Peugeot – Engineered to be enjoyed (or A simple way a car dealership can profit from an ERP system?)

About six months ago, when I was buying a car, a friend of mine, in a typical The Good, the Bad and the Ugly fashion, told me that there were two kinds of cars: good cars, and French cars. I bought a French car. I bought a Peugeot 407 SW (Peugeot says their cars are engineered to be enjoyed) and although I could do so, I am not going to make this a post about what went wrong with this car already so far. This is going to be a post about how the simplest of the features of an ERP system can influence customer (dis)satisfaction, and create long term decisions for, or against a car vendor. Also, not typical for me, I am speaking from the shoes of a customer, rather than consultant, this time. Quite a change for me.

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Monkey policy

Policies are sacrosanct. Every company has them, and when implementing ERP systems policies do come in the way. That’s the way we do it ’round here since forever, is heard rather frequently, but a simple question why can leave a big question mark hang unanswered.

There was an experiment…

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Users never mess with the system

I’m still in Vegas, and this city is crazy. But it’s funny, us people in IT have a thing or two to learn from these people in gambling business. We have all been hearing from our customers how they want their systems reliable, available, and so. Well, what I’ve been seeing here for the past two days is a highly-available 24/7 service with full redundancy and failover clustering all in place. There are roulette and blackjack tables and slot machines in every free square foot, so it’s pretty darn scalable, too. There is zero downtime, entertainment never stops, and that’s pretty much the reason I write this post now, instead of sleeping. I almost feel the music is louder by the minute, probably proportionally so to how sleepy I am. I’m too old for this sh*t.

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