Is End to End ERP System Dead?
Prashant Mendki
Strategic Growth Leader | Alliances & GTM for SaaS & Supply Chain / Procurement
Three and half years back I wrote an article about how extended supply chain is new supply chain. How the characteristics of supply chain now going beyond plan-source-make-deliver and includes every aspect of supply chain. I used following image to illustrate this in my article https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/extended-supply-chain-new-prashant-mendki/
After writing this, I sent it to my mentor, highly acclaimed supply chain analyst in the industry.
Her first reaction looking at this picture was – You have this “Core ERP” at the bottom – why?
Me: Because you still need ERP to run the business.
But don’t you think if you have plug and play solutions for all the above – ERP is just a financial system back-end?
Me: Probably in longer term yes, but not today. Today people still see it from the prism of ERP and associated systems to do business.
Talk to me in another 4 years and we will discuss the same – she said in somewhat challenging tone.
We are in the last leg of that 4-year journey, and today when I talk to industry executives – I see clear signs of what’s in the store. End to end ERP market moving away and best of the breed taking over. Will ERP Survive or ERP software vendors will change with the time (if its not too late already) or niche providers silently captured the place already? What do you think?
Thanks
Prashant Mendki @pmendki
Network AI Evangelist @ Blue Yonder | Guiding Complex Supply Chains
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Strategic Growth Leader | Alliances & GTM for SaaS & Supply Chain / Procurement
6 年Thanks for all the comments. I would like to further expand this, after repeated question - does that mean a death knell for ERP providers - I say NO - Here is link to next article - https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/end-erp-may-going-away-providers-listen-prashant-mendki Let me know what you think?
Scheduling Specialist for High-Variety, Order-Driven Production and Resource-Constrained Projects
6 年Prashant Mendki said, "...End to end ERP market moving away and best of the breed taking over.". I have been waiting for such outcome for many years. Order-driven, high-variety production units (mostly job shops) regularly face a lot of difficulty to optimally schedule their production as part of production control and management. My company supplies a best-of-breed software tool for production scheduling in such units. To the best of my knowledge, none of the existing ERP systems for complex job shops has a production scheduling module that is satisfactory to a significant percentage of its users. There are some commercial, best-of-breed scheduling software which are very powerful and versatile to meet scheduling needs of a variety of job shops. They perform more efficiently as an add-on to ERP systems because they need a good amount of data and frequent updates of such data. Since ERP systems are powerful enterprise-wide integrated information systems, the integration of best-of-breed scheduling software with them can greatly benefit ERP users in manufacturing.
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6 年I agree with Hanspeter that the trend towards horizontal process-centric systems is increasing, often with 3rd party vendors building on an open platform provided by the vendor (think PaaS) However this doesn't mean Cloud necessarily, as CIO's seem reluctant to move their Core ERP data off-site. Also Edge Computing extending the Platform into the field / shop floor with IoT does not replace Core ERP / Platform functionality, but merely tracks physical goods / services more accurately and in real-time.
I am convinced that we currently see a change in focus, away from the traditional vertical technology/application focus towards a horizontal focus on business processes and whatever it takes to keep the process running. This will dilute all these boundary considerations to the final stage looking only a services that are orchestrated by an IIOT platform.