Part 3: Having the right approach and attitude to an ERP implementation

“Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better.” Samuel Johnson

Do you know how complex Microsoft Word and Excel are?

Because Word and Excel look so easy, people under-estimate how complex other standard systems, like an ERP, can be. If business users knew how complex those two Microsoft applications really are, they would be more thoughtful and careful when embarking on a complex software project.

In 2010 there was a debate between some of the major enterprise software influencers and bloggers on whether single or multi-tenancy was an issue for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications. On the one side was Josh Greenbaum who argued that the type of tenancy should not matter to SaaS users; on the other was Phil Wainewright (here and here) and Dennis Howlett whose views were that multi-tenancy is the only way for SaaS software. This debate is still going on.

Single-tenancy refers to a software configuration (application and database) in which each client has its own underlying application resources. Multi-tenancy is where all clients share the same underlying resources. Multi-tenancy also means that all customers get the same application upgrades and enhancements at the same time, whether they want them or not.

Part 1: Building a house on a solid foundation

You can hardly miss it these days: questions about why Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) projects hit problems, or worse, fail, appear on so many websites. I have seen many ERP implementations and thought I had some answers, but it was only after I had been involved in building a house that I could see the similarities between building projects and ERP implementations, and why we don’t see buildings collapsing in the same ways some ERP projects fail.