Maximizing Return on Investment Using ERP Applications

THE BUSINESS SUITE: ENRICHING THE FUNCTIONALITY (1996–2005)

With the basics of the back-office integration engine well established, ERP vendors turned their attention to functionally richer front-office programs that were being developed by a variety of other vendors. These programs were CRM (customer relationship management), SCM (supply chain management), SRM (supplier relationship management), HCM (human capital management), and PLM (product life-cycle management). Now it was not only necessary to work through cross-functional issues at the integration point (ERP), it was also necessary to include business processes from outside the core functions the company connected to, such as customers, suppliers, supply chain partners, human capital functions (recruiting, talent management, and so on), and the entire life cycle of products from research (both internal and vendors) through the end of life for those materials. On one level, this just seems to be more functions, more enrichment, more inclusion, but each of these functional areas has process components that are part of an end-to-end business process. And now, these functional areas had to either be managed within the suite or modified such that all interactions with the back-office integration engine were consistent with process decisions that had been made in the initial implementation. Although on a business level, this was a good thing, on another level, it plunged companies back into the need to manage design, implementation, ...