Consulting fees
Since few IT departments are staffed to handle the extra work required to implement each phase of a big ERP project, many of the items mentioned earlier require consultants. Without proper management, though, consulting fees can eat through your budget faster than a pack of mice through a chunk of cheese. It's important to make sure that in-house staff is capable of managing consultants. Consulting contracts should carefully define key deliverables, schedules, skill levels of available staff, and objectives for training internal staff. The contract should also be accompanied by a detailed specification that clearly points out the desired business objective and technical requirements. Proper planning and project management (as mentioned earlier) are important for managing consultants and holding them accountable.
The bottom line on ERP
Although ERP projects are complex and expensive, properly implemented, they are nonetheless worthwhile. Meta Group found that once fully deployed, the median annual savings from a new ERP system was $1.6 million per year.
But every ERP system must be continually maintained and upgraded to take advantage of new applications, technologies, and features. ERP software is hardly static, and there are major new developments as the software grows to embrace the Internet and as companies open up their data and business processes to partners. (See story for more about the trends now shaping ERP.)
When you realize how much is involved with ERP, you quickly realize that it is this software and the business process it describes--not the computing hardware--that lies at the real center corporate information technology.
Adrian Mello, Tech Update's e-business columnist, has covered the technology business for nearly two decades and is a former editor-in-chief of Line56, Macworld, and Upside.
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