Corporate ERP: Standard vs. Rich functionality - Microsoft Great Plains

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 datawarehousing/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