When you are running IT department in midsize company you are probably thinking strategically about technologies and the way to have them implemented efficiently with future upgrade perspectives. In this small publication we would like to review advantages and risks associated with custom business processes programming and implementation.
We will compare ISV channel add-ons and doing programming in-house referencing Software Development Kit. We do not pretend to be technical and this is not a manual for programmers as it is rather for managers. Let’s begin with pluses and minuses of ISV add-ons:
1. ISV Products. Modern ERP software vendors are opening their products to their partners also often referred as ISVs. The model works like this. ERP publishing company needs to make money on its core set of modules leaving horizontal and vertical solutions to consulting firms specializing in these areas. Consulting firm is leveraging its specific and dedicates some coding resources to create canned product referred as Add-On. For example core SAP B1 functionality offers some features of simple discrete manufacturing and if ISV partner has reasonable number of customers with process manufacturing requirements then consulting organization may decide to program the module on their own. In the future however SAP might be in the position to offer add-on purchase and including it into its core product. If you are the end customer you still have to think about your perspectives as if you are purchasing add-on you are leaning toward its ISV reliability and technical support. But the ISV industry is usually represented by smaller organizations where the question of future presence is important. If for example there several concurring add-ons offering similar functionality and SAP decided to acquire one of them then the customers acquiring alternative add-on might be in the disadvantage
2. In-House Programming. The pluses are the facts that you have the option to own the source code and you do not have to pay for all the add-on functionality as you are often expecting to implement only small percentage. There are minuses however as in-house coding doesn’t have the polygon to test all the scenarios and by doing so clean up software bugs. Another potential future danger is technology transformation. Good example would be old supercomputers were using such programming languages as Cobol and Fortran and modern PC, Linux and Mac computers are rather favoring C, C++ and Java. But in any case add-on is also kind of committed to the programming language and it is difficult to port it to whatever will be the winner in the future
3. How about ERP product life cycle? It is very good observation or question if you like. There is always a competition between computer hardware (think about PC, Macintosh or Sun), Operating Systems (Linux versus Microsoft Windows or Mac OS) and even databases (MS SQL Server versus MySQL/PHP or Oracle). There are also new ideas in programming such as Object Oriented Programming with its classes and interfaces (C#, VB.Net, C++, Delphi and others) versus old good-style Procedural programming in Fortran or Cobol. When accounting application is proposed by software enthusiasts it has to rely on the ideas and technologies available by the time of the introduction. At this time of 2012 we believe that the life cycle of the ERP software product is about twenty years. This doesn’t mean that you will have to start over as migration paths are the way to move away to switch to the future product from the same publisher
4. Now let’s think about SAP B1 in-house programming. Before you hire contractor we recommend you to include source code ownership clause into the contract. All the future version updates will require customization recompilation including new version DLL libraries. If you do not own the source code and your current consulting company closes the doors somewhere in the future then you are screwed. Let’s talk about the tools. Software Development Kit has code samples in C# and VB.Net and this is why it is recommended to do coding in Microsoft Visual Studio
5. What types of customizations are popular as candidates for in-house coding? Perfect examples are integrations based on user defined fields and tables created directly in user interface settings. It is unlikely that ISV add-on would cover such integration. This about ecommerce shopping cart in B2B or B2C scenarios, Electronic Document Interchange (EDI) or external Business Management System
6. Let’s take a quick look at the competition. Business One was originally architected in Israel with international small business ERP and accounting software market considerations. It was in reasonable extends successful in Asia, Russia, Brazil, Europe and Spanish speaking Americas. The application was introduced in the United States in the grim time of wars and Bush presidency era. We would like to make a parallel to Great Plains Software Dynamics and its predecessor Great Plains Accounting for DOS, Windows and Mac. Currently Great Plains is known as Microsoft Dynamics GP. At this time GP has huge number of installations here in the USA, Canada, Mexico and internationally mostly in English, Arabic and Spanish speaking countries. SAP B1 in our opinion has more modern architecture comparing to Dynamics GP Dexterity but it is less represented in the ISV community
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