3 posts tagged “baan”

I have a number of friends and relatives who, when they ask what I do for a living, I reply “Computers”.  This is a catch all answer that normally elicits one of two responses. Firstly, “Oh, that’s interesting, how are the kids?” and secondly, “I’m looking to buy a computer for home, what do you recommend?”  To avoid getting involved in helping someone make a decision as to which PC to buy I reply that I only deal in enterprise computing and that the starting price is £100k. That normally finishes the conversation off.

In reality I am in the business of helping manufacturing companies achieve greater value through the application of technology. Mainly through the optimisation and deployment of ERP systems and extended functionality such as shop floor data collection, real time manufacturing machine performance management and the application of automated data collection.

Some people persist and demand to know more about what I actually do and it is always entertaining to watch their eyes glaze over by the time I reach the second sentence. I’m not upset. These friends are from other walks of life such as the caring professions or are personal tax advisors or, dare I admit it, from marketing.

However, I do have a good circle of friends that I have met through my work and they completely understand what I am talking about. I have other friends too who work in the manufacturing industry.  Almost all of them have heard the expression ‘ERP’. They’ve either witnessed it directly (some say suffered), or are aware that the company they work for has an ERP system.

It really is quite a shock then to come across companies in manufacturing industry that are of reasonable size that are completely oblivious to what ERP is all about – and to what extent the business may be affected.

A year or so ago I came across a business that had been acquired by a company based in another country. The head office had sent over a computer with a tier 2 software product on it and told them that this was now the corporate standard and that they must implement it.    

I recently had a further conversation. They decided to implement this system by giving it to the IT manager and telling him to get on with it. No plan, no business case, no budget, no buy-in, no project team, no sponsorship – no hope!

I feel like reporting the senior management to the RSPCITP (The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Information Technology People). There clearly is no understanding of what ERP is about, how complicated it can be, that it is not like Microsoft Word – install and use. It truly is bizarre.

 Anyway, I am now going over to explain to the senior people within the business all about ERP – It’s great. I should be able to talk about it for hours and people will actually listen. I hope.

I think that the corporate objectives of ERP implementations, in multi-site, multi country implementations are being compromised by either the inflexibility or short-sightedness of the corporate IT function.

Let me explain. We are in the business of providing support to manufacturing businesses, primarily here in the UK, for both their Microsoft Axapta/AX and Infor Baan ERP users. We approach those users that we know of through our marketing and we also get a number of calls each week from companies that have these ERP systems.

Where the company is UK based, or has UK based IT, then our conversations with them are often fruitful and we can work together on optimising their systems.

A good number of companies have had their ERP installed via corporate diktat – and I have to say that many of these users are frustrated and unhappy with their critical business system. They often say that they feel the corporate IT doesn’t really care about them and cannot provide the resources to offer training and support but they are not allowed to look at locally based partners who could help them get the most out of their ERP.

I understand the problem and the conflicts. At a corporate level you are trying to attain economies of scale and common business processes and have a blueprint as to how your business works. This can lead to value being released by having less local IT and its associated costs – I’ve been there, I know.

However, the local user, in a different country, feels that the corporate IT function doesn’t understand about the issues and problems facing the users ‘on the ground’. It doesn’t make sense to fly people from corporate IT to the sites around the world to help as it is far too expensive, and resources are probably rather short anyway. But the problem is that corporate won’t allow the use of local companies because they may try and subvert the corporate model.

There is an added complication too. It is likely that the user site is paying a recharge to corporate for the use of the system – they feel that they should be getting a level of service within that fee, which, they think should include on-site training and support. Corporate, on the other hand, can’t build in a recharge to include a certain number of days which may not be used as they will be accused of over charging!

My recommendation would be to allow the local site to have a local budget for training and optimisation that is discretionary spend. Set clear limits as to what can be done locally and, if necessary, vet the local provider. This way corporate will not be perceived as holding the local business back.

I’ve just left a meeting which has really cheered me up. I went into the meeting with fairly low hopes that the right decision would be made – but in the end they chose ‘practical’ over ‘pretty’.

I have been working with this particular customer for a number of years – they have an aged ERP system which they are continually trying to get the best out of with relatively limited budget. Over time we have made improvements to the use of the system by changing business processes, utilizing unused functionality and the use of EDI amongst other things.

Where I have always advocated some spend is in the warehouse through the introduction of bar-code readers and associated middleware.  Some time ago they were convinced that a separate warehouse management system was the answer to their woes. It soon became clear after some analysis that their current ERP had the warehouse functionality they needed but not the bar-codes. By implementing a third party solution they would be buying software that duplicated much of what they already had plus they would need to interface their ERP, with the associated costs and overhead, to give them a solution that seemed like one system. They want to show their stock in real-time. Our answer is to add barcoding to their current system and update directly into that – that is real time.

So why am I particularly happy? It’s this: a couple of weeks ago the vendor of their ERP turned up with some Business Intelligence software. My customer was smitten! It gave them data cubes and the ability to have dynamic reporting and analysis. They were enamored with the fact that they could drag and drop and point and click and they could have a dozen different views of their data. So impressed were they that they asked me to come in and advise them on how best to deploy it.

The problem was that they were going to use their bar-coding project budget to fund the purchase.

At this point I had to remind them about their current issues; the mis-deliveries, the missed deliveries, the lost stock, the endless poor quality stock takes, the mind numbing and inaccurate form filling and the fact that no one in the business was confident about quoting delivery dates.

The beauty of BI would be that they would be able to see how bad things are in great detail but not be able to afford to do anything about it.

We’ve agreed that the saving they are going to make from the implementing bar-coding first can be used to buy the BI product later.

To find out how automated data collection can have a good business case take a look at our papers here.    

And I know there will be a few people that disagree with me – BI will be good for this business – just not yet!