Is Your ERP system a Mother-ship or a Satellite?

Excellent advice. Thanks.

Can you please provide a list of the “mothership” ERP packages?

Interesting post. I would say that most of my friends in this business do not think of their ERP system this way. ERP life span and openness is what did it for us.
We made the move to INFOR several years ago, as we judged that Activant’s products at that time would go through a slow death or non development and tapering support as is described above……
Fortunately we were right. We consider INFOR to be the best ‘mothership package’ for the money.

Makes me wonder how committed epicor might be to Eclipse. Has anyone heard of any reduction in support or change in personnel yet? Wonder when I should start looking … and at what?

I would like to point to some missing elements in your article:

Open databases: DB2 should be in the list.

Required training: One of the most expensive line items in a transition from one ERP to another is training. How long will it take to an employee to become “very familiar” with the features of the new product?

There is also a lack mentioning of a series of new ERP products available to the Electrical Distributors and the futuristic approach taken to address the needs of the companies today and propel them into the future.

I think Allen’s point is that when these companies buy other packages, it is a business decision as to where they fall in the budget pecking order for development and support. The private database that eclipse runs on has always been a concern to some.
Most all the eclipse development and support people have already left.At least the ones we know. One would suspect that if you know a eclipse sales person, you might want to check their status.
You know we all probably though we bought the best package at the time when we bought. I know we didn’t look at the life span nor the stability of our current package company. Wish we had.
I suspect if we had purchased Infor, we would be in a much better situation technology wise. But that was then and now is now.

It is not just distibution companies that have ERP issues, as a medium sized manufacturer we looked at SAP, EFACS, & Oracle and felt that the ROI time would be too long and that such an investment would drain financial resources. We opted for a half-way house system (Progress-Plus)that integrated production operations and uploaded the invoice data to Sage Line 50. Such a small system does have many of the features found in larger ones. One feature especially good is the linking the database tables via SQL views and porting out to excel which allows us to use the data in custom test reporting. But we still have to use other products to manage customer interactions and at the moment this is acceptable. The challange for us moving forward is working with the application developer to include customisable options that allow a better fit into our business. I would be interested in other Medium sized companies overcame similar problems.

Some great advice from all.
Our problem has always been when we start to look at a possible conversion we face some real problem areas:
1.Business interruption and leaving history behind
2.Training as one said above. It is important, but we can get comfortable with what we hear and see.
3.We have yet to have someone explain what we would get out installing certain functions. I am not talking about features that all talk about. It is really what do we gain on our bottom line.Real world savings
4.Price data and managing of margin, SPA and collections have evolved to the point that most ERP sales people can’t tell us bottom line savings the way we currently operate. They just want to talk features and functions.
If a company can present those types of solutions….then we would be open to that type of message.

Along the way we discovered that SAP was a custom installation that for us required massive amounts of money.That was a turn off. We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel so to speak.
Eclipse would have put us back in the same frying pan and we would be held captive for coding and database.
That is what they had to sell at that time and they did a good job of presenting their products to us.
We have a different view than most, in that we are looking at a ROI at our lowest unit of work throughout our company. We are trying to take people and put them into places where they can make the company money….not push paper. We had numerous discussions with these companies above and others, and they just talk a different language about return on investment. It seem to boil down to a comparison between features and price…and several times we almost went for the price.
Now comes SaaS/Cloud and they offer a inexpensive price per month with a cookie cutter mentality. That’s not a bad thing when you are trying to sell the same software to a lot of people.
But for our size we want a product that offers flexibility, ease of operation, supported long term with a company that is going to be around for at least 20+ years. We are willing to look at different ways of accomplishing our operations goals. But we have to be able to measure our operations and customers.Our search goes on.
Good post by the way. It got me to thinking about our situation.

We have intalled our software solution (Ximple – pronounced Simple) at a couple of Electrical Distributors of different size and both have replaced aged software running a portion of their business.

Taking the web navigation approach, we have integrated all aspects of their business at a fraction of what Eclipse quoted them to start.

We believe that our web approach is going to survive many years and many technology changes because we have made the device (PC, tablet, smartphone) a component controlled by the user not the software. Additionally, all the features offered are included in the base licensing and as the user becomes more confortable with the basic features, can move to the more advanced ones without the need of making any license upgrade.

Plus, since it is web product, is 100% cloud accesible and offered in that fashion. Meaning that small shops can license the use of the software and with no need to learn or host any hardware platform and still use the same tools that as of couple of years ago, only large companies could afford.

My assumption is that Allen is equating a Mothership ERP to a complete, up-to-date ERP system that was not built with a large series of patches or glitches and can run on any database.
Hopefully the ERP company learned what was actually needed and built the package from scratch in up-to-date coding. If that is the case, then it would rule out the eclipse type of packages, where private databases are the norm along with what we consider to be expensive support.
Also in our searches, we basically ruled out the cloud applications because of the restrictions we might place on ourselves, if we modified the base package to our needs. We see a problem when a cloud package upgrades, does it carry our mods forward with out a great deal of expense. It would be like paying to make the mod, and then paying to fix the upgrade. So far, we haven’t found a cloud package that will satisfy that requirement.
What ‘clouds’ the issue, pardon the pun, is that the cloud ERPs offer what appears to be a very low monthly rental which includes some type of support.

What would be of interest is if everyone reading this post were to share their experiences of searching for their new ERP system.

My goodness….this is a good post.
Our ERP software company bugs us to death about buying add on functions….but so far can not explain the real bottom line gain we would get, based on our company as it currently stands.
We are not going to buy these add on until we can understand some sort of increase in bottom line.

Sure hope they get the message.

We are on Shims and we are pretty much locked into this old package for right now. Over the years it has been fairly reliable form a up time vs. down time. This package is about 35 years old.

As we have expanded it has gotten slower. I think we understand what each department’s needs are. The over riding question is how we make a final selection and convert….with out getting stampeded into the “buy”.

I think we are on the ERP that is on the downward side of support. They don’t answer the phone very often.
I recall that you published a white paper on how to determine a company’s needs and getting internal buy-in sometime back. Is it on the web?

We would encourage Allen to follow up with some additional thought provoking post about ERPs and operational issues.Many of us are caught with 20+ year old packages that seem to run ok…until we have a problem.
This whole area of thought is so important to owners trying to compete against regional and mammoth big chains.

Epicor has now laid off over 50 Activant people in the last couple of weeks. TO be expected when they are acquired. Someone has to pay for the acquisition.