Should company introduce ERP?

After all, the merit of ERP is low cost & short term development.

Every company wants to avoid futile IT investment and this merit seems to be very attractive!!

All in all, company should introduce ERP?

Every company will become happy by introducing ERP?

In my opinion, ERP does not necessarily make company happy and I do not recommend ERP.

First of all, if you want to introduce ERP, you have to change your business operation according to ERP. ERP provides standardized function and it does not apply to all your business. If you do not want to change your operation and introduce ERP in your business, you have to customize ERP according to your business. In such case, I think, the project of introduction of ERP would be expensive and long term – you cannot be given the benefit of ERP. Furthermore, every time the version up of ERP, you have to customize your system. It costs again and it’s nonsense!!

From my work experience, as an IT engineer and marketer, I have never heard the success story of ERP project in Japan. Most Japanese companies hesitate to change their business to introduce ERP, so they try to introduce ERP by customizing according to their business. Then, quite a few man-hour take and a lot of system bugs are found, which finally leads this project to “death march”. I saw these kinds of failure many times.

I know many foreign companies could have made success in introducing ERP, but most Japanese are delicate and cling to their own way. The business operation in Japanese company is distinctive style and it is hard to standardize.

In this environment, the introduction of standardized software package – ERP is difficult.

Basically, when company wants to introduce new IT system, they should do so by developing system from scratch; analyze business process, system requirement, design business process & IT architecture, implement software by programming and system test, and introduce system. During this process, if there are any points where ERP or other software package can be utilize with no customization, then, company should introduce them. But, it would be better not to introduce them across the board.