When it comes to that most personal of items, the fine suit of clothes, there really is nothing quite like a completely custom fit and the attention of a master tailor. The cut of a bespoke suit is incomparable.
Applied to motorcars, bikes, houses and any one of a number of personal items, customisation is king. It shows style, reflects personality and taste. But custom is not always good, especially where it applies to enterprise-scale software systems, because excessive customisation can cause systems to become rigid, excessively complex and impossible to maintain.
The bespoke enterprise resource planning solution, designed from the ground up to suit the individual needs of one business, is all but a thing of the past. It is not only just too expensive and time-consuming, but it is fraught with extreme risk; by the time the solution is ready, for example, the business may have changed so dramatically that it is no longer relevant.
Add to that the fact that most companies execute certain essential processes in a manner that is fairly standard, with a little room for their own idiosyncratic or innovative differences. It is a fact that finding a 100% fit from any system is something of a pipedream. In the 30-odd systems that HansaWorld has deployed in as many months, perhaps four of them have no customisation at all at the time of implementation; that will change as time goes on and these systems must adapt to the needs of the businesses.
That means most off-the-shelf applications packages provide a reasonable fit, which can be made perfect with a little attention from business analysts and/or programmers.
A little like buying a good suit off the peg and having it taken in here and there for a near-perfect fit.
But, just like you would be unlikely to start with an XXXL if you are a small, the off-the-shelf solution must start out being in the right ballpark.
What good business analysts will look for when matching a system to requirements is somewhere close to an 85% fit between the standard software and the requirements of the client company. The 15% gap is where some programming or tweaking will take place to get to a point where the fit is snug enough that the business is set to operate smoothly and effectively.
More customisation than that and problems are likely to be encountered. With a lot of customisation, which essentially boils down to code that someone has written, there is the chance of strange-but-true problems like someone leaving the company. The next person might not understand what's been done. Or so much might have been done - but not quite correctly - that it may need to be 'undone' and sorted out, with associated costs. Or the system might be so adapted that the business is locked into one version of the ERP software, unable to take advantage of new releases and new advances.
The result could be a system that is un-maintainable or frightfully costly to operate.
The bottom line is that any company director looking to invest in ERP for the first time will face the inevitable question of customising. Be aware that while this will almost always be necessary, the degree to which the system is to be customised must be considered. There is such as thing as too much, which will end up costing more than you're willing to pay.
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