If you can't already tell, we really love to discuss the recent evolution of ERP and its technology. As a delivery organization, something we're constantly trying to figure out is how can we best support our customers in this constantly shifting landscape. New systems and capabilities are constantly emerging, and we are faced with the challenge of trying to get our customers to change their mindset about the systems. Everything's had to change on the vendor side: the training system, the support systems, the product development systems, etc. As that whole thing is coming together, probably the next year or two is when you're really going to start seeing a lot of this gel into something like the Essentials program.
The more of those streamlined implementations you do, the more you're going to find out that they work worked well. Also, the more customers go through this process, the more we are able to improve it based on feedback, driving all everything to get better, more robust, easier to deploy. Will we ever get to the point where somebody downloads an ERP system and has it up and running in four weeks? Probably not, although we can always dream.
If you coming off of a system with hundreds of users and thousands of lines of code that are being executed, you're gonna have to make sure that all that stuff works as anticipated. Even if all the code works right, the data migration alone can create issues. While data is just one of those things, there's also all the reporting and analysis and different tools, which can be equally overwhelming to choose between.
The flip side of the coin is a vendor thinking they don't need to generate the reports. Well, an auditor still wants to see the financial statement (in physical, paper form). Sorry, they're not going to be okay with just looking at it on the screen, especially not in the public sector with audit reports, kaffir reports, and whatnot. However, something really kind of interesting about this whole evolution of things is the way it has vendors forced into a tighter relationship with their customers than they ever had been before, which is really great for the community as a whole.
