Blog: 3
A shocking real story

Recently one of our senior associates enquired with a senior purchase officer of a reputed company about how he plans his purchases. This company had spent a fortune in a top end ERP system 10 years back and had just upgraded with the latest version.

This ERP had wonderful features including state-of-the-art planning features.  Our associate was expecting the purchase officer to be using one of these wonderful features. He was keen to learn and get some inputs on how a top end ERP system handles material planning. But to his shock and surprise the purchase officer click opened a spread-sheet from his desk-top.

Why on earth was he using a spread-sheet when about 24 variants of material planning were at his disposal? This was a big question in our friend's mind. What about millions spent on this system? Was the management aware of the actual status of the level of usage of the ERP?

With bit of hesitation our learned friend asked the purchase officer why he was not using planning tools available in the ERP. The purchase officer said that he had lots of expectations from the ERP system but the reality is that it has been of no use to him in his role. In fact he confessed that only routine work is carried out on this system and there must be hardly anyone making use of the higher functions. Most of them did not know what exactly the various features did. Nobody knew how to configure a particular functionality. Very few ventured to click and discover something out of curiosity but eventually gave up to caution.

When such a scenario could exist in one of the bigger public listed companies what must be the smaller manufacturing companies doing?

This was an eye opener for us. Now we have made it a point to ensure that all our customers benefit from the ERP system in the real sense. We now have a methodical approach to ensure this.

What is the use of an integrated software system if it does not function as a Decision Support System? What is the use if it does not automate routine tasks? These benefits, we feel, are the basics that we have to ensure that they are delivered. And the user cannot be blamed for that.