In his book, The Inmates are Running the Asylum, Alan Cooper talks about software being like a dancing bear. It doesn't dance well, but what astounds people is that it dances at all.

ERP can be like that. (You think?) your company is better off with it, but it sure does seem clumsy sometimes.

If 76% of respondents bought ERP for efficiencies, did they realize them over their pre-ERP condition and now they're unhappy with the new efficiency baseline? That is did they achieve initial ROI vs. satisfaction with the rate of improvements to their solutions after the initial implementation (Innovation)?

After implementation, no one seems very happy with continued efficiency improvements in any area, the best being 50/50 yay/nay, I just wondered if the initial hit was delivered as promised.

For ERP owners wondering how to qualify and quantify their current issues, it can be helpful to use the following generic terms: Gathering, Categorizing, Assigning (Ownership), Acting, Sharing.

If you ask, "Why isn't my transaction processing totally automated?" where it is not, it lacks capabilities that can be defined by those terms.

It may be very difficult to understand which area(s) apply, because ERP is typically poor at reporting about itself or on manual work done and by whom (a parallel cycle of gathering data and then sharing it to management, that should accompany all transaction processing) but if you persist you can actually identify specifically where your gaps are.

Note there is a whole industry built around concepts like "Reporting" (old school), "Business Intelligence", and "Data Warehousing", which at their heart are ERP for business leaders. Transactional ERP is optimized for processing, "Business Leader ERP" is built for understanding what happened in the Transactional ERP, and maybe when, why, how, and who did it.

Transactional ERP identifies tasks for operational staff to work on, Business Leader ERP identifies tasks for Business Leaders to Assign or Act on. Transactional ERP supports downstream work and data capture. Business Leader ERP usually doesn't. Instead, its outcomes are transformed into non-standard variations of Gathering, Categorizing, Assignment, Action and Sharing cycles called Project Plans, sometimes supported by "Groupware".

After you understand your work (which means you completed Gathering and Categorizing) there are then patterns of common solutions that address the gaps of each category.

Correlating solutions to common problems is the Acting step, and if you are doing it, Assigning Owner would have already occurred with you as the designee. Or, maybe you assigned someone else to research solutions. Note Owner can also be the system itself, as in, show me all processing done by the ERP rate lookup analyzer.

Example:
Taking sales orders.
This is mostly a Gathering problem. Some customer has a purchase order in his head or another system has a low stock level, but awareness is not in your ERP system. You could take a phone call or get a fax and have someone on your payroll "gather" the order data at cost to you.

Of course, human order takers can often be replaced by system to system integration or by screens directly available to customers in some shared network (VPN, internet). If you have human order takers doing order data entry vs. true sales support, why is that? If you can't expose a catalog to your customers, you have a sharing problem.

One final note, if you have only adopted a ticket system database like BestPractical's Request Tracker or Atlassian's Jira for all your company's processes not supported by formal ERP, you are ahead of the game in managing and understanding your company's work.

If you're thinking about ERP, get one of these ticket tools and build a simple group workflow around its capabilities. They are strong on the 5 categories, but they are very manual and rely on human beings to process each step. You will quickly identify where you want to eliminate repetition or create automation, or standardize some operation, objectives that ERP promises to support.

One other much briefer comment, where is IBM's Tivoli Asset Management (MRO Maximo) product line?

Don't let the "Asset Management" fool you, it's ERP.

There is an explosion of ERP Awareness in the frontier of emerging markets.

Being a part of one and seeing the results such as transparency, accountability and increase in efficiency is a very real target that is achieved not by the Product but as rightly stated in the article, but, by how it is used?

The ERP arena is more important than ever in emerging markets and we are seeing the big players latch on accordingly.

There is an explosion of ERP Awareness in the frontier of emerging markets.

Being a part of one and seeing the results such as transparency, accountability and increase in efficiency is a very real target that is achieved not by the Product but as rightly stated in the article, but, by how it is used?

The ERP arena is more important than ever in emerging markets and we are seeing the big players latch on accordingly.

"Historically speaking, CIOs have been reluctant to take many chances with their ERP systems"

- Historically speaking, CIOs (bureaucrats) are reluctant to take chances with anything.

Only CIOs were polled. Does anybody wonder what end users think of ERP? CIOs tend to be status quo.

ERP systems are 'to-be' legacy systems. They would not be in use today except for the fact that there's nothing to replace them. The innovation will not, in my opinion, come from ERP vendors at all. Someone else needs to find a way to deliver the same kind of end to end integration that makes them so valuable in a much more flexible package. Don't look to Oracle or SAP to deliver this. It's more likely that a kind of Google will offer it in the years to come. Then we can start considering competitive differentiation as a factor driving the system selection process again.

This is a great article and goes hand-and-hand with what I am experiencing. One thing I have noticed with ERP systems that wasn't discussed in this article is user education. I know this wasn’t part of the survey but I believe it is a big part of the problem.

The ERP system used at my company is a little outdated but it has modules that address finance, HR, purchasing, and inventory. One thing I have experienced at the companies I’ve worked at is that the companies do not want to pay for training. It is my belief that properly training your employees on how to use your ERP system will eliminate a lot of the problems IT experiences.

For where ERP could go, see the early chapters of this sci-fi story,

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

It basically describes workflow communicated to humans via wearable headsets, and taking inputs back from them, processing them, then generating the next task. Think small package shipping (FedEx, DHL, UPS) drivers with handheld devices.

How many readers' ERP is workflow capapble now, vs. just outputting sets of data with statuses insufficient to really describe the next required task?

There is an excellent article about workflow here,
http://www.jboss.com/products/jbpm/stateofworkflow

and another from CIO last year, here:
http://www.cio.com/article/106605/Business_Process_Management_A_New_Glue_or_the_Old_Soft_Shoe_/1

I keep waiting for some workflow hooks in GoogleApps, Zoho, Yahoo Mail / Yahoo Groups, etc. but so far not there, or have I missed it?