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Is it possible to overcustomize an ERP solution?
What are the drawbacks?
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7 Answers
Absolutely - unless you are the consultants making the customizations. The key driver for customization has to be ROI.
Given that most ERP sellers make their money off the customization work, you can find yourself spending a lot of money in redoing customizations when a majur (and sometimes a minor) release comes out - particularly if it contains changes to how a specific function works.
One favorite example is that the visibile function library has been streamlined so that a particularly useful function variant is no longer available.
So make sure every customization has an owner in company management that will acccept the chargebacks for that work on a recurring basis. If they are unwilling to accept that, then don't support the customization. You may still end up having to do it, but at least you can then point the finger at the guilty party and assign the cost to them during your annual budget review.
Without a doubt. I have been doing big ERP and related applications consulting for more than a decade. I have not seen one customer who would stick with the "vanilla: software. Customers who have implemented ERP in the early 2000's regret now due to these over customizations, as it prevents them with the following.
1. Ability to upgrade to newer versions
2. Adopt changes to business models and related process needs
3. Overhead to maintain customized solution.
4. Knowledge drain of the skills that did those customizations.
5. Lack of support or high price maintenance costs by ERP Vendors.
Corporations are realizing these pitfalls and moving away from over customization, but still many newbie customers fall in this pitfall. Cheers !
While it is true that vendors can receive considerable revenue by programming and supporting customizations, it is not true that all vendors encourage such activity. As an ERP vendor myself, my company's policy is to be very open with clients (prospective or otherwise) about the pitfalls of 'over-customization'. We don't want to just sell software. We are selling solutions. We don't want to create a house of cards that we can't adequately support, or that we need to retain specific staff or talent in order to support - long-term, that's not a sustainable model for us.
For clients, over-customization tends to create inflexible solutions. When business conditions or processes change, clients need to be nimble enough to react quickly. Over-customization restricts that.
In certain instances, over-customization may mean clients don't have access (or reasonable access) to vendor's future improvements. Clients pay for those improvements in the way of support and maintenance contracts whether they take advantage of them or not. And then potentially pay a premium to support one-off customizations. There's some bad math in there somewhere...
The need or desire for over-customization may be a sign that the solution wasn't the best fit for the business in the first instance, so having some feeling for how wide the gap is before signing on the dotted line is a good idea.
For clients where the business model truly is so unique that commercially-available packages don't suit without vast customization, finding something that can be utilized as a 'toolkit' and maintained in-house might be something to explore.
Perhaps the real question here is how to identify overly-customized solutions...when are the changes too much?
Yes you can over customize an ERP. The largest drawback is that you have created a custom version of the ERP and likely won't be able to take any upgrades - which you will be expected to even though you can't.
You can over customize anything. Focus on the the core business, company strategies (not IT's), and demand and RIO.
TCW
The problem with many ERP solutions and implementations is that the underlying business process have not been reviewed for inefficiencies and improvements leading management to customize the application to meet the current flawed business process. Before any ERP solution is implemented, management should conduct full and complete business process reviews to ensure that processes are efficient and support business initiatives. Once processes have been improved, much of the perceived "customization" may not be necessary. In other words, over customization may be the result of managers forcing an outdated, inefficient business process on the ERP application in an effort to automate the bad process.
Possible but not advisable. It is better to scan the vendor horizon and pick a vendor whose ERP process closely matches yours and see if you can modify the basic process to match theirs.There can be ADDON modules maybe, but the basic process should not be tampered with. Process modifications can cause problems when applying upgrades and patches.
Most production processes all over the world are largely similar there is only one major large swathe path by which we go: Procure (Raw Materials), Manufacture, Sell, with Design if necessary coming in-between somewhere. Most ERP Manufacturers follow this with slight variations. The trick is to find the vendor closest to your process.
Sometimes some vendors refuse even seemingly simple requirements. In the East(India atleast), the number system is xxxxx,00,00,00,000. In the West it is
xxxxx,000,000,000. Our ERP vendor has also refused to make this modification. A seperate plugin for cheque printing was developed by us.
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