Corporate ERP: Standard vs. Rich functionality – Microsoft Great Plains
By Andrew Karasev
Alba Spectrum Technologies
1-866-528-0577, 1-630-961-5918
help@albaspectrum.com
Traditionally we were
considering functionally rich systems, such as SAP, Oracle Financials,
PeopleSoft, JDEdwards as the fit for large publicly traded corporation. There
might be multiple opinions for the future corporate ERP/MRP systems. We would
like to give you our prognosis: high-end systems will be losing market to
generic granulated standard functionality systems. Customization will be in
high demand – but it will be appropriate to go for light of medium customization
versus purchasing high-end functionality system. It is not a secret, that
nowadays multiple companies from Fortune 500 list use midmarket solution, such
as Microsoft Great Plains as their corporate ERP. In this small article we’ll
try to defend our position and give you highlights on deploying Microsoft Great
Plains for large corporation.
- Computer Hardware
Technology Breakthrough.
Imagine you are back in old-good 1990th – high tech boom. If
somebody would tell you that you can go to the store and purchase of the shelf
400GB IDE hard drive for $300 – you would probably laugh. We were used to
20GB hard drives those days and believed that such a high capacity devices
attributable to mainframes. Another example – 1GB RAM memory stick for $100.
Intel Xenon and AMD Optron based Servers are direct successors of IBM PC
platform, designed in the 1980th as personal computer (PC). These
are signs of the maturity in the industry and time to revise hardware pricing
strategy – it should definitely drop.
- Elite DB Platforms
Time is Over. Yes, it might be
surprise, but Microsoft, which in the 1990th was targeting small
business and developers community is now out there on the marketplace with
Microsoft SQL Server, which is similar in its power and is a way more simple
to support, than Oracle, DB2, Sybase, Progress, Ingress, SAP database and
other “elite” platforms. Midsize companies switched to MS SQL Server and do
their reporting, analysis and datawarehouseing/OLAP on the Microsoft platform
- Custom Logic
versus Functionally-Rich Module.
The trends in the ERP/Accounting applications software industry ended up with
required annual maintenance/enhancement program fee, which is usually close to
20% of the software list price. If you purchase expensive module and use 10%
or its functionality, because the whole bundle has what you need among other
features, then you are in trap of paying 20% annually for the logic you don’t
need and don’t use. If you hire consultant to customize generic platform –
you pay one time
- ERP Granules
Standardizing. This should
happen. We believe in this – seeing signs of maturing ERP software industry.
Good luck and you can
always seek our help in customization, implementation, integration and support.
Call us: 1-866-528-0577 or 1-630-961-5918,
help@albaspectrum.com
Andrew Karasev is Chief
Technology Officer in Alba Spectrum Technologies – USA nationwide Great Plains,
Microsoft CRM customization company, serving Chicago, California, Arizona,
Texas, Florida, Georgia, New York, Australia, UK, Canada, Continental Europe,
Russia and having locations in multiple states and internationally (
http://www.albaspectrum.com ), he is Dexterity, SQL, C#.Net, Crystal Reports
and Microsoft CRM SDK developer