In my last blog, I mentioned a glass bottle manufacturer where I used to work. Let’s return there for a moment, specifically to one of the factories. Pretty inhospitable places, particularly at the height of the South African summer. Nonetheless, even back then (mid 1990s), the control systems were capable of dropping out data.

For most of my career, I have been engaged in making decisions, or helping others make decisions. Way back in 1997, when I was just a boy, I used a financial tool known as the Hillier Model to help a large South African glass bottle manufacturer decide where to put capital in order to best serve market conditions.

I look in my diary – I see two days on a site somewhere the other side of absolutely nowhere, otherwise known as Norfolk. Objective: ‘Improve planning process’.

As we all know, regardless of best endeavors, procedure and protocol some ERP implementations go more smoothly than others. People, or as I like to call them, Variables, cannot always be brought around to our way of thinking in the limited time we get to implement an ERP system

In this age of Industry-four-point-whatever, the stuff of interthings, customizable screens that can make coffee and excise bunions, massive data and so on, it can be fairly easy to forget that some ERP users may not want every bell and whistle in order for their solution to work optimally for their situation.