[vain_cain]

I see a lot of comments here saying a company should adapt their business processes to their ERP, and in my experience they are wrong - with the exception of accounting(Good luck trying to customize accounting modules within ERPs to fit your process).

I don't work with SAP, but I've been working with Microsoft's ERP(Dynamics NAV/Business Central) my whole professional career(almost 5 years).

When it comes to shipping, manufacturing, HR, supply, sales, planning, quality assurance etc... every big company is going to have a million edge cases which are impossible to cover with the standard functionality of an ERP. And most importantly - hundreds, or maybe thousands of employees that have gotten used to working a certain way.

When you try to make your process fit to a standard ERP functionality you are fighting two dragons:

1) Working your way around edge cases - with the right consultants/developers this doesn't have to be a big pain.

2) Getting your employees to change the way they have been working for years, or even decades. And in addition giving them an overwhelming UI - I've never seen this work as planned. This is also probably the reason the company your mother works for had so many pains.

On the other hand, if you try to make the ERP fit to your processes, there's only one dragon you need to slay - extending the ERP's functionality.

I can only speak for Microsoft's ERP, but everything that is impossible or hard to extended within the ERP itself can easily be extended through an outside application. And by doing so, you can probably even make the employees job easier by keeping the process the same, but giving him an UI that isn't overwhelming.

[ineedasername]

>should adapt their business processes to their ERP, and in my experience they are wrong

That depends. I’ve seen a lot of adaptation to processes that are legitimately & measurably better in time & accuracy ignored in favor of costly customizations out of nothing more than “not created here” syndrome. If a customer doesn’t like that then an off the shelf product is the worst choice they can make unless they are prepared to hire a significant in house dev team.

Otherwise, if you have been adapting your current business processes to deal with the limitations of a legacy system first deployed in the early 80's then there's an excellent chance that at least some of those things can be done more easily in a more modern system. (Though SAP may not always be the best place for that to actually be the case).

[vain_cain]

>If a customer doesn’t like that then an off the shelf product is the worst choice they can make unless they are prepared to hire a significant in house dev team

Correct. This is the problem my company solves. We are ERP consultants/dev's who also know web development. Through the years we've made 50+ web apps to extend Microsoft's ERP, most of which can be used in most companies with similar needs with slight modifications.

And, of course you don't blindly follow a process. There's always some improvements to be made to the process before developing an app for it.

EDIT: Drastically changing workflows for employees within huge companies will ultimately almost always cost you more... It all depends on the company of course, but we have to generalize a bit.

[LurkerAtTheGate]

This is the same niche I fell into - building applications to standardize the work happening parallel to SAP because it didn't cover the edge cases, and people created their own workflows using mostly spreadsheets passed around. Which, comically, our client eventually bought another enterprise piece of software to cover our niche. We figured the gig was up...that was 5 years ago. Turns out the new enterprise software covers only a tiny fraction of the edge cases, so ours just keeps chugging along, paying the bills.

[NikolaNovak]

It's possible you might not have worked in erp space, especially sustainment / maintenance (as opposed to implementation) long enough to see true customization price. I certainly didn't my first 5 years - to mis paraphrase, I was excited at all the things I could do, so I didn't bother to truly consider whether I should :). ERP's lifetime at large company is frequently decades, and their roi vs cost is similarly long.

Every. Single. Customization. You make, which makes so much sense to seemingly eagerly satisfy the user during implementation, will be a massive pain, forever, with every patch and upgrade and new functionality released by vendor in perpetuity, and will inevitably cause performance and failure issues eventually. And will only be getting more expensive and painful to maintain exponentially over many years.

Yes, you should customize erp for your very specific edge cases that you a absolutely need. But:

A) number of processes Bob from accounting or Fatima from HR believe are absolutely crucial and immutable and special and unicorn and mandatory, is way way higher than processes which actually are special and must be preserved. Personal inertia is huge. More often than not, special ways of doing things which are not your core business are an unnecessary cost, whether through erp or not.

This may seem like I'm a traditional grognard IT head who disregards users and their needs, but it's quite the opposite so let me clarify with

B) The threshold of customization at which erp no longer makes sense is in fact very very low.

If you actually, really properly are a special snowflake of a company and your convoluted hr or finance or pay processes are your key immutable competitive advantage, then don't get an erp. Other name for erp is cots, commercial off the shelf, which strongly hints as to how its meant to be used. With erp, customizations should be fought tooth and nail on every level,and that's a largely accepted industry wisdom.

[vain_cain]

>It's possible you might not have worked in erp space, especially sustainment / maintenance (as opposed to implementation) long enough to see true customization price.

I haven't, but some of my colleagues have been in the space for 20+ years.

>Every. Single. Customization. You make, which makes so much sense to seemingly eagerly satisfy the user during implementation, will be a massive pain, forever, with every patch and upgrade and new functionality released by vendor in perpetuity, and will inevitably cause performance and failure issues eventually. And will only be getting more expensive and painful to maintain exponentially over many years.

Wrong. Upgrades almost never break your customizations, because in the ERP space backwards compatibility is verry much a thing with the exception of a few extreme cases now and then. I've migrated customizations from a 2004 version of NAV to a 2022 version of Business Central - even the name of the software changed, and the language in which it is written, but the customizations were almost plug and play after running the code migration tool provided by Microsoft.

>A) number of processes Bob from accounting or Fatima from HR believe are absolutely crucial and immutable and special and unicorn and mandatory, is way way higher than processes which actually are special and must be preserved.

I never said employees wishes should be blindly followed, you still have to do the consulting part of the job...

>B) The threshold of customization at which erp no longer makes sense is in fact very very low. >If you actually, really properly are a special snowflake of a company and your convoluted hr or finance or pay processes are your key immutable competitive advantage, then don't get an erp. Other name for erp is cots, commercial off the shelf, which strongly hints as to how its meant to be used. With erp, customizations should be fought tooth and nail on every level,and that's a largely accepted industry wisdom.

Wrong. The benefit you get on the accounting side, and the all data being in one place side(reporting) outweighs almost any customization that needs to be done - because, good luck making those 2 things from scratch. And good luck living without those 2 things if you're a mid/big company.

[IceDane]

> and in my experience they are wrong - with the exception of accounting

> I don't work with SAP ..

Yeah.. that's just it. Your experience doesn't matter. Adjusting your business to fit SAP nearly as much as an unspoken requirement. It's not just a smart bit of wisdom people throw around. It's literally what you have to do if you want to have any hope of implementing SAP successfully, because it is such a colossal, messy charlie-foxtrot that there is no hope otherwise. Not even SAP's own people understand their own mess.

[vain_cain]

You're right, for some reason I just assumed all ERP's are as easily extendible as Microsoft's. It just makes sense they would be oriented that way due to the complexity of the world. I often hear horror stories about SAP, and can't for the life of me figure out why it's so popular(except it's more oriented than other ERP's to non-tech savvy people).

[IceDane]

I work in this industry(though thankfully very rarely directly with SAP) and I cannot fathon why it is popular either. As I explained in my other answer in this thread, everything they touch turns to garbage.

I think it's really a case of a self-fulfilling prophecy, of a sort. They are the biggest in the business, so people go with them, which makes them bigger, which attracts people.. and so on. It probably helps(SAP) that they also decades worth of man-hours implementing all sorts of insane business logic(like for accounting, as you mentioned, which is something you definitely don't want to get wrong) where other players are likely to be behind.

[hef19898]

If you dig you find as much screwed up ERP projects for SAP as you find for Microsoft or for any other system. Differences in absolute numbers are caused different market share of the systems in question.

[airstrike]

I'm definitely stealing charlie-foxtrot

[yyyk]

As someone who has also worked with Microsoft Dynamics - mostly the other products, which are IMHO at least an order of magnitude more complex from NAV/BC - you can customize it heavily, but the high complexity will get to you. Some things are actually rather difficult to do (e.g. anything to do with Ledger or BOM calculations).

Adapting Dynamics ERP to business process is a challenge of its own, and not every company can do it. At least it's possible in Dynamics, SAP is a mess - most customers I know with SAP have to use external software and import/export for significant customization.

[NohatCoder]

> I can only speak for Microsoft's ERP, but everything that is impossible or hard to extended within the ERP itself can easily be extended through an outside application. And by doing so, you can probably even make the employees job easier by keeping the process the same, but giving him an UI that isn't overwhelming.

But then, did you really gain anything by using an ERP instead of just a dumb database, which would have worked just as well as backed for those applications?