Amazing ERP-systems opportunities are more like mirrors and beads for barbarians

ERP System Choice Rule No. 19:
" If in the sales/presentation process the prospective supplier begins harping on incredibly diverse and sophisticated functionality, then the hoodwink probability in the 90 per cent area."

Why so?

Here is a real world example.
Ulmart, greatly renowned for their epic SAP implementation achievements, automatically became a target company for most sellers of software whose practical uses are as dubious as fabulous is its price.
The logic is clear: if the SAP guys managed somehow to push their miracle product, we might be lucky, too!

So a WMS system producer comes to Ulmart to present them. One of those who charge many million dollars for what we sell for twenty thousand.

And now the standard script of pushing another %GreatProduct% is played. And it is damn specific that the script itself is invariant in its main aspects to the Great Product’s name; auto-replace SAP with e.g. Manhattan, and no one will see any difference. Those 70, 120 or more page presentations are read by no one anyway – not even by their authors, that is, by generations of copy-and-pasters and auto replacers. And no one listens, of course.

Now the presentation culminates – at the point when the stage director expects the listeners’ minds to be overwhelmed by the blast of emotions produced by the glitter of the mirrors and beauty of the beads falling out of the bales onto the ground before the shocked Indians.
​The narrative deals with an electronic queue for the unloading of suppliers’ trucks. The truck’s number plate is entered into the goods arrival document. As the truck passes the checkpoint, its number is captured by the camera, recognized and identified with its associated goods receipt. The system analyzes the rate of unloading of the trucks already docked and/or queued to the dock shelters and determines the number of the gate to which the truck must come. The gate number and the place in its queue are communicated to the driver.

At this very moment, after shocking the uninitiated listeners’ minds to their very bottom, the presenter deals his coup de grace:
"Now, guys, how does it work now at your company?"

Here’s how.
The checkpoint operator looks up the goods forwarding documents, finds the goods receipt, enters the driver’s mobile number into it and puts it into the Unloading Expected status. The goods receipt joins the general unloading queue.
After an unloading gate gets free, the receiving clerk clicks on the next document to pick it out of the general queue. The driver gets a call or SMS message with the gate number. And what if he is slow to pull up? The next one will be called, while the ‘missing’ one will be placed at the end of the general queue.
And everything will be done automatically.

So the presentation is somewhat screwed up at its zenith.

The reader is now prompted to draw his/her own conclusion on the relative advantages of the goods acceptance business process from the major company charging millions and from Ultimate WMS worth twenty thousand.​

Including field workers’ prosaic reflections, say, on the problematic readability of truck numbers in the Russian climate and after Russian roads for most of the year, and the like.

We return to Rule 19 at the beginning of this text. As you listen to the presentation being delivered by the ERP system seller, focused mainly on its bells and whistles, you should understand one thing:

• If the seller concentrates on jingle bells, he is not interested in discussing the substance. Imagine choosing a car and the car dealer talking about handsomely grooved winkers, ’see what a sexy antenna comes out’, ’a changer for seven disks while all have five at most’ — and not a single word about the car’s engine, price, or general outline at least. You are asked to rely on the manufacturer’s prestige: ’A good car and — just look at those lovely grooves on the winkers’... well, you understand.
  
  
  
• Even if the bells and whistles (B&Ws) have enchanted you and you’ve decided to buy into an implementation project, you should understand that you’ll receive the working B&Ws last if at all. Thus, in the above goods acceptance example, you will not enjoy your optical number plate recognition (just to nuke those flies up the wheel)until the warehouse itself -all the main warehouse business processes — starts working on the new platform.
  Until this happy moment arrives, your excellent and expensive cameras will busily recognize the truck numbers into the Void of Chaos.
  
  
• The value of those B&Ws in terms of both practical utility (see below) and the labor intensity of implementation is within one percent of the total implementation project budget. That is, again, if it’s the B&Ws that they are dangling before you, then you will pay 99% of your money for things of no interest to you — in the infrequent case where the project is a success.
  ​More often, all the money will go down the toilet.
  
  
• allthe B&Ws being shown to you can be implemented in virtually any workable system.
  Thus, in the example above, if those Ulmart logisticians had been less competent and more lickeous to the monkey bait of beads and mirrors (and thus more like the standard target audience of such presentations) and fallen for the number-plate recognition feature, we’d have provided them with such functionality for less than $10,000 and in less than three weeks of work — including testing. Again, paying a million or more dollars makes no sense.
  
  

To put it in a nutshell.
As was repeated on numerous occasions, an ERP system is a business tool.
As is, by the way, any system for business – whatever the set of capital letters in the acronym.
The only final purpose of a good and usable business instrument is to boost profit. Whether through greater sales, smaller costs or otherwise. But the root is always higher profit. And where it is unclear just how the business tool will (or at least could) increase the profit, it is 100% humbug rather than a business tool.
Jingle bells and fart whistles do nothing to increase profit – or they would be called differently.
​As practical-minded Anglo-Saxons say, ‘if an unknown animal looks like a dog, barks like a dog and bites like a dog, it is certainly a dog". And, conversely, if a dog NEITHER looks like a dog NOR looks like one, …So you understand.