Customise at your peril!

ERP or CRM packages require weeks or months of configuration to suit an individual business, often at the cost of flexibility and integration between multiple applications.

Consider the whole package

If that sounds like doom and gloom, don`t get me wrong. I strongly endorse the choice of a pre-built ERP package. It is very alluring to consider software that can solve business problems and brings with it the promise of best-practice processes, rapid deployment and easy configuration. Wherever possible, organisations should invest in such solutions.

But remember: your choice of package must meet more than 80% of your business requirements, and you must be prepared to live without the balance, choosing rather to modify your business processes in accordance with the constraints of the package, than the other way around.

This is because extensive modification negates the value proposition of a package. Conversely put, this is the downside of customisation.

Anyone who has watched the IT market over a period of time will attest to the vast number of failed implementations they have witnessed.

Let`s look at some of the reasons for these failures:

* Modifications turn a manageable implementation project into a huge, costly and complex exercise. The Standish Group study shows that the probability of an IT project`s success decreases exponentially with the size of the project;
* If the changes you required to fit your business requirements require the vendor to modify the source code, you can almost always count on failure;
* When clients make major changes, they effectively move out of the product`s mainstream user group, and as vendors cater for common denominators, the software will no longer benefit from product R&D, nor will users have access to support.
* Extensive modification means cutting oneself off entirely from simple upgrading;
* Package vendors often do not have all the skills required for software customisation, particularly in the case of an import, necessitating importing consultants or settling for inexperience.

Sometimes you have to build it

So, while IT managers may assume that their data architecture can be built entirely from packaged application software, this is clearly not always the case.

It is generally more difficult, more time-consuming, and more costly to change 30% to 40% of an existing piece of software than it would be to build it from scratch.

Therefore, before you buy, you have to understand the business implications of using bought software: if you can`t get the features you require, you would do better to look at building your own software instead.

Note: Today, the term packaged software tends to refer to high-end enterprise software suites, as opposed to shrink-wrapped software sold through retail.