by Thomas F. Wallace, Michael H. Kremzar
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Product Description
Follow the "Proven Path" to successful implementation of enterprise resource planning Effective forecasting, planning, and scheduling is fundamental to productivity-and ERP is a fundamental way to achieve it. Properly implementing ERP will give you a competitive advantage and help you run your business more effectively, efficiently, and responsively. This guide is structured to support all the people involved in ERP implementation-from the CEO and others in the executive suite to the people doing the detailed implementation work in sales, marketing, manufacturing, purchasing, logistics, finance, and elsewhere. This book is not primarily about computers and software. Rather, its focus is on people-and how to provide them with superior decision-making processes for customer order fulfillment, supply chain management, financial planning, e-commerce, asset management, and more. This comprehensive guide can be used as a selective reference for those, like top management, who need only specific pieces of information, or as a virtual checklist for those who can use detailed guidance every step of the way.
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Average Customer Review:
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
 Marred by confusion in thinking and presentation, 2007-06-08
This book has a good mission and scope, and the prose is clear and straightforward. The thinking underneath the prose is, unfortunately, often confused. It's as if the paragraphs were competently edited, but not the chapters or major arguments. "There are three kinds of companies," says page 20; on page 59 there are again three kinds of companies, and the categorization is sorta-almost the same. Five minutes of scrutiny finally reveals the two comparison-sets are not congruent. This is strange and unsatisfactory, because making them so would have been easy and certainly would serve the reader better.
The book sometimes balks at simple realities. "One kind of company" already has ERP software installed and hasn't gotten the hoped-for return, and people are frustrated. The solution is to re-implement, and "the good news is that having the software already installed certainly makes life easier in some important respects ... The bulk of the software has already been selected." But what if the software was poorly chosen and won't do the job? That's the situation I face, and none of the three categories deals with this not uncommon scenario.
That's from the chapter titled "Software," which has other problems. There are some good ideas; don't get the module organization of a software package confused with your real organizational units, for example. But there's no clear general orientation to the software issues, not much for creating meaningful comparisons between products, no acknowledgment that fraudulent marketing is a real danger or that seemingly universal terms can carry very different meanings simply by their contextual scope.
My disappointment with the book increased sharply during the instructions for ROI assessment. The presentation of concepts was muddled, but I persevered and hammered out a complete ROI document. I'm a database builder, not a money analyst or manager, and I was proud of the result when I sent it off to the owners. It's now a few weeks later and I am halfway through 'The Goal' by E. Goldratt. And my ROI is false, I realize, because this ERP book fails to help the reader convert "better efficiency" into dollars returned. An improvement belongs on the ROI if dollars are returned. That means for a reduction in costs for non-production labor (for example), you have to say which salaried workers will no longer work at the company. I rewrote my ROI. I said what positions could go (including my own), but the grounding-to-earth also forced me into a lower percentage for benefits. It was the same for improvements in gross revenue. On that point the ERP book even fails to point out that a gain in gross sales is not to be interpreted as a gain in profit. Now if I were any kind of analyst, I wouldn't have been fooled; but I don't think the book should go out of its way to cloud up the core issues, and that's what this one does. I'm just glad I sent a corrected ROI (and still with an exciting return) before the owners themselves had to point out my incompetence.
I won't get fooled again. A second ERP primer text is coming my way.
61 of 61 people found the following review helpful:
 Complete focus on what's important: processes and management, 2002-07-03
If you're exploring an enterprise-wide solution, even if it isn't an ERP package, or are planning an implementation after the software has already been selected this book will prove invaluable. Unlike other books about ERP (and e-business and enterprise application integration for that matter), this one is focused on the business processes and what it takes to prepare for and manage the implementation.Of course, while much of this book applies at a high level to any enterprise application, it is all about ERP. The authors take great pains to avoid talking about software, which in itself is refreshing. They also skillfully guide you through a panorama of key issues, including what ERP is and how it fits into the overall scheme of business value and competitiveness. However, the best part of this book is their implementation strategy, which explores how an ERP package is going to require changes at the business process level, how to break down the implementation into manageable stages. In this respect the book is a combination of a management overview of ERP, organizational change strategies, and project management approach to implementation. The key areas addressed by this book reflect reality. For example, all of the major challenges that you're likely to face are addressed. The critical success factors, such as training, preparing the organization for the system (from a people perspective), and the way the implementation phases are sequenced can either be learned from this book, or learned the hard way (which is sure to include schedule and cost overruns at best and a disaster at worst). In particular, the process-oriented approach that is reiterated throughout the book needs to be heeded. This is the essence of any ERP package, and it will change your organization. This book gives good advice on how to effect the shift from discrete jobs and procedures to a workflow. In addition to this excellent book I highly recommend two other resources: (1) "Scorecard System For World Class Enterprise Resource Management" by Travis Anderegg, which is a unique book/online survey combination you can use to evaluate the alignment of your ERP system to business processes, and (2) "Enterprise Resource Planning Systems: Systems, Life Cycle, Electronic Commerce, and Risk" by Daniel Edmund O'Leary. O'Leary's book completely complements this one and fills in a few gaps.
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