About ERP Systems

There is a page on the Manufacturing Practices website that has been there for about five years. It tells the story of a company that called asking for an opinion about interfacing their "Job Management Tool" to an ERP System. Their goal was to use the accounting piece of that system. Here is the link: I'm Sorry But Your Duck Is Dead.

I won't drag out the issues involved, but suffice it to say that they contracted for remote custom education to help them better understand what an ERP System is and is not and what the ERP System will do for them and TO THEM. The effort was a success. The son and the feisty business owner who thought the proposal was "outrageous since I did not EVEN know their business" (his words, not mine) signed the note.

During the education, we explained why KPIs were more than Key Performance Indicators and why we refer to them as “Keeping People Involved®.” Many benefits were automatic outcomes of that education including, proper Forecasting, Forecast Error measurements, Cycle Counting efforts, On Time Shipments, Throughput Improvements, Project Management considerations, and Leadership requirements during and after the ERP Implementation. You know, those things that make manufacturing companies competitive in the marketplace instead of, “oh yes, by the way, we also make things.”

The thank you letter did not come immediately after the class; it was months after they started using that ERP System that the letter came. By sending the letter, they were saying that we truly helped make them successful.

I remember my first argument about the role of education; it came when I was a programmer at Control Data, writing an MRPII System for mini-computers. The education effort involved having other peers (programmers) review the LOGIC, produced before the code writing. What a stupid idea, I rationalized, I’ve been programming for more than 6 years, why should I have to think about what I am about to do before I do it. The ANSWER came when management asked us to write a program to put a Bill-of-Materials and put all the parts in a table arranged by Low-Level-Code.

Half of the group just wrote code for the request and half the group did it the “new way.” My program was 100+ lines of code long, which was about half way between the upper and lower number of lines of code for others in the first group. The ‘other group’, as a team, wrote the program in ten lines of code after creating the proper logic to deploy to write the code.

The real shocker really came with our tests. Where our group did not have a “successful” first run attempt with test data, the other group did. With that, both groups saw the reasoning behind management’s desire for us to think first, and only after that, act. Our “ready, fire, aim,” quickly became, “ready.., aim.., fire.” When Manufacturing Practices, suggests that companies understand what ERP is before they look for, implement or re-implement an ERP System, we teach them the lesson of “ready.., aim.., fire.”

Here is a take away. Business owners and C-Suites must constantly monitor the expense of education against an investment in their people. Businesses have no way to measure the accumulative costs of remaining complacent. However, by failing to invest in people, leaders assume absolute business risk and at best, the possible loss of any competitive advantages. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions."