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organisations or partners were able to make to on-premise solutions. While it’s true that different businesses are subject to different pressures and have different requirements from their finance systems, starting down the road of customisation immediately limits the scalability of the product and forces finance teams into a trade-off between long-term benefits and short-term convenience. To get the most out of any technology implementation – ERP or otherwise – users should take the opportunity to re-evaluate their working practices in the context of what the new solution enables, rather than look at how they can change the solution to fit existing established processes.” Green’s statement leaves little room for doubt; customisation as we know it is a thing of the past and post-modern ERP vendors are now delivering solutions that do away with the old notion of customisation in favour of ‘personalisation’ through APIs and other bolt-ons.
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ark Hughes, regional vice president for UK and Ireland at Epicor agrees that personalisation is the new advantage for ERP customers and warns against the use of customisation in modern ERP practices. He said: “For many years, ERP providers have traded on the fact that the software they sell is hugely customisable. However, for many businesses using ERP software, the difference between actual customisation and personalisation remains unclear. Personalisation is a noninvasive means of tailoring software; for example, changing the way reports are produced, or altering the tracking of KPIs. Customisation, on the other hand, often requires code, technical expertise, and access to how a system works. In addition, it can have significant knock-on effects further down the line. “The main problem with customisation is that businesses end up with a solution that is completely different to everybody else’s - and this matters for a number of reasons. In terms of 78
E R P T O D AY
| Q2 2019
“For many businesses using ERP software, the difference between actual customisation and personalisation remains unclear” MARK HUGHES - Epicor
“To make ERP deliver value, companies have to innovate at the edge with microservices and extensible technologies” CLAUS JEPSEN - Unit 4
supporting and maintaining ERP systems, if you are using standard, configured, personalised software, any errors found in your system are more than likely to have been found in others. However, as soon as you begin to customise the software, any bugs or problems will be limited solely to that system and will need to be solved on an individual basis. This makes supporting customised software much harder. “ERP technology has been around a long time, and its capability is much greater than it once was. Due to advancements in ERP systems, businesses can make adequate changes through simple personalisation, which many would have previously considered as a customisation or modification of the software. By putting an agile and modern ERP system in place, businesses will be able to fully utilise their software and avoid the need to customise.”
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laus Jepsen, Deputy CTO at Unit4 also has strong views on how customisation has hindered ERP value and suggests that microservices (APIs and bolt-ons) are the new frontier of value drivers in modern ERP solutions: He said: “In the past, organisations saw the value of ERP in the customisations they could build. They would
