Today's corporate world is totally driven by latest technologies available in the market. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is one among these innovative and novel technologies obtainable in the market. ERP implementation is not merely a status symbol but it is implemented to address the pain areas of the company. It is the matter of adopting the best practices so that there is an enhanced integration of work flows.
Customization is the most important and integral part of ERP implementation. Customization of an enterprise resource planning is necessary at many instances as the readymade applications may not fit into the requirements of the company.
Customization of ERP application is good for extent. It will make the application to address the pain areas of customer business environment. But, too much of customization may destroy the existing features of the enterprise resource planning application. So, both the customer and vendor need to be very careful on the issue of customization. There is no fun of altering the application completely just because you are unable to fit the application into the requirements.
If you encounter a situation where in the ERP application needs to be completely amended to address the pain areas, it is recommend that just leave the application and search for another. The brand name of the ERP does not serve you if the application is not suitable for your business environment. The branded applications are good in terms of flexibility and scalability but if you alter the application to large extent, how can you expect it to be more scalable and flexible in the future?
It is not good to have a completely customized application where all the important and strong features are destroyed to make the application fit into the requirement. Yes, the customization is necessary but to some extent where in you add many other tabs and columns to report more information or to address all the pain areas.
The only problem here is that, the original features will be killed in the process of complete customization. Normally, the customers choose to go ahead with a specific enterprise resource planning application by seeing the original features. If the original features are killed to make the application suits to the customer's environment, the customer may loose the original features which made him more fascinated towards the application.
The customization of ERP should be taken place in such a way to add some more features to address the pain areas of the customer by not touching the original features. As long as, the customization does not affect the original features of the ERP application, we can definitely alter the same. But if you think you loose the original features of the application by customizing the same, it is not advisable at all.
To conclude, Customization of ERP application is good to some extent if the application is altered to address the customer core pain areas with out killing the original features of the application. If you think you loose the original features of the application by customizing the same, just leave the application and search for another good application available in the market.
