A recent Gartner report had some harsh words for highly customized enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, saying that by 2016 customized, monolithic ERP software would be known as "legacy ERP," a term Gartner defines as, "any system that is not sufficiently flexible to meet changing business needs."

Andy Kyte, vice president and Gartner Fellow, stated, "Early ERP adopters, particularly large enterprises in energy, manufacturing and distribution industries, are paying the penalty of a decade or more of excessive customization. Businesses looking to improve administration today can take advantage of lower costs, better functional fit and process flexibility offered by blending cloud applications with on-premises applications in what we now refer to as 'postmodern ERP."

When ERP was first introduced, CEOs and executives latched onto ERP as a source of reliable integrated solutions. Stakeholders are still seeking these qualities today, but technological advances have allowed them to assume that such characteristics will be present in any decent software on the market. Expectations have now changed, and business owners are not looking for more affordable and flexible systems. ERP that fails to meet these new demands will only hold an organization back.

ERP evaluation will only become more rigorous as time passes and more advancements are made. Current implementations are obviously not going to disappear any time soon, but vendors will be forced to understand and adapt to the new hybrid ERP environment sooner or later. Off-premise solutions, combined with business process outsourcing, will only become more popular because they provide executives and CEOs with alternatives to the inflexible and expensive modules of the past.

If you are interested in learning more about ERP flexibility, or are in search of business management software for your enterprise, contact Accent software today!