Reflections Week Two

The first thing we did in class today was the group presentations. I'd read the first chapter the night before the class, so the presentations were a good review of chapter one in the textbook. It was more or less the exact same thing. Our group did a presentation on Porters three generic strategies, and since I'm a marketing major none of this was new to me. But it is always nice with a recap.

Then we went through chapter two. We talked about decision making systems and enterprise systems. The one thing that caught my attention was we learned about ERP systems. At first we went through Supply Change Management Systems, Customer Relationship management Systems, Business Process Reengenering Systems and finally Enterprise Resource Planning Systems. My first thought was, that according to my experince, CRM and SCM systems are usually an integrated part of ERP systems. Or at least - they should be in order to have a complete ERP systmes!

My experience in working with ERP systems is, that the single most important thing about this kind of system is, that you have all the information you need gathered in one single system, and that everyone has acces to this system from everywhere at anytime. This is at least how I marketed the ERP system I used to work with.

Also, there was a comment on one of the slides about the average failure rate of an ERP project. It is 66%. I couldn't help laughing and thinking that this number seems extremely high, but it doesn't surprise me after all. Many companies will go out an purchase an insanely expensive system without having made plans for the implementation of the system. And I think this is where most of the ERP systems fail - in the implementation phase. Most business do not allow the time and the money for the implementation of the system, because they do not realize how much time this is going to take.

I could spend a lot of time writing about my experiences in the ERP Business. I won't - I'm sure it is really not that interesting to read about...