Possibilities of ERP systems are used less than on a third

The Aberdeen Group company, with assistance of group of ERP providers, conducted the research "ERP in Manufacturing". More than 1000 manufacturing enterprises using systems and families of programs for enterprise management were polled. During the research it was revealed that most the companies does not use a considerable share of opportunities of the ERP systems.

Based on a research, two thirds of the companies respondents when choosing ERP systems were based on richness of their functionality. However then they used, on average, only 27.6% of the functions implemented in systems. According to analysts of Aberdeen, is most complete users of systems from Lawson use the functionality put in software, and users of SAP, as a rule, implement bigger number of modules, than clients of Oracle. Infor and QAD have rather recent implementations, and two thirds of users of a packet of Plexus Online ERP use it about 5 years.

In general about a third of ERP applications are implemented 5-10 years ago, on 18% of programs have age of 2-5 years and of 10-15 years, 13% of systems - and 9% of applications - are younger more than 15 years than 2 years. Other 9% of the studied companies have no ERP systems at all.

About 88% of small enterprises have only one ERP system, and only 6% have two and 4% have 3 systems. Among mid-size companies of only 58% of the companies have one ERP system, 22% have two systems, 10% have three systems, 4% have four systems. In large enterprises only 20% have one ERP system, 18% have two systems, 22% have three systems, on 9% have three and four systems, and the whole 31% of the companies have more than four installed systems. Let's note that on Aberdeen classification, the having less than 50 million dollars of an annual turnover belong to the small companies, and to large – the having more than 1 billion dollars.

Such "reproduction" of ERP systems is explained, on the one hand, by merges and acquisitions of the companies, and on the other hand, the bigger independence of separate divisions as a part of the large companies allowing to select him to itself automation systems. It is no wonder that 84% of large enterprises and 67% of the medium-sized companies participating in a research are going to integrate the separate systems. Support of a large number of separate packets requires big monetary licensing costs.

According to Cindi Dzhutras, the vice president for researches of production companies and ERP systems in Aberdeen companies, the greatest difficulties at implementation of ERP systems appear at coordination of business processes of the enterprises and functionality of software. The companies try to reach compromise between need to adapt software for requirements of specific business and desire to avoid large-scale expenditure for updating, replacement and integration of software products.