Discussion on:

Selecting an ERP system: Build or buy?

I agree with the statements given, but believe there are other significant issues to take into account:

Support - with an off-the-shelf you get support in the vendor's time, but don't have to provide your own staff. With a custom solution, the more the solution grows the more time is spent providing support & fixes and the less developing enhancements. However, you employ the staff so likely to be more timely.

Scope of application - whilst an in-house system may be good for minor tasks such as order processing, it requires a lot of man-years to develop a large, fully-integrated solution. You may end up spending more on development costs than you would purchasing a pre-packaged app; after all, lots of customers are paying for thoseman-years whereas if you write your own clone of SAP then you're paying for them all!

Quality - Unless very carefully managed you are likely to encounter more quality problems with an in-house system. Depending upon the impact of the inevitable bugs you might be faced with a potential disaster, or it might purely be an inconvenience. This risk-assesment needs to be made before deciding.

Budgetary planning - a pre-packaged solution is likely to have a hefty lump sum price tag followed byannual maintenance. With an in-house system, you get to spread the spend a lot more.

Reliance on staff/vendor - if you're in-house system is documented mainly in the heads of the developers, they have a major hold on the business. On the otherhand, this also holds true for the vendor of a packaged solution. However, you aren't at the mercy of a few people - though you must consider the vendors stability and long-term viability.

Most businesses that don't have MRP/ERP don't have a handle on their inventory. Without 98% inventory accuracy, you're just kidding yourself. Before investing the big bucks to get an MRP/ERP system, lock up the stockroom and start cycle counting. When you get to 98-99% inventory accuracy, you're ready to consider MRP.

We have an custom developed application that covers most of the organization processes except two functions. Can we add these two missing functionality to make it 100% custom ERP or going for a packaged one?

Regards
Goutam
goutamsg@gmail.com

As far as you miss only two functionality and happy with your existing custom develoed application, Why you want to buy a new ERP system ?. It is always good to have your own custom developed application for long term benefit, Later also when you need more customization or new funstionality addition it will be easy for you to add to your custom application with minimum cost.

But make sure you will have a good technology team behind your software.

Anyway packed solution always with generic functionality. So difficult to fit all of your business requirements with a generci ERP system. And ofcourse customization charge also will be very high for such application.

own built solutions are more inexpensive.We need to maintain the staffs. but at same time off-self product is not accurate matching to company system.

If you can have a future plan to market your solution to other companies, my suggestion is to build a custom solutions.

But you should have make sure a strong technology team behind this idea.

The advantage is you can easily implement your custom needs in time time to time.

Try to develop the application as generic solution also.

Once the package is saturated and implemented successfully you can try to sell the software to other companies those who have similar operations with less customization.