Weather: Technology Agility for ERP
Weather: Technology Agility for ERP - Overview
Unpredictability, like the weather, change is the hallmark, and either the delight or the demon for business/ technology executives. The only given is that change for either is guaranteed, and yet, the primary emphasis both from a planning, budgeting and even for ERP selection criteria remains fixed and point-in-time oriented. Organizations often make their ERP buying decisions (or indecisions to stay with what they have) by looking at today’s needs and those that they can perhaps foresee in the near future. For example, a company may have embraced an acquisition strategy, a new line of business, consolidation of business operations – and may be planning for those strategies.
However, the more important decision criteria needs to be much more forward looking and outside of foreseeable parameters. In other words, and in keeping with vintner’s terms:
- What if there is a drought (existing buyer market dissolves)?
- An unexpected sunshine (business opportunity based on a competitor exiting/selling their business)?
- An earthquake (a primary market opportunity/challenge that changes buying behaviour)?
- Or, a parasite that can destroy the vine (the emergence of a new negative situation on any business level)?
Technology Architecture, Cost-Effective ERP
Technology Architecture, Cost-Effective ERP
Will the technology architecture allow organizations to respond quickly and cost-effectively from either an opportunistic or damage control need or will they need to endure the cost, organizational disruption and pain of ripping out all of those grapevines and starting anew?
McKinsey says, in its 2006 report, “The Adaptable Corporation” that one of the greatest challenges facing corporations today is a “complexity catastrophe” with business planning.
The Problem? “Highly interdependent systems, such as large software programs become so complex that (corporations) go into gridlock”
Because Agresso’s VITA architecture has limitless configurability and re-configurability, organizations can continually adapt their infrastructure to gain a powerful business edge over competitors with restricted agility. Customizations in Agresso Business world are different from other ERP packages in that, as stated earlier, the application source code is never modified. Customization coding occurs at an overlay or extraction layer.
Meaning, in simple terms, changes, upgrade, any desired response to “the weather” occur at the most simplistic level possible with extremely minimal time/resource/cost impact. You can change it, and change it again and again, using internal resources. Viewing IT change-management as a resource-smart opportunity (and not a gridlock-threatening event) is a radical departure from the way ERP solutions are analyzed and purchased today. Organization executives selecting Agresso, continually report that in their pre-planning, they tend to “over budget” (vs. under budget) for planned changes. They also report that changes to the Agresso system occur faster than anticipated and without external IT resources. The savings using Agresso is ongoing and the solution has virtually no expiration…it keeps on living.
Weather: Technology Agility for ERP - Conclusion
In summary, Agresso’s development team has optimally configured the solution to have lockstep intelligent integration between the data model, the business process and the reporting/analytics delivery model. But, equally important, Agresso’s VITA architecture has separated the database, business logic, customisation layer and user interface to optimize the IT department’s ability to deliver business agility and avoid the “complexity catastrophe” of competitive solutions from SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Lawson, etc.
Go back to: Agresso's VITA ERP Architecture - Technology Framework