ERP and Smartphones

As I was sitting up last night at 3am rocking my littlest man to sleep again, a comparison of ERP being similar to a Smartphone popped into my brain.  It always seems my best thoughts happen in the middle of the night, but that’s another topic.  So, what do I mean by ERP as a Smartphone?

My Smartphone can do lots of things, even though it is a pretty basic model compared to what is currently available.  (Even that statement shows similarity – classes of Smartphones, just as there are classes of ERP, depending upon what you need/want and how much you are willing to invest.)  My basic model, out of the box, can surf the web, send and receive email, send and receive text messages, download new ringtones, play a few simple games, change the colors, etc.  All fairly common among Smartphones, and a pretty basic offering which suits my needs fine at this point.  There are two points I want to make here.  First, my  Smartphone does not do everything, nor do I expect it to.  Second, I can gain added functionality by downloading 3rd party apps that work with my phone.

Let’s start with point two above – 3rd party apps.  As Apple taught us, there is nothing wrong with 3rd party applications to enhance your existing phone.  Apple could not and does not want to have an Everything Phone and all that would entail.  They do not have the developer power or desire to do that.  No single company does.  So, by releasing a development kit, and creating a method for others to develop apps and enhance the smartphone experience, their smartphone becomes a jack-of-all-trades phone that almost can do anything and everything desired.  Not everyone needs all the apps available – people desire different things and the app marketplace is where they go to customize their phone as they desire.  This goes back to the first point above.  Apple, Google, HTC, Sprint, AT&T, et al provide the strong core, and virtually anyone in the world provides the enhancements and “wow” apps.

Translating this to ERP is easy, but people still expect their ERP system to be an all-in-one solution.  This is darn near impossible, for many reasons.  Chief among them, in my opinion, is that every organization has different wants/needs/desires, and expect things to work as they want, not as dictated to them.  The sheer amount of flexibility required to accommodate all options would make the software so complex that setup would take eons and require such detailed knowledge of what options affected what other options that an implementation would be outrageously expensive and cumbersome.  Therefore, companies make a strong core, even SAP and Oracle, and then other ISVs add-on industry specific functions or additional “core” functionality.  Selling this, however, is still difficult at times, because people have not stopped thinking of ERP as an all-in-one solution from a single vendor.  But this cannot be the case, and people need to learn that.

If you look at some ERP projects, especially some open-source examples like xTuple and OpenBravo, you will see an app marketplace.  There, anyone can develop an app that enhances the existing functionality.  Granted, developing an app for an ERP system is more complicated that for a Smartphone, but the general idea is the same: create a strong core, have a development kit that can be used to enhance/extend the core, and provide a way for ISVs/developers to monetize those apps and create an environment where the core is background but indispensible.  Think SalesForce with force.com, SugarCRM with Sugar Exchange, even NetSuite and Quickbooks.  Microsoft Dynamics GP does not have a marketplace per se, but does have a robust 3rd party solution directory.

I think ERP will continue to move in this direction, and I think it has to in order to actually live up to its own acronym – Enterprise Resource Planning.  That can entail so many things to so many different people that being able to get the solid core and then enhance it oneself or purchase/install 3rd party apps is the only way this can happen.