Had to do a course in 4th year on supply chain management. Essentially it was a course on "look at how these companies all fucked themselves by trying to implement erp systems :'D "

Wait, why are they running all those systems? I thought the whole point of erp was to do all that shit in one place?

Honestly no idea yet. I would have thought that there would be one system that can do the job that 3 of those currently do. Or even one of the systems we currently use that can do it. I know one of them is being upgraded in a few months. I don't even think the systems have talk to each other all that well either, so some data isn't always "live".

It seems to me to be pretty standard from a manufacturing point of view so there should be a way. I can only assume someone is keeping themselves in a job supporting the lot.

Oh, but there's no fax machines, which is a huge improvement!

ERP is the big ass fix it all together solution to integrate pretty much all business functions into one system, shared databases, live data etc. Everything on your list of systems, and more, could be managed by an ERP system. In fact, one of the examples we were given in class for what it's meant to replace is people in different departments using their own spreadsheets :'D

Of course that's all big idea stuff, and mostly (according to the case studies we had to do, anyway) it doesn't work. Makes a load of money for SAP & Sage and the likes, though :D

This case study is well worth a read, if you're into economic car-crash type stories. One of the biggest pharma distributors went from multi-billion dollar company to bankruptcy because of a failed ERP implemenation :'D

http://www.uta.edu/faculty/weltman/OPMA5364TW/FoxMeyer.pdf

>>In fact, one of the examples we were given in class for what it's meant to replace is people in different departments using their own spreadsheets

The data in question is actually generated from one system, and needs all the by-hand editing to prep it for import in another :'D (fail)

Just fax it over to the dba :'D

Be serious. ERP is a process where 80% of the investment funding for a business goes to building a tiny system of entirely new work which is (1) unrelated to the day to day work of the business which continues to run on whatever under-funded IT it already had and (2) packed to the gills with very sexy acronyms and plain English words such as 'digital' and 'big'. This tiny system will 'provide new and unexpected opportunities' for the business as opposed to aiding the old and difficult problems that need to be addressed. The new and unexpected opportunities will have a dramatic impact on the career prospects of a small coterie of consultants and company staff around the senior VP running ERP. They will thrive at huge expense until the time comes to move on to a new project.

That was pretty much my understanding of it after taking that course, and I think that must have been what they wanted us to take away from it, seeing as I got a ridiculously high score for my exam paper for saying as much.

That case study is interesting though, your post on mainframes reminded me about it the other day: old mainframe system running 420k transactions per night, shiny new erp system running on shiny new hp servers managed 10k transactions per night.

An overnight job failed last night, meaning the software which forecasts demand is showing all the wrong data.