Enterprise Integration

Twenty years ago, the promise of ERP systems was that they would be one system that provided for all the IT functionality that any industrial organization would need, all wrapped in one neat package that worked out of the box to meet all the needs of the enterprise.

While this was a laudable goal, it was unachievable because of the fact that every manufacturing plant and warehouse operates differently depending on the customers it serves, the regulations for the areas where it is located, its technological capabilities and the skills and training of its local workforce.

This directly conflicted with the needs of the ERP software development organization to develop one body of software that would be usable by tens or hundreds of thousands of organizations, so as to amortize its cost of development.

As a result, ERP systems are typically used for common functions across a broad swath of organizations, such as accounting, human resources, customer relations management and long-range materials planning, although, even here, ERP systems are being supplanted with specialized systems, which are industry specific.

As a result, we find industrial organizations, today, using a multiplicity of different systems, each specialized to the needs of the organization, in a sort of “best-of-breed” mash-up.

One of the goals of a Smart Operations Management System is to provide everyone in the organization with the information they need to do their job, when and where they need it, in a format that most useful.

Replacing all these existing systems, with one large and expensive ERP system that does not do any of these functions well, is bound to fail in this goal because ERP systems are the lowest common denominator across all possible applications of each ERP system.

 Smart Operations Management Systems, such as  those based on the SmartOps24x7 software platform, use intelligent agents to integrate information across all these systems so they work as a cohesive whole, tailored to the specific needs of each enterprise.