Canned products are a reality for most of us in the software industry. Why would you roll your own CRM (Customer Relationship Manager), MRP (Material Requirements Planning) or accounting software when there are many mature products that are configurable for just about anything a business can do? The devil’s advocate would say, “where would we be if Google took that approach”? That may be true. I would contend that the success of the outliers such as Google are rare and far between. But there are a number of horror stories for those people who have tried to write their own. And, there are an equal number of horror stories for those people who have implemented canned packages.
Sometimes bad results come due to inadequate capacity planning. I worked for a company who purchased the latest warehousing canned software in the early ‘90s. They ran IBM mainframe applications, and were transitioning to the AS400 platform with the latest and greatest software. The software was awesome. It had all kinds of features they really needed. It just turned out that the biggest AS400 couldn’t handle the load, when they finally brought the entire company onto the system. They were saved at the last minute by the release of the next generation AS400 with a higher capacity.
Another company I worked with also used AS400 software for manufacturing. They customized the software radically to make it work for their specific needs. When the next version of the base/canned software was released, they realized that it would take nearly as long to re-implement their customizations. As a result, they were unable to move forward with much needed features and bug fixes, because the cost was too great.
All of this wandering brings me to a conversation I had just today with a colleague who is consulting for a company that is upgrading a canned software package they have had in place for a few years. They have a number of customizations and integrations being ported to a newer version of the canned software. I asked my friend how the project was going. His response was a pleasant surprise. This company knew the day would come when they need to upgrade to a newer version. Their approach was to use interfaces for all of their customization and integration. As a result, they are ahead of schedule with the new implementation, and the success rate has been stellar.
Do you support canned software for your company? How has your experience been? Share a comment with us with your thoughts?
Cheers,
Ben