Costs

ERP will make my problems go away!

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Some say that ERP will solve all your problems. A deus-ex-machina which takes you to the promised land and brings you years of prosperity and bliss. Reduced operating costs and administrative overhead, improved inventory, higher customer retention, better profitability. It will streamline, improve, integrate, leverage, increase all your good things, and reduce, decrease, eliminate all your bad things.

You don’t buy it, do you?

ERP may help you solve your problems. Eventually.

First thing it will do, though, is—expose them. The question is… are you ready to face them?

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10 reasons that make design absolutely necessary

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Unfinished buildings, by net_efekt (on Flickr)Design is one of a kind. Other phases in Sure Step are understood and accepted as good and necessary. But design, do we really do that? Is it really necessary? Who’s going to pay for it? Does the customer really need all those documents? Instead of writing documents, you could have it developed in the same, or less time. And so on and so forth.

As a matter of fact, if you asked me to pick one single most important phase in a Sure Step project, then it’s the design. No second thoughts here, whatsoever.

Here I list the ten most important reasons that I believe make design absolutely indispensable.

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Panorama’s ERP report, part III

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image I’ve just got the news about Part III of Panorama’s ERP Report in my inbox. If you missed my analysis of the report, please read it first: part three builds on findings of the first two. I know that I am biased when writing about this, but how can I not be? Microsoft Dynamics is the best choice ERP and the report (as a whole) clearly shows why exactly.

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Panorama’s ERP Report reveals important facts

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For a long time, the ruler of project reports was Standish Group’s (in)famous Chaos report, which analyzed IT project success/failure factors. While many of the Chaos report’s findings applied to ERP implementation, the report as a whole was primarily about software development projects. And as we all know, implementing ERP is not the same thing as software development. Hopefully.

Panorama Consulting Group, an independent ERP consulting firm from Denver, Colorado, has conducted a market research in 2008, that explains ERP implementation project success factors and reveals some interesting metrics about real ERP costs, duration and benefits. Finally, we have a decent ERP project report, which reveals some important facts about Microsoft Dynamics.

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Starting it from scratch – do you dare?

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(Three compelling reasons to reshape your business processes, not your software)

Has your computer ever crashed while you were doing something important, causing you to lose all your work? A natural first reaction to this situation is frustration: your work is gone, your effort went in vain, you’ll never do it as well as you did it the first time…

And yet, when initial frustration is gone, and you start doing it over again, from scratch, you are more likely to produce results of higher quality than the first time. Why? The reason for this is simply called—experience.

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