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Robert Hahn 7th Mar 2011
ERP and CRM are less about software than they are about business processes. Companies who acquire one of these, whether open source or proprietary, are in for months of planning, process analysis, training, and customization. The "software installation" ends up affecting everyone from the mailroom clerk to the CEO.

That's why the hand-holding and 'consulting' is such a big part of it. If a company has never had an ERP system before, they literally don't know what they don't know. And most of what they need to know has very little to do with "software" per se. The problems will end up being more about corporate culture, resistance to change, fiefdoms resisting loss of power and control... all stuff well outside the skill set of most IT shops.

You can't automate a business process if the people working there don't even know what it is. Get all the people associated with processing an order from the incoming mail through the shipping dock, put them into a room, and ask them to diagram how the order flows through the system. Nine times out of then you'll find that (a) no one person in the entire company knows how an order makes it through the system, (b) there are 'holes' in the process where A sends it to B, C gets it from D, but no one knows how it gets from B or D or why D even needs to see it. (The answer will turn out to be, "Because we've always done it that way.")

Open Bravo strikes me as an excellent business opportunity for small management consulting shops who can drag all the participants into the conference rooms, figure out how the business processes work, tell IT what to automate, and then train everybody on how it works and what the transition will look like.
ie8 fix

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