Non processes

Some years back, I worked at a public agency that was attached to a public university. The university implemented a new education based ERP that while having tons of features, and tons of capability, and so on and so forth, it really created a drag on a lot of processes, like purchasing and ordering, and all sorts of institutionalized policies that should have only been applied in specific cases and not across the board. Over time, I suppose they did start getting the rougher edges cleaned up and functioning a little better, but I left before it really became usable like it was supposedly going to be. One thing it did try to do, although doing an awful job of it, is try to make sure the chain of command was followed on things like purchasing.

Compare this to another experiences I have had, where companies didn't have anything in place, and in order to do something, individuals had to take specific initiative to get things done. I suppose it works better to just do it manually in situations when you have a small staff, and everyone knows everyone else, and all the major aspects of the company budgets can be kept in the heads of one or two finance types. The problem then becomes individuals taking specific initiative. If they don't want it bad enough, it doesn't happen. Even if their higher ups want it, but not badly enough to make sure that specific initiative is had by those in the trenches, it still wont happen. The solution would seem to be some sort of ERP solution.

However, ERP solutions are ridiculously expensive, painful, clunky and awkward on their best days, and extremely costly to support in both time and money. I have seen very large fortune 500 companies with very large staffs assigned to supporting SAP or Oracle or other ERP implementations that seem to have no end of problems with them. A complex solution to a complex problem, that seems to breed yet more complex problems. But hey, I hear your ERP vendors have more complex solutions to those complex problems. They are only [insert a six or seven figure number] and will only cost [insert an even bigger number] to support.

There is a better way. I haven't seen anyone really hit this one out of the ballpark, but Infoworld had a good write-up on it a while back. I guess one of the major questions is whether not having an automated process or even having a non process is better than an expensive or poorly implemented automated process. I have recently run into a troublesome non-process. A good automated process, or even partially automated process would be very helpful about now. All the big ERP solutions are not even remotely solutions in this case, and it wouldn't be up to me, but a good low cost process automation tool would be really nice for these guys, even if it is too late for me to benefit.