Your ERP doesn’t need to be everything. Even though ERPs are often sold as a one-size-fits-all back-office solution, they have functionality gaps. Depending on your organization’s needs, these gaps may be small and inconsequential or large and impossible to ignore. Organizations have different options to solve this problem, including bringing in an entirely new solution, adding a bolt-on solution to the ERP, ignoring the problem entirely, or making customizations directly to the ERP.
While it might seem straightforward to go directly to the ERP to make changes, this comes with many risks.
Risk 1: High Costs
The high cost of custom-coding your ERP comes from a couple of different places. Firstly, the upfront costs of making the changes can be extremely high; however, the costs of ongoing maintenance as the ERP itself has updates can be even more costly. If your organization isn’t careful, the total cost of ownership may far exceed the benefits of the improvement.
For organizations that make custom ERP changes internally, this can take up a significant portion of tech time and resources.
Risk 2: Time Spent on Implementation, Maintenance, and Upgrades
Since custom coding is so personalized to one organization, it can take a lot more time to create, implement, debug, and update functionality. More time is spent testing before, during, and after initial implementation. Issues are also often uncovered by users themselves. These same users must often wait for long periods of time for the fix. Time spent waiting on fixes can get in the way of scalability or moving forward with other related projects.
Risk 3: ERP Upgrades
When it comes time to update a custom-coded ERP, updates to the core ERP can be detrimental. Depending on how the updates affect the custom coding, the solution could break. Since custom coding is specific to one organization, there is a lot of work that goes into testing, debugging, and even potentially rebuilding what broke. Depending on how often the core ERP is changed, your custom code may fail more than it works.
Choosing the Best Solution for Your ERP
While an out-of-the-box ERP cannot fit every single business need and process of an organization, they also aren’t meant to do that. If custom-coding an ERP makes sense for your organization, it is a great way to not need to implement new technology; however, there are other options to accomplish filling ERP gaps. Options like bolt-ons are a great way to implement new functionality without moving too far outside your ERP. To learn about how ICG’s bolt-on solutions work, request a demo.