Enterprise-Wide Software Solutions : Integration Strategies and Practices

This book is a tutorial and reference for evaluating and implementing a software package solution that allows a company to migrate from a legacy system. It provides practical advice to managers at companies implementing a variety of software solutions; furthermore, the book is not product specific.

Most corporate officers charged with purchasing package software products are not experienced buyers, and there is very little information available to guide you through this process. Enterprise-Wide Software Solutions is the thorough tutorial and lasting reference you need to help you implement, use, and manage these powerful tools. For those organizations seeking to obtain the maximum benefits of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software implementations, this book provides a basis for planning and managing expectations among all relevant groups - corporate management, information technology staff, users, outside consultants, and the software vendor. This book helps you reduce costs and hours to more reasonable levels. Crucial topics - budgeting, project team organization, cost justification, customization, outsourcing, reengineering, testing, training, and more - are covered in detail, allowing you to concentrate on the selection process, implementation strategy, and package software product that is best for your company.

In an effort to become more flexible and competitive, companies are migrating from legacy systems to integrated business management package software products. These products represent the future for companies that need to streamline their business processes and improve the sharing of information in order to compete in the rapidly evolving business world. Yet adopting a package software solution is not a process to be taken lightly, and this critical change can represent a tremendous investment of time and resources.

Most corporate officers charged with purchasing package software products are not experienced buyers, and there is very little information available to guide you through this process. Enterprise-Wide Software Solutions is the thorough tutorial and lasting reference you need to help you implement, use, and manage these powerful tools. This book provides a basis for planning and managing expectations among all relevant groups--corporate management, information technology staff, users, outside consultants, and the software vendor.

Companies are investing significant amounts of money and time to implement business package solutions. This book helps you reduce these costs and hours to more reasonable levels. Crucial topics--budgeting, project team organization, cost-justification, customization, outsourcing, reengineering, testing, training, and more--are covered in detail, allowing you to concentrate on the selection process, implementation strategy, and package software product that is best for your company.

This book addresses the evaluation, selection, installation, implementation, use, and economic advantages of using business software packages. In the United States and all over the world, companies are installing software packages for business automation at an unprecedented rate: financial, manufacturing, distribution, and, primarily, integrated packages, which promise to cover all internal functions in one product. Most of the firms and their corporate officers who purchase these packages are not experienced buyers of such products and related services. This book establishes a baseline for planning and managing expectations between corporate managers, their information technology staff, and outside consultants.

The human issues are critical here--not the technical ones--and the human issues are less likely to change quickly. Although automation has become a tool kit for every manager at every type and size of organization, there is little material available to guide the journeyman in how to implement, use, or manage these tools. The distributed, integrated, automated environment has become an avalanche that threatens to sweep up the business community; it has already outpaced the educational mechanisms necessary to support it.

The book is a guide to what to expect when a company is getting ready to purchase and implement a new software package. It provides an "A to Z" perspective of the many technical and nontechnical elements that must be considered. It provides a framework for implementing all the bits and pieces that make up a system.

Experience shows that the real problems with business packages are comparability (evaluation and selection), evangelism (getting corporate consensus), training and motivating the end users, and maintenance (support, extensions). These issues are very well covered by the author.

This book can be read and used to establish a "common language" among groups of people who rarely speak the same language today: senior business managers, information technology managers, information technology key users and end users, and external business consultants.

Companies are spending significant amounts of money and time to implement business package solutions. This book can be of tremendous value to the business community by helping readers reduce the necessary costs and time required to install new company-wide software to more reasonable levels.

The book, however, does not go into a lot of details on such critical issues such as change management and business case development for the project.

This is a good introduction book and is an easy read. I recommend it for readers who want to understand the issues of ERP at a high level.

To survive, thrive and beat the competition in today‘s brutally competitive world one had to manage the future. Managing the future means managing the information. In order to manage the information, in order to deliver high quality information to the decision makers at the right time, in order to automate the process of data collection, collation and refinement, organizations have to make Information Technology an ally and should harness its full potential and use it in the best way possible.

Almost all organizations are turning to some sort of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) package as a solution to their information management problems. ERP packages if chosen correctly, implemented judiciously and used efficiently will raise the productivity and profits of companies dramatically. But many a company fails in this because of wrong product, incompetent and haphazard implementation and inefficient or ineffective usage. To work successfully, the ERP solutions need a lot of factors to click. There should be good people who know the business, the vendor should be good and his package should be best one for the company‘s needs, the ERP consultants should be good, the implementation should be planned well and executed perfectly and the end–user training should be done so that the people understand the system and the effect of their efforts on the overall success of the program.

Often the responsibility of implementing the ERP solution will be given to a person or a group of people who do not have much experience in implementing such systems. They might be good managers with excellent track records and they might have encyclopedic knowledge of the functioning of the company. But the number of options available in the ERP marketplace is simply overwhelming–SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Bann, JD Edwards, etc.–to name a few. These are the major players and their and hundreds of small timers who enjoy considerable market shares in their own niche markets.

How to choose the right product? How to choose the right vendor? What options and modules to purchase? How to deal with the vendors and consultants? How to plan and execute the implementation? How to plan in advance so that the program can be rolled out in minimum time and with maximum effective ness? What are the things that could go wrong? Who are the people who can be of help? The list of questions is endless! Every vendor will claim that their product is the ideal and their support is the best. So the managers are faced with a tough proposition. They just can‘t make a `trial and error‘ decision making. It is either `do it right the first time‘ or `going out of business‘ proposition. The huge costs involved in the ERP implementation allow no margin of error, rework or correction.

The timing of the book `Enterprise–Wide Software Solutions‘ by Sergio Lozinsky could not have better. It is an ideal book for managers or professionals who are entrusted with the task of implementing the ERP solutions in their company. It a good book for people who are thinking of implementing ERP solutions, it is an ideal primer for and ERP consultant, programmer and end–user. The real value of this book lies in the fact that, it helps in giving the reader an excellent overview (the big picture) of the ERP solutions, the packages, the benefits, the problems, the roles each has to play, and so on.

It is written in a simple, easy–to–read, jargon free and pleasant style. The design and layout helps a lot in improving the readability. The organization of the book is logical and clever; the reader is read from one topic starting from selection of a package to implementation problems in a clear and logical manner. The flow of the topics is real nice. The chapter `Some Additional Ideas‘ is a real bonus. There are no appendices. One on the various vendors, a brief overview of each product and where one can obtain more information would have been real nice. Similarly the a listing on the ERP resources on the Internet like mailing lists, sites dedicated to ERP issues, etc. could have been very useful to the reader. But the author has packed so much information in such a cute little book (190 page including index), that it is worth its weight in gold.

A `must read‘ for managers, ERP professionals and anyone who wants to know about ERP in general. This book should definitely added to every manager‘s reading list.

The author has also been a guest lecturer for a class we delivered to partners who were interested in the selling of implementation services and the successful management of client expectations through all stages of the project.

I would highly recommend this book to any consultant or client member of an implementation project team who is relatively new to the ERP arena and even as a refresher to more experienced practitioners.