ERP Maturation and Implementation Issues Survey

Welcome to the Adaptive Growth Inaugural Winter Survey of ERP Maturation and Implementation Issues.  We’d like to solicit your help in determining how the top management of manufacturing and distribution companies views maintaining and/or replacing aging ERP software.  We currently have two primary (and, we feel, inadequate) sources of information about this.  The first is the anecdotal scuttlebutt everyone working in the ERP space is bombarded with every day.  We distrust it deeply.  We think that in business, just as in politics, the answers you get depend on the questions you ask; and we in the ERP business space almost always ask the questions that are of concern to us.  Our second source of information is of course our clients.  We think we understand their concerns quite well, but they are hardly unbiased – after all, they chose to do business with us at least in part because their own concerns coincide with our own.  We’re not sure how representative they really are.  In fact, we have sound reasons for doubting that they are very representative at all.

We tend to doubt that our clients are representative of all manufacturers and distributors for a somewhat paradoxical reason.  They are primarily concerned with the high level of risk associated with ERP acquisitions and implementations (roughly a quarter of which fail entirely, and fully three quarters of which experience some significant degree of disappointment).  Because we are in business to help mitigate the risk of project failure, we find a natural fit with them.  But they can’t be typical, simply because the figures for failure are so high!  Managing risk is mostly a matter of focused awareness of the factors that cause risk, and if most companies were aware of these factors, then most companies would succeed – which, unfortunately, is not the case of ERP implementation projects.  So factors other than risk management are driving most ERP implementation efforts, and this survey is designed to elicit them. Your reward for participating – aside from the sheer fun of it all – will be to receive a copy of the completed survey, which we anticipate will be available by the end of February.  It should be an eye opener for all of us.  You’ll notice that we ask for some detailed, written answers.  We plan on putting some serious work into this, and we plan on distributing everybody’s input to everybody who offered any.  We think you’ll be glad you participated.

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