ERP Enterprise Resource Planning Solution Evolution

Since the creation of ERP enterprise resource planning systems decades ago, key issues and bugs in these solutions have been addressed and consequently the market is opening up for a new marketing channel and business customer generating a resurgence and following for ERP solution and enterprise applications..

The pressures placed on ERP vendors from companies over the last ten years specifically have sparked new product innovations. The biggest complaint from ERP enterprise resource planning practitioners is that the older enterprise applications required perpetual upgrades and modifications that forced companies to dedicate considerable resources and dollars towards their enterprise systems maintenance and upkeep.

Enterprise solutions were a huge investment and commitment in terms of capital and human resources and only the largest companies could benefit from ERP solutions, it was a key competitive advantage with at high barrier to entry. For the companies fortunate enough to have the deep pockets to afford these solutions, the high ERP implementation costs, ERP vendor costs and application complexity was also key issues. The high capital and implementation downtime handcuffed companies to their vendor as the cost was to high to switch to another vendor.

Furthermore, the first ERP solutions were company-wide implementation on a very grand scale with a software solution that was both rigid and complex. They were so complex that when finally deployed, only the core functions were used by customers leaving a significant amount of features and functionality dormant and unutilized. It was rare if more than half of the systems features and functionality was utilized.

Given these drivers to improve ERP enterprise applications, developers have since focused on a new generation of ERP products that are affordable by every company size, reduced ERP implementation time requirements, modular feature sets, more customized to every industry and company size that are compatible with the latest technological advances such as wireless and web enabled technologies.

As we mentioned, the cost of former "large" ERP vendor solutions including maintenance were significant investments that were more of a marriage for life decisions. An ERP vendor was literally welded to a company and breaking this relationship was even bigger decision for companies to contemplate than agreeing to the partnership in the beginning as actual business disruption and loss of sales would be an immediate impact to deal with. However, with the new ERP enterprise products wave including the recent emergence of web based solutions and open source applications, developers have been able to overcome these limitations by bringing hosted enterprise solutions or software as a service (SaaS) solutions to the market that dramatically reduce maintenance fees, ERP implementation and deployment time lines and total cost of ownership.

These hosted solutions have increased the competitive landscape and subsequently the standards, service and customer satisfaction levels of companies who are no longer locked in to a single enterprise vendor.