Enterprise resource planning (ERP) decentralizes, streamlines and simplifies your business operations.
Not only does it increase your business operations but also improves its growth.
Whether it is about managing the HR (human resources, planning product development, or taking care of the supply chain, the software helps you integrate the key workforces into one centralized system and thoroughly review the gathered data supports and helps you make an informed decision.
While there are several off-the-shelf software solutions that claim to address your enterprise resource planning needs from certain renowned brands such as Microsoft, Oracle, Infor, IQMS, SAP, Epicor, Sage, Netsuite, and many others, they require you to pay a subscription fee and help you with a limited number of features.
Therefore, some companies prefer to go with a customised ERP software so that they can introduce and eliminate the features, based on their business’s needs.
Best of all, a customised ERP software can solve problems that can hardly be made possible by off-the-shelf software, provided the particularities of each enterprise.
A customised ERP product allows you to integrate features that are not only unique to your business but also makes your business function efficiently.
Customisation, thus, gives a satisfactory answer to some enterprise, but surely not to all.
No idea whether you should go with the customisation or off-the-shelf software?
Let’s check out the article ahead to know and understand about its pros and cons.
Customised ERP software: Let’s check the bright side first
It allows you to have absolute control over your product.
The ERP system is meant to address your business’s needs. A one-size-fits-all system may not properly communicate or address your business’s needs. But if you have it customized based on your business needs and demands, it provides you with an increased control over what it helps with and what it does.
You can even have a solution configured, precisely based on your business specifications.
Certain off-the-shelf systems allow you to integrate features that you don’t want.
Customisation can make it possible, by harnessing the specifications crucial to your industry and enterprise and how it works. What’s more, before getting it custom-made, you can reach out to your leadership team and departments and know about their views so you can add the features that will help in growing the success of your whole business, and thus get you the desired growth..
It gives you the flexibility to adapt your organization as per the time and demands
When you have a customised ERP software, based on your business’s needs and demands, it provides you with immense flexibility to adapt your business to any change taking place in your organization, and based on your business needs.
It helps you gain a competitive advantage
Customising software, based on your needs, is the best answer if you want to get all of your business’s challenges addressed in full as a standard ERP system cannot do so.
As you know, every firm aims to gain a competitive advantage in its industry, and if you don’t struggle to build up a system that can help you in seeing a bigger, clear picture and check all the data around your processes, you will be left out.
Meanwhile, if your rivals have themselves benefited from the ERP system that uses their potential and lets them achieve their goals, you may be left behind.
It helps scale and change your ERP software when your needs undergo any change
Let’s face it, companies keep changing over time. As you hire new employees and integrate new procedures and processes in your enterprise, you feel the need for an enterprise-wide system that could go with your company’s growth.
If you go with a custom-made or customised ERP approach, you are sure to have your business’ needs addressed, precisely based on your new services, users, and demands.
Besides, you can alter the infrastructure and design of your organization, as per the ERP system and increase the needs as well as the demand of your organization.
It helps you with your own software
When you use a standard, off-the-shelf system, the license remains with the software company.
For example, if you leverage a SaaS model, you first need to subscribe to it and pay a certain amount of fee to use it so that you can use the ERP software.
But if you have customised ERP software, as per your business needs and demands, you become the sole owner of the software and its license. You will not have to make payment for the service of using the software within your company.
So, as you have a customised ERP software, based on your business’s needs, you can continuously adjust and add fresh features to further personalize the software.
Cons of a customised ERP system for your organization
Over-customising doesn’t let you achieve your goals
Getting a customised ERP system is good, but there is a risk of “over-customizing.
As you know too much is always bad. Similarly, when you have a customized ERP software, it helps you introduce more personalized features. As a result, the system gets distorted and unable to gain the desired goals planned to achieve in the first place.
This may lead you to scrap the system as it doesn’t serve the desired purpose, any longer.
But that never means you should depend on the off-the-shelf system, but it does indicate you need to be wary about getting into a customization rabbit hole.
Plan and set up your goals, and once you’ve successfully achieved them, don’t get tempted to continuously include unwanted and undesired features and components.
You may overlook core features of off-the-shelf software
If you focus more on customising your product or a customised software, you may miss out on the main features of your current ERP system and make them more obscure with unwanted bells and whistles.
Besides, it makes it quite challenging to install regular updates and upgrades, which are typically mandatory for the smooth functioning of the platform. This may slow down the necessary functions of the software.
The more features you add to your product, the greater you introduce defects
Yes, the more features you add to your software, the higher the chances are to defect the software.
Hence, the more involved and “fancier” the software is, the higher the possibility is to surface the defects.
It is costlier than the standard software
Let’s begin it with an age-old saying: the more sugar you add, the sweeter you get.
Similarly, the more features you desire to introduce into your customised ERP software, the more money you will be required to pay for taking advantage of them.
So, your greed for adding more features correlates to the fee you have to pay for.
Hence, if you need extensive or features-packed customised ERP software, you must not overlook the hefty price tag you will be required to pay for enjoying all of them.
So, if you want to bring your business to the next level, there is no need for a second thought, simply go with the integration of an ERP software in your organization.
Whether having a customised software is the right answer relies on what you want in your platform and how you are looking forward to using it.
So, take note of these pros and cons before you think of devising your ERP software strategy.
After reading the article about the pros and cons of integrating a customised ERP software in your organization, we hope that you would like to know more about the company that can best guide you through the customised ERP software integration and implementation and how its integration is going to help in improving your business growth.
If you have any questions about the ERP system or need some experts’ advice to implement the ERP system, we would be happy to answer them in the comment section below.
