Buying ERP Has Not Become Easier

We are seeing a market where the number of vendors and products has not decreased. At the same time, new solutions are being developed that enable customers to strengthen their competitiveness through new digital offerings — but which also create many open questions about which direction to take. Even though most systems now live in the cloud, do not assume that buying ERP has become easier.

We still see many of the same vendors that existed 10 years ago, but we also see that the ERP core is shrinking while being supplemented with a wide range of smaller solutions. These include traditional best-of-breed solutions, but increasingly also new apps and small cloud-native applications — some of which may only be a few years old. These solutions are often easy to acquire — sometimes just a credit card payment and a few steps away from being up and running. Such solutions are frequently purchased by the business without involving IT — but reality catches up quickly. How do you ensure a proper architecture? How do you ensure that all these solutions are maintained? And how do you manage master data across the many new applications?

We see the ERP core shrinking and being supplemented by a wide range of best-of-breed third-party solutions.

So, while it may initially seem simple to acquire new business systems, the task becomes significantly larger once the day-to-day reality sets in — when the solutions must be maintained and integrated to ensure they meet business needs.