Despite the best of plans, ERP implementations often go wrong because customers have unique requirements that are always evolving and vendors will haul out the sledgehammers to force their solutions to fit – even if they weren’t designed to deliver what the client wanted in the first place.
It’s like trying to squeeze a watermelon into a small cup. Keep forcing it in and you’ll end up with nothing but a messy pulp.
Every company is different. They compete in different markets, have a different target audience, and need solutions that support the different verticals they play in. No one solution can ever fit all.
SYSPRO recognises that we can’t be all things to all men. That’s why we strongly believe the model that works best for our customers is one that is flexible, adaptable, and able to support each of our customers’ needs – no matter what these may be.
That is ultimately what matters. Organisations want to be able to choose what works best for their unique requirements, and they want to be able to do so quickly and effortlessly.
They also need a platform that will help them to build applications that they can then run anywhere across their network, regardless of the vendor or environment.
This is where SYSPRO comes in. We offer tools that our customers can use to develop customised applications and run these on any platform they choose, including non-SYSPRO systems.
SYSPRO a platform for growth
A good example of this is SYSPRO Workflow Services (SWS), which companies can use to “workflow-enable” or automate any application within their IT environment. It lets users build and manage business processes through an easy-to-use interface, and these can then run in any ERP system. Simply put, you can tap SWS to automate any application you want, and you don’t have to run that application on SYSPRO ERP if you don’t want to.
Not many ERP vendors are willing to do this and could result in their customers feeling trapped as it poses a risk to their ability to move from one ERP platform to another in future for whatever reason.
Another example is SYSPRO’s adoption over a decade ago of service-oriented architecture (SOA) – we call it SYSPRO e.net Solutions. Applications built using an SOA architecture can communicate and exchange data with each over a network, without the need for human intervention. The principles behind the architecture enable customers to build, deploy, and integrate any third-party modules they want. It’s a philosophy that I still believe can best support an organisation’s IT needs today.
At SYSPRO we encourage customers to keep their ERP data on our platform, but urge them to use best-of-breed solutions that they should feel free to choose on their own. We don’t live in our own SYSPRO box, so to speak. We want to offer our customers a platform for their growth, and we don’t believe we can do that by forcing our clients to use only what we tell them to use.
Apart from SWS, we offer several tools to support this including SYSPRO Espresso mobile applications and Executive Dashboards, and we do this without forcing our customers to incur additional licensing fees.
SYSPRO Executive Dashboards provide access to interactive visual interpretations of real-time data, allowing businesses to measure, monitor, and analyse what-if scenarios running on their ERP systems. While we provide some predefined dashboards so you can immediately access an overall view of your business through select-and-drop, we’re fully aware your organisation also has unique data requirements, and our dashboards also enable you to create and personalize your dashboards. As with the SWS, you can access your customised Executive Dashboards on any environment such as a Windows desktop. This means you can run a dashboard built on SYSPRO and any of your third-party suppliers can access that dashboard even if they don’t have a SYSPRO system.
My previous post also explains how the SYSPRO Espresso mobile solution is not only plug-and-play, users also have the flexibility to tailor the look and feel of the application to fit their company’s unique requirements. Customers can also visit our app store to download other customised mobile ERP solutions that industry peers might share on the app store. And because it was developed on HTML 5 as the rendering agent, SYSPRO Espresso is cross-platform, browser-independent, and device-agnostic. Write the app once and you can run it on any platform, be it on a desktop or mobile device.
And that’s the basic philosophy behind everything we do. Build on SYSPRO, run it anywhere you choose. The choice is yours.
