When Implementing an ERP solution there are 2 basic choices:

• Out of the Box; or
• Custom Built

  OR

Configurable versus Customisable:
Many 3rd party products that are generic in nature are designed to accommodate, within reason, many different types of businesses. These products are designed to be configured by the user.
If a business differs significantly from the intended user of the product, to make it fit it needs to be customised. Once this is done the product is no longer generic and many of the advantage of it being generic are lost.

What does ‘Custom Built’ mean?
A total business solution comprising at least one custom built component.
In business more often than not the optimal solution will include one or more vanilla products with a custom databases accommodating the more unique business specific functionality and a purpose built data warehouse tieing all of the solutions together.
For example a business’ optimal solution may include a generic CRM product to manage customers, MYOB to control the financials and a custom SQL database to manage operational information and to control information across all data stores.

Everybody wants, or likes to believe that there is an out of the box solution for their business that is:

• Cheap
• Efficient; and
• Easy to Use

This is rarely the case, and at best, vanilla solutions can only accommodate part of your businesses function.
So when deciding whether to opt for the out of the box solution or custom build give ere to these few considerations:

• Out of the box solutions work best when no customisations are required. Even if the customisations seem minimal to keep the solution viable they should be weighed against adjusting the business’ processes to fit the ‘Out of the Box’solution.
• Even if the business opts for minimal customisations the total cost to the business grows rapidly.
• Custom built solutions are all too often judged by the not so flashy front ends (which are usually the first thing sacrificed by the business in favour of additional functionality).
• Whilst silky smooth interfaces look the part, it is quality information that makes a business tick. ‘Out of the Box’ solutions are not only famous for making it easy to put information in to them in the wrong place (thereby destroying data uniqueness and blurring the business’ data structures), but as a result they make it virtually impossible to extract meaningful and accurate information.

From a technical point of view:

Custom built solutions give a much more efficient table structure.
Out of the box ERP’s cluttered and cumbersome back end to support its generic nature, is so often overlooked as the consumers focus on ‘the bells and whistles ‘ of the flashy front end.

When making customisations to an out of the box solution a developer is faced with a table structure that resembles this:
 

Important note: From a productivity and efficiency point of view the success of the implementation of a vanilla ERP solution is inversely proportional to the level of customisation required.

Summary

As a rule of thumb, if you can find a vanilla solution that requires no customisation to fit your business, and you don’t envisage substantial business growth or process evolution then this solution may be the best choice. Once product customisations are required the benefits of the vanilla product over custom built start dropping off rapidly. When a business is sufficiently complex that extensive customisation of an out of the box product is required it the alarm should sound as to why we are not custom building a purpose designed solution from the ground up.