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Ensuring
E-Business
Success by
Learning from
ERP Failures
Herb Krasner
I
n the 1990s, a plethora of companies at- ing, and then moved into ERP. SAP started by
tempted to use enterprise resource planning specializing in manufacturing automation before
systems to support and improve their internal expanding into other areas. Thus, each product
business processes or to address Y2K com- derives its strengths and weaknesses from its his-
pliance issues. During my recent involvement in tory and its companys current business strategies.
troubleshooting several failed ERP projects, I dis- Some vendors design their products to be flex-
covered a set of common problems that besets ible in capturing and using customer business
these projects.As the shift toward e-business accel- processes; others dictate the processes to be used.
erates in this decade, more companies will face For example, Oracles ERP product is among the
similar problems. Un- most flexible; SAPs is among the least flexible.
Although enterprise derstanding the impli-
cations of these prob-
Over the past few years, ERP products special-
ized for particular industry segmentssuch as the
resource planning lems and learning how apparel industrys JBA System 21 Stylehave
to mitigate the risks also emerged.
may be the toughest they pose will be vital to Highly complex, ERP systems contain many
project youve ever the success of ERP pro- hardware, software, and peopleware components
jects on and off the that can be interconnected in a variety of patterns.
attempted, doing it Web. Pop the hood on one of these systems and youll
right will be the key find dozens of parts and millions of lines of code.
ERP DEFINED These systems are further complicated by the het-
to implementing ERP productssuch erogeneity of the connected components, the
as those by SAP, Baan, newness of the underlying technology, and the
a successful JDE, SSA, JBA, Or- need for integration into the clients total IT envi-
e-business. acle, and PeopleSoft ronment. Some ERP components are self-con-
conceptually contain a tained software packageseither custom-built or
set of functional com- standard products. For example, SAP/R3, Baan,
ponents, integrated around an enterprise data and others now offer various client-server prod-
warehouse. These components provide auto- ucts that reside within an overall ERP system
mated support in traditional business process architecture.
areas such as inventory control, material require-
ments planning, and order processing.
With each product suite emerging from a dif-
ferent historical perspective, todays ERP prod- Inside
ucts offer a wide variety of capabilities. People-
Soft, for example, began by specializing in back-
office systems, then expanded into the front office.
Strategic Options for
Oracle specialized in relational database man- Enterprise Reengineering
agement systems, branched into data warehous-
AN E-BUSINESS
Figure 2. Typical project life-cycle model. SYSTEM PROJECT MODEL
A corporate e-business project typi-
E-business goal cally consists of five major phases, as
shown in Figure 2. These phases, per-
Strategy definition formed incrementally, usually overlap
heavily.
I
the planning is sound. Often, people think they know what f you consider your e-business system project to be cru-
processes they want to automate right to the point when cial to the future of your organization, you should want
the requested software packages actually come in-house. to treat the knowable risks to success formally and
Then gap analysis tells them it would be a lot cheaper to proactively so that you can focus resources and mitigate
adapt their processes than to rebuild the software, so its potential project failures. The techniques Ive presented
back to the planning phase again. here can provide tools for starting this process.
e-business strategy,
project management approaches,
RENEW
complex technology and systems, and
end-user resistance.