Musings Upon Grassy Hill

In many smaller companies, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems record the operations of the organization in great detail. Every transaction, from customer order to production require to work order to purchase order to receiving report to pick ticket to packing and shipping transactions to invoice to payment record are handled by a piece of software backed up by a large database. That data is most often viewed via periodic reports, internal detail reports, and possibly an executive dashboard application that summarizes the various sales, inventory, accounts receivable and accounts payable activities in (near) real time. (more…)

For your consideration… A recently concluded ERP implementation survey found that 93% of ERP implementations take longer than expected. 93%! How, then, is it unexpected? Here’s another finding: 59% of implementations cost more than initially assumed. There’s a shocker. And 57% suffered “operational stoppages”, which means that they could not carry on their business for some period of time. No wonder people cringe when the subject of ERP software comes up. Unfortunately, it gets worse. I think the worst statistic in this survey by Panorama Consulting Group is that, for all of the grief that the implementations cause, only 21% realized half or more of their projected benefits they were expecting from the software. Dismal. (more…)

Writing web applications is a beautiful thing. Everyone who uses a computer understands a little about a web browser so they automatically have one less barrier to learning your new program. Plus, many people have their browser open so they don’t have to switch to a desktop application. However, there is one part of the learning curve that you cannot bypass. The user is still going to need to learn how to move around in your app. They still need to learn to use the menu(s) and navigation in your program. (more…)