ERP implementations are so prevalent these days as most of the business owners are trying to adopt the latest technology available in the market. Huge competition among companies in same industry has been the main reason behind these changes in the market.
Customization is the most important aspect in the implementation. ERP customization is nothing but alteration of the application to make it fit into the customer requirements. ERP applications are designed keeping common requirements of all the industries in mind. There is a lot of difference between the operations of one company to another in the same industry. The enterprise resource planning application which fits into one company may not fit into another company in the same industry. This is what the main reason behind the customization of ERP application. The customization is mainly based on the GAP analysis which is done on the business operations of a specified company.
Based on the recommendations of GAP analysis, the application goes to the technical consultants so that it can be customized. More customization is required for companies whose operations are pretty much different from the traditional operations of the business. The business environment of some companies like Pharmaceutical and casting and moldings companies largely vary from the traditional business environment. For these types of business environments, the customization is must.
It is the matter of fulfilling the needs of the customer by addressing the pain areas in the working environment. The production environment and the steps involved in the production process vary from company to company. Even though, there are ERP software existed in the market specific to one industry, there are lot more tabs and features to be added to the application to report the relevant information.
If the application is not customized to some extent where the functionalities of the ERP application meet the requirements of the customer, it will not deliver the results in future and ultimately, it affects the return on investment. Keeping this return on investment in the mind, we need to alter the application so that it will match the requirements and hence it will address the customer core pain areas.
The ERP software is normally a readymade skeleton application, which integrates all the departments of the company. When it comes to addressing issues in side the functional departments, we need to add so many features which are necessary to address requirements but not already built in the application.
To put in a nut shell, it is a matter the of fact that, an ERP application which is just a skeleton made and needs to be amended or altered based on the current situation. Customer is allowed to follow the best practices with the help of enterprise resource planning application to some extent. To gain hundred percent advantages from the enterprise resource planning application, it is the responsibility of the customer and the vendor to sit together and discuss on the issues that need to be perfectly addressed and the amount of customization required to address the issues in the live or real time environment.
