Implementing Best of Breed ERP Systems

ERP implementation projects normally involve a single vendor providing the packaged software for the entire system. Although most companies follow this practice, a significant number of firms employ an alternate strategy of “best of breed” ERP. This strategy involves selecting software that best matches the current or desired business practices of the company from a variety of vendors. This strategy reduces the need for the firm to customize the software or to significantly reengineer its business practices. Best of Breed offers firms the opportunity to maintain or create competitive advantage based on unique business processes. “Vanilla” ERP implementations may result in competitors all adopting the same business processes leaving no firm with an advantage. INTRODUCTION In an increasingly competitive global environment, firms are using information technology to increase their competitiveness and gain better information for decision making. Many firms have implemented enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to further these goals. Enterprise resource planning systems are off-the-shelf software systems, which claim to meet the information needs of organizations. These systems are usually adopted to replace hard to maintain legacy systems developed by IS departments or older off-the-shelf packages that often provided only piecemeal solutions to the organization’s information needs. ERP systems evolved in the 1990s from material requirements planning systems (MRP), which was developed in the 1970s, and manufacturing resources planning systems (MRPII), which was developed in the DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-859-8.ch017