stuart midgley

My small business has grown to the point where the processes I started off with are getting annoyingly cumbersome. Manually copying information from our contacts database into our sales and accounts software for each sale, accessing product information from printed materials, supplier catalogues and online websites… the busier we get, the longer it takes.

So the search is on for a good, all-encompassing software system that will cover all area of our business operations - in short, an ERP system.

And what a revelation this process is to me. Business software is complex, difficult to install, takes a long time to customise to the needs of any particular business and, in the case of commercial packages, damned expensive.

Examples of failed ERP implementations are everywhere. $100 million law suits from major companies against their ERP vendors (such as SAP or Oracle) seem not uncommon, and smaller companies seem to be avoiding the whole area as much as possible.

When I said all this to a good friend (a software engineer) he simply replied, “Welcome to software”.

I’m proceeding very carefully.