The ERP landscape for manufacturers: what kinds of systems are there?
By Dennis Jacobs — twelve years of ERP experience in manufacturing
First-time ERP buyers don't get lost in the number of systems but in the kinds of systems: everything is called ERP, from an industry package for machine builders to a global suite. This piece orders the landscape into four flavours — without a ranking, because which one fits depends on your company, not on a list.
Flavour one: the industry package
Systems built for one industry — in Dutch manufacturing, for instance, packages aimed specifically at machine building or metal. Strength: the industry's processes are already in there, from costing to post-calculation, and the vendor speaks your language. The flip side: smaller vendors, smaller ecosystems, and anyone working outside the industry's mould notices quickly.
Flavour two: the broad mid-market system
The big names in the SME segment: broadly applicable, large partner network, many integrations. Strength: continuity, a choice of implementation partners, and an ecosystem of complementary products. The flip side: manufacturing is one of many worlds it serves, and the manufacturing-specific depth often comes from a partner add-on — which in practice means choosing two vendors instead of one.
Flavour three: the enterprise suite
The global suites for large organisations. For the average manufacturer of 50 to 500 employees they are rarely the logical choice: the functional richness is there, but the implementation burden, the required administration and the costs belong to a different scale. Exceptions exist — for instance when the parent company already runs the suite.
Flavour four: the development platform
Platforms on which you model or generate business software instead of configuring a package. Strength: the system follows your process instead of the other way around, and changing it stays possible without the release anxiety of customisation-on-a-package. The flip side: you get no ready-made industry functionality, so the quality of the project hangs almost entirely on how well your processes were thought through before building starts.
How to choose from this
Not by ranking the flavours, but by first sharpening your own situation: how unusual are your processes really, how much capacity for change does your organisation have, and what must still be possible in five years? A company with common processes and little IT capacity ends up at a different flavour than one whose process is its competitive edge.
Getting that sharp is exactly where a selection should begin — before the demos, not after.
