the packaging that goes around them.

The following gives some sense of the stronger elements of usage in most ERP package implementations for large organizations that I have seen.

CwK E261 ERP Interfaces and Data TN

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