卷铺盖走人，这已经不是第一次，只不过此次非我舍弃，而是被逼无路…
新的站点是www.thinkingstone.net,自己掏钱买的域名，想在这再说什么也没什么意义，希望新的开始能有更好的延续，按计划，本应该早写以上的话，一直推着，国庆这样有标志的节日,该作为结束的最佳时间了…
2005年10月1日，此站永久废除！

6月28日，blogsome登陆不上去，初步怀疑是系统升级或被黑恢复之类的事，毕竟曾经也发生过…
6月29日，blogsome仍然登陆不上，甚感蹊跷，但是因为无暇，也没在意…
6月30日，blogsome还是登陆不上去，google了一下，才知可能被屏蔽了…
其实早在最初，转移到blogsome的好多中文用户都或多或少担心有可能这个blog站点也会遭受被封的命运，
只不过我们一直在侥幸中祈祷…
没想到进展的速度似乎超出了我们的想象，也许我们太幼稚了…
我最终定下blogsome也是经过多方对比，
看着一步步的完善，一天天的纪录，一日日的积累，曾经幻想过很多…
现在看来所能做的只有是再次漂泊…
哪怕我挂着”免谈国事”，只谈风花雪月，歌唱”政府万岁”，只写IT艰辛，
一切也不可能挽回什么，我们再次选择了忍受和沉默，很多人…
我在想我们会不说话到什么时候?
任何事情，越是藏着掖着越是物极必反，
我想那些高智商的上层们应该比老百姓更会知道，
但是现实的结果让人往往可笑和可悲，
可笑明知道是个错误的坑，却偏固执往里边跳，
可悲明知道应该往上爬，却发现身边毫无可抓之物，任凭随波逐流…
他们到底在害怕着什么？？

鲜艳的红色，不是革命的颜色，而是言论被限制最严重的地区…

今天过得很平常…
早上拥挤在破旧的19路车上，
因为赶时间而没有顾得及吃上早饭，
由于天气实在炎热而中午没敢出大厦，
不得已再次去地下餐厅吃那又贵又不难吃的套餐，
一眨眼，就到了下午黄昏，
听着窗外“晚报~~北京晚报，法制晚报”的哟和声，
晚上又要继续着加班…
今天又是一个特殊的日子，离开公司的日子已经与领导确定好，
三年了，我将告别一段旅程，踏上新的征程。

It was an ordinary day today.
This morning, I squeezed myself into a crowded bus,
because in a hurry, I had not a breakfast.
At noonday, very hot weather makes me not go out, had to have a lunch in dining room of building, a low-end meal, a unsavory food.
Time slipped by, as listening to a sound of the newspaper - seller, the shade of evening began to closed round. As usual, working overtime is necessary.
but it is a special day today, I confirmed when I leave the company.
Three years passed, finished a leg of the life trip, will step into a new path.

google总是悄无声息，却又行动神速，从最早的只能查询美国和加拿大的地图业务，到现在已经蔓延到全球，包括北京。没有具体和提供美国城市卫星地图的可视扩大程度作对比，不过在目前对北京所提供的最大可视范围下，能清晰分辩出道路上哪些是轿车，哪些是公交的程度的确让普通老百姓来说不是一般的惊讶。
突然有个冲动，我要寻找我的熟悉之地…

广安门桥，难忘的937

右安门桥，怀念的19

这个是我现在居住的租房所在地（开阳里5区）

这个是我目前工作的公司所在地（宣武区信息大厦）

最近几日，因为需要，忍受在北京38度高温的小屋里，恶补了一下关于ERP的基础，虽然我是被称为挨踢(IT)的人,看ERP这个字眼也N(N>=1)次了，但是仍属于一无所知的一类…

ERP — Enterprise Resource Planning

标准定义来自于其对英文的直译：企业资源规划(Enterprise Resource Planning)。

先看一则笑话：

一天中午，丈夫在外给家里打电话：“亲爱的老婆，晚上我想带几个同事回家吃饭可以吗？” [ 订货意向 ]

妻子：“当然可以，来几个人，几点来，想吃什么菜？”

丈夫：“6个人，我们7点左右回来，准备些酒、烤鸭、番茄炒蛋、凉菜、蛋花汤……。你看可吗？” [ 商务沟通 ]

妻子：“没问题，我会准备好的。” [ 订单确认 ]

妻子记录下需要做的菜单 [ MPS计划 ] ，具体要准备的东西：鸭、酒、番茄、鸡蛋、调料…… [ BOM物料清单 ] ，发现需要：1只鸭蛋，5瓶酒，4个鸡蛋…… [ BOM展开 ] ，炒蛋需要6个鸡蛋，蛋花汤需要4个鸡蛋 [ 共用物料 ]。

打开冰箱一看 [ 库房 ] ，只剩下2个鸡蛋 [ 缺料 ]。

来到自由市场，妻子：“请问鸡蛋怎么卖？” [ 采购询价 ]

小贩：“1个1元，半打5元，1打9.5元。”

妻子：“我只需要8个，但这次买1打。” [ 经济批量采购 ]

妻子：“这有一个坏的，换一个。” [ 验收、退料、换料 ]

回到家中，准备洗采、切菜、炒菜…… [ 工艺线路 ] ，厨房中有燃气灶、微波炉、电饭煲…… [ 工作中心 ] 。

妻子发现拨鸭毛最费时间 [ 瓶颈工序，关键工艺路线 ] ，用微波炉自己做烤鸭可能来不及 [ 产能不足 ] ，于是阅览室在楼下的餐厅里买现成的 [ 产品委外 ] 。

下午4点，接到儿子的电话：“妈妈，晚上几个同学想来家里吃饭，你帮忙准备一下。” [ 紧急订单 ]

“好的，你们想吃什么，爸爸晚上也有客人，你愿意和他们一起吃吗？”

“菜你看着办吧，但一定要有番茄炒鸡蛋，我们不和大人一起吃，6：30左右回来。” [ 不能并单处理 ]

“好的，肯定让你们满意。” [ 订单确定 ]

“鸡蛋又不购了，打电话叫小店送来。” [ 紧急采购 ]

6：30，一切准备就绪，可烤鸭还没送来，急忙打电话询问：“我是李太，怎么订的烤鸭还不送来？” [ 采购委外单跟催 ]

“不好意思，送货的人已经走了，可能是堵车吧，马上就会到的。”

门铃响了。

“李太太，这是您要的烤鸭。请在单上签一个字。” [ 验收、入库、转应付账款 ]

6：45，女儿的电话：“妈妈，我想现在带几个朋友回家吃饭可以吗？” [ 呵呵，又是紧急订购意向，要求现货 ]

“不行呀，女儿，今天妈已经需要准备两桌饭了，时间实在是来不及，真的非常抱歉，下次早点说，一定给你们准备好。” [ 哈哈，这就是ERP的使用局限，要有稳定的外部环境，要有一个起码的提前期 ] 。

…… ……

送走了所有客人，疲惫的妻子坐在沙发上对丈夫说：“亲爱的，现在咱们家请客的频率非常高，应该要买些厨房用品了 [ 设备采购 ] ，最好能再雇个小保姆 [ 连人力资源系统也有缺口了 ] 。

丈夫：“家里你做主，需要什么你就去办吧。” [ 通过审核 ]

妻子：“还有，最近家里花销太大，用你的私房钱来补贴一下，好吗？” [ 最后就是应收货款的催要 ]

有了以上的通俗易懂的认识，让我们再次回到科学的论述：

ERP是美国Gartner Group公司于1990年提出的一个对企业资源进行有效共享与利用的，以管理会计为核心的系统。

它是MRPⅡ(Manufacturing Resource Planning 企业制造资源计划)下一代的制造业系统和资源计划软件。除了MRPⅡ已有的生产资源计划，制造、财务、销售、采购等功能外，还有质量管理，实验室管理，业务流程管理，产品数据管理，存货、分销与运输管理，人力资源管理和定期报告系统。

ERP通过信息系统对信息进行充分整理、有效传递，使企业的资源在采购、生产、成本，库存、分销、运输、人力、财务等诸多方面能够得到合理地配置与利用，从而实现企业经营效率的提高。

ERP通过运用最佳业务制度规范(business practice)以及集成企业关键业务流程(business processes)来发问和提高企业利润，市场需求反应速度和企业。

ERP软件的合理运用可以帮助企业内部业务操作合理化，同时运用功能丰富的协作/合作技术(collaborative technologies)可以帮助企业在跨合作企业群体和贸易伙伴之间提高管理水平，扩展企业竞争空间和提高综合能力。

ERP把客户需求和企业内部的制造活动以及供应商的制造资源整合在一起，形成企业一个完整的供应链，其核心管理思想主要体现在以下三个方面：
一、体现对整个供应链资源进行管理的思想；
二、体现精益生产、敏捷制造和同步工程的思想；
三、体现事先计划与事前控制的思想。

从本质上讲，ERP是一套信息系统，是一种工具。ERP在系统设计中可集成某些管理思想与内容，可帮助企业提升管理水平。

但是，ERP本身不是管理，它不可以取代管理。ERP本身不能解决企业的管理问题。企业的管理问题只能由管理者自己去解决。ERP可以是管理者解决企业管理问题的一种工具。 不少企业因为错误地将ERP当成了管理本身，在ERP实施前未能认真地分析企业的管理问题，寻找解决途径，而过分地依赖ERP来解决问题。

最后，不但老的问题得不到有效地解决，又产生了许多新的问题，最终导致了ERP实施的失败。企业也因此而伤了元气。正确地认识ERP是什么与不是什么，就会在ERP实施之前认真分析企业在管理上存在的问题，了解ERP对解决这些问题的作用，充分细致地计划与落实利用ERP解决这些问题的程序，为ERP充分发挥效率提供基础。

ERP应用成功的标志是：
一、系统运行集成化，软件的运作跨越多个部门；
二、业务流程合理化，各级业务部门根据完全优化后的流程重新构建；
三、绩效监控动态化，绩效系统能即时反馈以便纠正管理中存在的问题；
四、管理改善持续化，企业建立一个可以不断自我评价和不断改善管理的机制。

■ How do companies organize their ERP projects?

Based on our observations, there are three commonly used ways of installing ERP.

1. The Big Bang
In this, the most ambitious and difficult of approaches to ERP implementation, companies cast off all their legacy systems at once and install a single ERP system across the entire company. Though this method dominated early ERP implementations, few companies dare to attempt it anymore because it calls for the entire company to mobilize and change at once. Most of the ERP implementation horror stories from the late ’90s warn us about companies that used this strategy.Getting everyone to cooperate and accept a new software system at the same time is a tremendous effort, largely because the new system will not have any advocates. No one within the company has any experience using it, so no one is sure whether it will work. Also, ERP inevitably involves compromises. Many departments have computer systems that have been honed to match the ways they work. In most cases, ERP offers neither the range of functionality nor the comfort of familiarity that a custom legacy system can offer. In many cases, the speed of the new system may suffer because it is serving the entire company rather than a single department. ERP implementation requires a direct mandate from the CEO.

2. Franchising strategy
This approach suits large or diverse companies that do not share many common processes across business units. Independent ERP systems are installed in each unit, while linking common processes, such as financial bookkeeping, across the enterprise. This has emerged as the most common way of implementing ERP. In most cases, the business units each have their own “instances” of ERP—that is, a separate system and database. The systems link together only to share the information necessary for the corporation to get a performance big picture across all the business units (business unit revenues, for example), or for processes that don’t vary much from business unit to business unit (perhaps HR benefits). Usually, these implementations begin with a demonstration or pilot installation in a particularly open-minded and patient business unit where the core business of the corporation will not be disrupted if something goes wrong. Once the project team gets the system up and running and works out all the bugs, the team begins selling other units on ERP, using the first implementation as a kind of in-house customer reference. Plan for this strategy to take a long time.

3. Slam dunk
ERP dictates the process design in this method, where the focus is on just a few key processes, such as those contained in an ERP system’s financial module. The slam dunk is generally for smaller companies expecting to grow into ERP. The goal here is to get ERP up and running quickly and to ditch the fancy reengineering in favor of the ERP system’s “canned” processes. Few companies that have approached ERP this way can claim much payback from the new system. Most use it as an infrastructure to support more diligent installation efforts down the road. Yet many discover that a slammed-in ERP system is little better than a legacy system because it doesn’t force employees to change any of their old habits. In fact, doing the hard work of process reengineering after the system is in can be more challenging than if there had been no system at all because at that point few people in the company will have felt much benefit.

■ How does ERP fit with e-commerce?

ERP vendors were not prepared for the onslaught of e-commerce. ERP is complex and not intended for public consumption. It assumes that the only people handling order information will be your employees, who are highly trained and comfortable with the tech jargon embedded in the software. But now customers and suppliers are demanding access to the same information your employees get through the ERP system—things like order status, inventory levels and invoice reconciliation—except they want to get all this information simply, without all the ERP software jargon, through your website.

E-commerce means IT departments need to build two new channels of access in to ERP systems—one for customers (otherwise known as business-to-consumer) and one for suppliers and partners (business-to-business). These two audiences want two different types of information from your ERP system. Consumers want order status and billing information, and suppliers and partners want just about everything else.

Traditional ERP vendors are having a hard time building the links between the Web and their software, though they certainly all realize that they must do it and have been hard at work at it for years. The bottom line, however, is that companies with e-commerce ambitions face a lot of hard integration work to make their ERP systems available over the Web. For those companies that were smart—or lucky—enough to have bought their ERP systems from a vendor experienced in developing e-commerce wares, adding easily integrated applications from that same vendor can be a money-saving option. For those companies whose ERP systems came from vendors that are less experienced with e-commerce development, the best—and possibly only—option might be to have a combination of internal staff and consultants hack through a custom integration.

But no matter what the details are, solving the difficult problem of integrating ERP and e-commerce requires careful planning, which is key to getting integration off on the right track.

One of the most difficult aspects of ERP and e-commerce integration is that the Internet never stops. ERP applications are big and complex and require maintenance. The choice is stark if ERP is linked directly to the Web—take down your ERP system for maintenance and you take down your website. Most e-commerce veterans will build flexibility into the ERP and e-commerce links so that they can keep the new e-commerce applications running on the Web while they shut down ERP for upgrades and fixes.

The difficulty of getting ERP and e-commerce applications to work together—not to mention the other applications that demand ERP information such as supply chain and CRM software—has led companies to consider software known alternately as middleware and EAI software. These applications act as software translators that take information from ERP and convert it into a format that e-commerce and other applications can understand. Middleware has improved dramatically in recent years, and though it is difficult to sell and prove ROI on the software with business leaders—it is invisible to computer users—it can help solve many of the biggest integration woes that plague IT these days.

From CIO.com

■ What are the hidden costs of ERP?

Although different companies will find different land mines in the budgeting process, those who have implemented ERP packages agree that certain costs are more commonly overlooked or underestimated than others. Armed with insights from across the business, ERP pros vote the following areas as most likely to result in budget overrun.

1. Training
Training is the near-unanimous choice of experienced ERP implementers as the most underestimated budget item. Training expenses are high because workers almost invariably have to learn a new set of processes, not just a new software interface. Worse, outside training companies may not be able to help you. They are focused on telling people how to use software, not on educating people about the particular ways you do business. Prepare to develop a curriculum yourself that identifies and explains the different business processes that will be affected by the ERP system. One enterprising CIO hired staff from a local business school to help him develop and teach the ERP business-training course to employees. Remember that with ERP, finance people will be using the same software as warehouse people and they will both be entering information that affects the other. To do this accurately, they have to have a much broader understanding of how others in the company do their jobs than they did before ERP came along. Ultimately, it will be up to your IT and businesspeople to provide that training. So take whatever you have budgeted for ERP training and double or triple it up front. It will be the best ERP investment you ever make.

2. Integration and testing
Testing the links between ERP packages and other corporate software links that have to be built on a case-by-case basis is another often-underestimated cost. A typical manufacturing company may have add-on applications from the major—e-commerce and supply chain—to the minor—sales tax computation and bar coding. All require integration links to ERP. If you can buy add-ons from the ERP vendor that are pre-integrated, you’re better off. If you need to build the links yourself, expect things to get ugly. As with training, testing ERP integration has to be done from a process-oriented perspective. Veterans recommend that instead of plugging in dummy data and moving it from one application to the next, run a real purchase order through the system, from order entry through shipping and receipt of payment—the whole order-to-cash banana—preferably with the participation of the employees who will eventually do those jobs.

3. Customization
Add-ons are only the beginning of the integration costs of ERP. Much more costly, and something to be avoided if at all possible, is actual customization of the core ERP software itself. This happens when the ERP software can’t handle one of your business processes and you decide to mess with the software to make it do what you want. You’re playing with fire. The customizations can affect every module of the ERP system because they are all so tightly linked together. Upgrading the ERP package—no walk in the park under the best of circumstances—becomes a nightmare because you’ll have to do the customization all over again in the new version. Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t. No matter what, the vendor will not be there to support you. You will have to hire extra staffers to do the customization work, and keep them on for good to maintain it.

4. Data conversion
It costs money to move corporate information, such as customer and supplier records, product design data and the like, from old systems to new ERP homes. Although few CIOs will admit it, most data in most legacy systems is of little use. Companies often deny their data is dirty until they actually have to move it to the new client/server setups that popular ERP packages require. Consequently, those companies are more likely to underestimate the cost of the move. But even clean data may demand some overhaul to match process modifications necessitated—or inspired—by the ERP implementation.
Data analysis - Often, the data from the ERP system must be combined with data from external systems for analysis purposes. Users with heavy analysis needs should include the cost of a data warehouse in the ERP budget—and they should expect to do quite a bit of work to make it run smoothly. Users are in a pickle here: Refreshing all the ERP data every day in a big corporate data warehouse is difficult, and ERP systems do a poor job of indicating which information has changed from day to day, making selective warehouse updates tough. One expensive solution is custom programming. The upshot is that the wise will check all their data analysis needs before signing off on the budget.

5. Consultants ad infinitum
When users fail to plan for disengagement, consulting fees run wild. To avoid this, companies should identify objectives for which its consulting partners must aim when training internal staff. Include metrics in the consultants’ contract; for example, a specific number of the user company’s staff should be able to pass a project-management leadership test—similar to what Big Five consultants have to pass to lead an ERP engagement.

6. Replacing your best and brightest
It is accepted wisdom that ERP success depends on staffing the project with the best and brightest from the business and IS divisions. The software is too complex and the business changes too dramatic to trust the project to just anyone. The bad news is a company must be prepared to replace many of those people when the project is over. Though the ERP market is not as hot as it once was, consultancies and other companies that have lost their best people will be hounding yours with higher salaries and bonus offers than you can afford—or that your HR policies permit. Huddle with HR early on to develop a retention bonus program and create new salary strata for ERP veterans. If you let them go, you’ll wind up hiring them—or someone like them—back as consultants for twice what you paid them in salaries.

7. Implementation teams can never stop
Most companies intend to treat their ERP implementation as they would any other software project. Once the software is installed, they figure the team will be scuttled and everyone will go back to his or her day job. But after ERP, you can’t go home again. The implementers are too valuable. Because they have worked intimately with ERP, they know more about the sales process than the salespeople and more about the manufacturing process than the manufacturing people. Companies can’t afford to send their project people back into the business because there’s so much to do after the ERP software is installed. Just writing reports to pull information out of the new ERP system will keep the project team busy for a year at least. And it is in analysis—and, one hopes, insight—that companies make their money back on an ERP implementation. Unfortunately, few IS departments plan for the frenzy of post-ERP installation activity, and fewer still build it into their budgets when they start their ERP projects. Many are forced to beg for more money and staff immediately after the go-live date, long before the ERP project has demonstrated any benefit.

8. Waiting for ROI
One of the most misleading legacies of traditional software project management is that the company expects to gain value from the application as soon as it is installed, while the project team expects a break and maybe a pat on the back. Neither expectation applies to ERP. Most of the systems don’t reveal their value until after companies have had them running for some time and can concentrate on making improvements in the business processes that are affected by the system. And the project team is not going to be rewarded until their efforts pay off.

9. Post-ERP depression
ERP systems often wreak cause havoc in the companies that install them. In a recent Deloitte Consulting survey of 64 Fortune 500 companies, one in four admitted that they suffered a drop in performance when their ERP system went live. The true percentage is undoubtedly much higher. The most common reason for the performance problems is that everything looks and works differently from the way it did before. When people can’t do their jobs in the familiar way and haven’t yet mastered the new way, they panic, and the business goes into spasms.

■ Why do ERP projects fail so often?

At its simplest level, ERP is a set of best practices for performing different duties in your company, including finance, manufacturing and the warehouse. To get the most from the software, you have to get people inside your company to adopt the work methods outlined in the software. If the people in the different departments that will use ERP don’t agree that the work methods embedded in the software are better than the ones they currently use, they will resist using the software or will want IT to change the software to match the ways they currently do things. This is where ERP projects break down. Political fights break out over how—or even whether—the software will be installed. IT gets bogged down in long, expensive customization efforts to modify the ERP software to fit with powerful business barons’ wishes. Customizations make the software more unstable and harder to maintain when it finally does come to life. The horror stories you hear in the press about ERP can usually be traced to the changes the company made in the core ERP software to fit its own work methods. Because ERP covers so much of what a business does, a failure in the software can bring a company to a halt, literally.

But IT can fix the bugs pretty quickly in most cases, and besides, few big companies can avoid customizing ERP in some fashion—every business is different and is bound to have unique work methods that a vendor cannot account for when developing its software. The mistake companies make is assuming that changing people’s habits will be easier than customizing the software. It’s not. Getting people inside your company to use the software to improve the ways they do their jobs is by far the harder challenge. If your company is resistant to change, then your ERP project is more likely to fail.

From CIO.com

■ What will ERP fix in my business?

There are five major reasons why companies undertake ERP.

1. Integrate financial information
As the CEO tries to understand the company’s overall performance, he may find many different versions of the truth. Finance has its own set of revenue numbers, sales has another version, and the different business units may each have their own version of how much they contributed to revenues. ERP creates a single version of the truth that cannot be questioned because everyone is using the same system.

2.Integrate customer order information
ERP systems can become the place where the customer order lives from the time a customer service representative receives it until the loading dock ships the merchandise and finance sends an invoice. By having this information in one software system, rather than scattered among many different systems that can’t communicate with one another, companies can keep track of orders more easily, and coordinate manufacturing, inventory and shipping among many different locations at the same time.

3.Standardize and speed up manufacturing processes
Manufacturing companies—especially those with an appetite for mergers and acquisitions—often find that multiple business units across the company make the same widget using different methods and computer systems. ERP systems come with standard methods for automating some of the steps of a manufacturing process. Standardizing those processes and using a single, integrated computer system can save time, increase productivity and reduce head count.

4.Reduce inventory
ERP helps the manufacturing process flow more smoothly, and it improves visibility of the order fulfillment process inside the company. That can lead to reduced inventories of the stuff used to make products (work-in-progress inventory), and it can help users better plan deliveries to customers, reducing the finished good inventory at the warehouses and shipping docks. To really improve the flow of your supply chain, you need supply chain software, but ERP helps too.

5.Standardize HR information
Especially in companies with multiple business units, HR may not have a unified, simple method for tracking employees’ time and communicating with them about benefits and services. ERP can fix that.
In the race to fix these problems, companies often lose sight of the fact that ERP packages are nothing more than generic representations of the ways a typical company does business. While most packages are exhaustively comprehensive, each industry has its quirks that make it unique. Most ERP systems were designed to be used by discrete manufacturing companies (that make physical things that can be counted), which immediately left all the process manufacturers (oil, chemical and utility companies that measure their products by flow rather than individual units) out in the cold. Each of these industries has struggled with the different ERP vendors to modify core ERP programs to their needs.

■ What does ERP really cost?

Meta Group recently did a study looking at the total cost of ownership (TCO) of ERP, including hardware, software, professional services and internal staff costs. The TCO numbers include getting the software installed and the two years afterward, which is when the real costs of maintaining, upgrading and optimizing the system for your business are felt. Among the 63 companies surveyed—including small, medium and large companies in a range of industries—the average TCO was $15 million (the highest was $300 million and lowest was $400,000). While it’s hard to draw a solid number from that kind of range of companies and ERP efforts, Meta came up with one statistic that proves that ERP is expensive no matter what kind of company is using it. The TCO for a “heads-down” user over that period was a staggering $53,320.

■ When will I get payback from ERP—and how much will it be?

Don’t expect to revolutionize your business with ERP. It is a navel-gazing exercise that focuses on optimizing the way things are done internally rather than with customers, suppliers or partners. Yet the navel gazing has a pretty good payback if you’re willing to wait for it—a Meta Group study of 63 companies found that it took eight months after the new system was in (31 months total) to see any benefits. But the median annual savings from the new ERP system were $1.6 million.

From CIO.com

■ How long will an ERP project take?

Companies that install ERP do not have an easy time of it. Don’t be fooled when ERP vendors tell you about a three or six month average implementation time. Those short (that’s right, six months is short) implementations all have a catch of one kind or another: The company was small, or the implementation was limited to a small area of the company, or the company used only the financial pieces of the ERP system (in which case the ERP system is nothing more than a very expensive accounting system). To do ERP right, the ways you do business will need to change and the ways people do their jobs will need to change too. And that kind of change doesn’t come without pain. Unless, of course, your ways of doing business are working extremely well (orders all shipped on time, productivity higher than all your competitors, customers completely satisfied), in which case there is no reason to even consider ERP.

The important thing is not to focus on how long it will take—real transformational ERP efforts usually run between one and three years, on average—but rather to understand why you need it and how you will use it to improve your business.

■ What will ERP fix in my business?

There are five major reasons why companies undertake ERP.

1. Integrate financial information
As the CEO tries to understand the company’s overall performance, he may find many different versions of the truth. Finance has its own set of revenue numbers, sales has another version, and the different business units may each have their own version of how much they contributed to revenues. ERP creates a single version of the truth that cannot be questioned because everyone is using the same system.

2.Integrate customer order information
ERP systems can become the place where the customer order lives from the time a customer service representative receives it until the loading dock ships the merchandise and finance sends an invoice. By having this information in one software system, rather than scattered among many different systems that can’t communicate with one another, companies can keep track of orders more easily, and coordinate manufacturing, inventory and shipping among many different locations at the same time.

3.Standardize and speed up manufacturing processes
Manufacturing companies—especially those with an appetite for mergers and acquisitions—often find that multiple business units across the company make the same widget using different methods and computer systems. ERP systems come with standard methods for automating some of the steps of a manufacturing process. Standardizing those processes and using a single, integrated computer system can save time, increase productivity and reduce head count.

4.Reduce inventory
ERP helps the manufacturing process flow more smoothly, and it improves visibility of the order fulfillment process inside the company. That can lead to reduced inventories of the stuff used to make products (work-in-progress inventory), and it can help users better plan deliveries to customers, reducing the finished good inventory at the warehouses and shipping docks. To really improve the flow of your supply chain, you need supply chain software, but ERP helps too.

5.Standardize HR information
Especially in companies with multiple business units, HR may not have a unified, simple method for tracking employees’ time and communicating with them about benefits and services. ERP can fix that.
In the race to fix these problems, companies often lose sight of the fact that ERP packages are nothing more than generic representations of the ways a typical company does business. While most packages are exhaustively comprehensive, each industry has its quirks that make it unique. Most ERP systems were designed to be used by discrete manufacturing companies (that make physical things that can be counted), which immediately left all the process manufacturers (oil, chemical and utility companies that measure their products by flow rather than individual units) out in the cold. Each of these industries has struggled with the different ERP vendors to modify core ERP programs to their needs.

From CIO.com

■ What is ERP?

Enterprise resource planning software, or ERP, doesn’t live up to its acronym. Forget about planning—it doesn’t do much of that—and forget about resource, a throwaway term. But remember the enterprise part. This is ERP’s true ambition. It attempts to integrate all departments and functions across a company onto a single computer system that can serve all those different departments’ particular needs.

That is a tall order, building a single software program that serves the needs of people in finance as well as it does the people in human resources and in the warehouse. Each of those departments typically has its own computer system optimized for the particular ways that the department does its work. But ERP combines them all together into a single, integrated software program that runs off a single database so that the various departments can more easily share information and communicate with each other.

That integrated approach can have a tremendous payback if companies install the software correctly.

Take a customer order, for example. Typically, when a customer places an order, that order begins a mostly paper-based journey from in-basket to in-basket around the company, often being keyed and rekeyed into different departments’ computer systems along the way. All that lounging around in in-baskets causes delays and lost orders, and all the keying into different computer systems invites errors. Meanwhile, no one in the company truly knows what the status of the order is at any given point because there is no way for the finance department, for example, to get into the warehouse’s computer system to see whether the item has been shipped. “You’ll have to call the warehouse” is the familiar refrain heard by frustrated customers.

ERP vanquishes the old standalone computer systems in finance, HR, manufacturing and the warehouse, and replaces them with a single unified software program divided into software modules that roughly approximate the old standalone systems. Finance, manufacturing and the warehouse all still get their own software, except now the software is linked together so that someone in finance can look into the warehouse software to see if an order has been shipped. Most vendors’ ERP software is flexible enough that you can install some modules without buying the whole package. Many companies, for example, will just install an ERP finance or HR module and leave the rest of the functions for another day.

■ How can ERP improve a company’s business performance?

ERP’s best hope for demonstrating value is as a sort of battering ram for improving the way your company takes a customer order and processes it into an invoice and revenue—otherwise known as the order fulfillment process. That is why ERP is often referred to as back-office software. It doesn’t handle the up-front selling process (although most ERP vendors have recently developed CRM software to do this); rather, ERP takes a customer order and provides a software road map for automating the different steps along the path to fulfilling it. When a customer service representative enters a customer order into an ERP system, he has all the information necessary to complete the order (the customer’s credit rating and order history from the finance module, the company’s inventory levels from the warehouse module and the shipping dock’s trucking schedule from the logistics module, for example).

People in these different departments all see the same information and can update it. When one department finishes with the order it is automatically routed via the ERP system to the next department. To find out where the order is at any point, you need only log in to the ERP system and track it down. With luck, the order process moves like a bolt of lightning through the organization, and customers get their orders faster and with fewer errors than before. ERP can apply that same magic to the other major business processes, such as employee benefits or financial reporting.

That, at least, is the dream of ERP. The reality is much harsher.

Let’s go back to those inboxes for a minute. That process may not have been efficient, but it was simple. Finance did its job, the warehouse did its job, and if anything went wrong outside of the department’s walls, it was somebody else’s problem. Not anymore. With ERP, the customer service representatives are no longer just typists entering someone’s name into a computer and hitting the return key. The ERP screen makes them businesspeople. It flickers with the customer’s credit rating from the finance department and the product inventory levels from the warehouse. Will the customer pay on time? Will we be able to ship the order on time? These are decisions that customer service representatives have never had to make before, and the answers affect the customer and every other department in the company. But it’s not just the customer service representatives who have to wake up. People in the warehouse who used to keep inventory in their heads or on scraps of paper now need to put that information online. If they don’t, customer service reps will see low inventory levels on their screens and tell customers that their requested item is not in stock. Accountability, responsibility and communication have never been tested like this before.

People don’t like to change, and ERP asks them to change how they do their jobs. That is why the value of ERP is so hard to pin down. The software is less important than the changes companies make in the ways they do business. If you use ERP to improve the ways your people take orders, manufacture goods, ship them and bill for them, you will see value from the software. If you simply install the software without changing the ways people do their jobs, you may not see any value at all—indeed, the new software could slow you down by simply replacing the old software that everyone knew with new software that no one does.

From CIO.com