{"id":152,"date":"2005-11-09T12:38:01","date_gmt":"2005-11-09T19:38:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=152"},"modified":"2005-11-09T12:38:01","modified_gmt":"2005-11-09T19:38:01","slug":"saporaclesoft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=152","title":{"rendered":"SapOracleSoft"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, I questioned<\/a> some undocumented research that SAP claims shows its customers are much more profitable than other companies. Today, the Financial Times reports<\/a> on research from the Hackett Group, a benchmarking firm, which indicates that it doesn’t matter whether your enterprise resource planning system is from SAP or Oracle or PeopleSoft: “they’re basically all the same.”<\/p>\n

Hackett examined a big group of large companies. It culled out the 25% that had the most efficient back-end processes (the ones automated by ERP) and found that about a third of those companies used Oracle, a third used PeopleSoft (now owned by Oracle) and nearly a third were SAP users. (Just a few had other vendors’ ERP systems.) It then looked at the other 75% of companies and found that the proportions using each of the main vendors’ packages were about the same. The lack of variation suggests, as the FT reports, “that their impact on efficiency and effectiveness is the same.”<\/p>\n

Here’s how Hackett’s research guru Philip Carnelley sums up the findings: “Every way you look at it, it doesn’t make a difference. There are aspects that are quite different in terms of the architectural side but in terms of features and functions they are all very comparable products.” Is this news? Not really. Back in 1998, Oracle’s then-president Ray Lane said<\/a>, “customers can’t find 5% difference among SAP, PeopleSoft, and us.”<\/p>\n

So what does matter? Standardization and simplicity. A lot of big companies run different ERP systems in different units, a messy problem that can be exacerbated by mergers and acquisitions. Such fragmentation leads to complexity, confusion and high costs, and consolidating the systems offers the opportunity for big gains. As Carnelley says, “It doesn’t matter which way they simplify, but simplifying is a good thing. The ‘world class’ organisations tend to have only one ERP system.”<\/p>\n

ERP is infrastructure. Rationalize it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, I questioned some undocumented research that SAP claims shows its customers are much more profitable than other companies. Today, the Financial Times reports on research from the Hackett Group, a benchmarking firm, which indicates that it doesn’t matter whether your enterprise resource planning system is from SAP or Oracle or PeopleSoft: “they’re basically all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=152"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}