Successes and Failures: Illustrations of “Why Bother?”

The Underachievement of ERPs

In the mid-1990s, enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementations were all the rage. Vendors of these products convinced corporations and government institutions alike that the real value to be gleaned from IT was in implementing these advanced, comprehensive transaction systems that would integrate multiple functional areas along the supply chain. The potential for streamlining these processes, reducing duplication, speeding the time to results, and thereby lowering costs significantly was virtually assured. IT wouldn't be cheap to get there; deployments ranged from a few hundred thousand dollars for a single module to tens of millions for a complete system. ...

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