| Working on an ERP startup^, this was a very interesting read for me. Our situation is a little different, because our goal is a customizable platform rather than a single instance built for a single company. Some points that resonated with me: Pay your technical debt early: Cleaning up after yourself as soon as it becomes apparent you've made a mess is huge. The most painful parts of our application to use and to modify were built the wrong way (in hindsight) and haven't been overhauled yet. The amount of additional work that has gone into building and maintaining those parts over what would have been necessary is massive. Of course, you can't always know how to build it right until you build it wrong. Take the (tech debt) loan, but make sure you've budgeted for paying it back quickly so you don't keep paying the interest forever. Show progress and Have clear metrics: These have been very important for us. We started (some time ago) using milestones in our implementations to keep client expectations in line with reality, and to keep ourselves on track and smooth out the effort/time curve. This is probably project management 101, but it seriously helps keep clients happy and reduces stressful last-minute work. On the other hand, I have to question the necessity of a custom ERP and the cost and effort put into it. "Total effort was about 16 to 18 person years (our team size varied from 3 to 5 over 3.5 years)." It seems to me that a lot of wheels may have been reinvented. In our experience, many companies think they have totally unique processes and data to track, when they're really doing just about the same stuff as their competitors.
There can definitely be advantages to having a custom, integrated system, but on the other hand, a more flexible and customizable system can be deployed much faster and cheaper. Not SAP, but there are other options. Bob: I'm not sure what you can share, but what are the key benefits the company expects to get out of a custom ERP? How big is the company? What is the breadth of the software, here--does it include e.g. accounting, or mostly industry-specific data collection? On a more technical note, can you expound a little on how Smalltalk factored into the design of the software? Why do you think Smalltalk was good productivity-wise? ^Bizowie (bizowie.com) |
I can't imagine why anyone would, either. I've seen companies spend 2X the cost of a new ERP system that would solve all of their problems on customizations and additions to an existing, outdated ERP system.
What do they end up with? Solutions that are incomplete, unreliable, and late to the game.