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E-Business Suite has a support runway to at least 2036 and Fusion Cloud ERP changes four times a year. Both need people who stay after go-live.
E-Business Suite has a long runway and Fusion Cloud ERP changes every quarter. Running both well takes two skill sets that rarely sit in the same person.
Seventeen articles ago, this series opened with a simple observation: small and mid-sized companies are moving to platforms like Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP in growing numbers, for reasons that hold up under scrutiny — real efficiency gains, real cost savings, real competitive necessity as the software their peers run gets more capable every year.
A generic description of "what an ERP does" tends to undersell how differently the same platform actually gets used across industries. A distributor's core challenge is inventory velocity and fulfillment accuracy across many SKUs and locations.
Growth is supposed to be the good problem. In practice, for a lot of small and mid-sized companies, rapid growth is exactly the thing that exposes how fragile their existing systems really are. A second location gets added, and suddenly inventory has to be tracked and reported separately, then consolidated, using tools that were only ever designed for one warehouse.
It's a strange feature of modern business software that companies can spend heavily on excellent individual systems — a strong ERP, a well-regarded CRM, a modern eCommerce platform — and still end up worse off than the sum of those parts, simply because none of them talk to each other.
Data migration has an image problem. It sounds like the boring, mechanical part of an ERP project — export from the old system, import into the new one, done.
Here's a number worth sitting with: organizations typically spend about 92% of their ERP implementation budget on technical activities — software, infrastructure, configuration, data — and just 8% on change management, the work of actually getting people to understand, accept, and correctly use the new system.
If you strip away the vendor optimism and look purely at the outcome data, ERP implementation has one of the more sobering track records in enterprise software. Sixty-four percent of ERP projects experience budget overruns.