Maximizing Return on Investment Using ERP Applications

WHAT IS THE LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES?

Everyone has heard the expression “It is what it is.” Although obviously tautological (inherently true), the statement still begs a couple of questions:

• Exactly what is it and is what we perceive it to be what it actually is?
• If we really understand what it is, wouldn’t it be nice to know how it got this way so that we could figure out how to either change the current state or use it more effectively?

We are not suggesting that large efforts be expended to rehash history or agonize over past decisions, which may be perceived as errors, in hindsight. Instead, a few examples follow of how business approaches evolve over time into situations that were never intended and that present significant obstacles to improvement. Furthermore, regardless of whether the intent is to drive improvements (our view is that it always should), changes necessitated by the explosion of IT business applications technology are unavoidable as we adopt an integrated view of business. This is the product of integrated systems exposing the logical relationships between functions that were not fully understood or supported in the past. Far from criticizing past organizational development, we believe that these approaches evolved as natural constructs developed to model past practices and understanding. All that being said, however, in order to effectively use current Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platforms to improve business results, business leaders must ...