Maximizing Return on Investment Using ERP Applications

Preface

SOME YEARS AGO, on returning from the manufacturing floor of my (coauthor Art Worster) plant, I stopped to clean my hands. There was a tub of benzene in the sink, and I dipped my hands into the solvent to get the grease off and then washed them in water. One of my colleagues came up and quickly admonished me not to do that because “Benzene is a carcinogen.” My response was, “Wow, when did benzene become a carcinogen?” The fact of the matter is that it has always been, but science was just finally catching up to the relationship between chemical exposures and diseases such as cancer. What does that have to do with this book, Maximizing Return on Investment Using ERP Applications? The book could have been titled Leadership and Change in an Integrated Business World, which might have seemed to imply that our business worlds have suddenly become integrated in a sort of metaphysical change, and we are now trying to figure out how to deal with the results, but this would be wrong, similar to my experience with benzene. The business world that our enterprises exist in has always operated with integrated processes, but only over the last 15 years or so are the full effects of this integration and the techniques needed to manage integrated business processes being exposed by the introduction of integrated IT applications, such as ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) packages. It is not a case of something new; it is a case of our knowledge of these relationships becoming known, just ...