Chris Del from tompeters! has opened an interesting discussion with his Individualism in Business article yesterday.
He asks: "Should I buy SAP or invest in my team?"
A. "It seems increasingly rare to find a true business team. (Dys)functional reporting groups appear to be much more common." and
B. "Investing in process and systems improvement feels more reassuringly tangible than investing in talent, it seems. An SAP R4 ERP system feels more likely to deliver ROI than teamwork development. Even though the stats on ROI for ERP implementation are frightening, they are more tangible than the soft stuff."
In our opinion, failure with strategy B is a direct result of the situation A and not an independent option.
And beware of that dysfunctional business team! What does business team stand for?
The sales team, the sales & marketing team, or the whole organization including several distinct IT silos working on the hosting, implementation, training, operations and support of SAP for the rest of the company?
The hard stuff/ software in itself is not to blame.
We answer: Buy SAP/ Oracle/ Microsoft and then invest in
- A cross-functional talented team
- Jointly collaborating on the workflows and business needs,
- Defining requirements for the implementation of the system and
- Constantly training/ empowering the users, thus
- Enhancing the processes as well as the implementation by incessant feedback.
Get the 
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