Often I hear that people are getting swamped with the number of applications running around inside the corporate network. There’s the web ecommerce stuff, the wholesale management system, the warehouse management system, the retail POS, some half-assed portal intranet, the EDI talking to the ancient vendors, and all the EDI translators in between. If you squint, you can see the green-screen NCRs and AS400s in the back of the room still chugging away (on coal-fired 220v converters, no doubt). It becomes a zoo very quickly. The longer things are around, the harder this gets.
So, what’s an IT department to do? I know– let’s get an ERP. An ERP will solve everything! Order system out of whack? ERP! Warehouse management out-dated? ERP! Need closer control over your financial data? You bet! ERP!!
I am going to write an ERP, and I am going to name it “Jeebus 5.0″. I named it that for the all-encompasing, sin-forgiving, cause-every-little-ting-gonna-be-alright mission that an ERP will provide for a company. I will give it the 5.0 number because, in general, IT people like nice stable platforms, and shit is usually pretty stable by version 5, right? We’ve all seen companies with no ERP at all, and those who are considering an ERP, those who’ve blundered their way into one, and those who went hog-wild on an ERP, to the point where you needed to go through PeopleSoft just to find the cafeteria. My personal opinion could be boiled down to the following touchpoints:
- An ERP is like any large mammal: safe as long as it has a leash and/or cage that limits the overall range
- ERP stands for ‘Enterprise Resource Planning”, which usually centers around the finances and inventory control. Keep it there (see the first point) and not much further
- If you have a better app to run your website or to run the wiki, then keep the better app– don’t throw it into the ERP just for giggles (beware of sexy ERP saleswomen in low-cut red dresses promising their ERP will do everything)
- An ERP can control the core finances and inventory of a company, but it had better talk nicely with all these other apps that are worth keeping around. “Talk nicely” means something open and free, not .vbs or proprietary codes specific to a single vendor.
So, with those guidelines in place, I’ll start laying out my Db schema this weekend. Look for updates at http://jeebus.sourceforge.net