In response to my post about business processes "angioplasty" I have received comments protesting that in fact SAP (or Oracle) does support the path Mazda had designed to keep its accounts payable process simple. Additionally, these packages support more elaborate two-way, three-way and other matching with purchase order, receiving records etc. True enough - packaged software supports multiple paths around many business processes. But at what price? The cost of the software has burdened the base processes. The license, the annual maintenance, the specialized training, the 2-3 year upgrade cycles all add up (see this post about the costs).
Most ERP vendors have also allowed their SI partners (and their own consultants) to make process design an art form. The decision on the process path and their configuration into the software should take days, not weeks and months. Conversions from legacy vendor masters should have been largely automated over the last decade. There should be enough use cases and test scripts over thousands of implementations. Yet, the SIs have not delivered those economies. At their billing rates, it adds up. There is also a premium around the employees who support the new process - because they are SAP "savvy".
In my estimation, if you were to look at the 10 year TCO of a new accounts payable system, then amortize that over number of checks from the system, we have added between 2 and 10c to each check. (SAP will argue it does not sell accounts payable functionality by itself - but most of the financial -FI/CO - user counts and transaction outputs I have seen in its customer base relate to accounts payable)
To SAP's credit, they have over the last couple of years been doing "Value Engineering" exercises for many of their clients. These show where there are process and other efficiencies to be gained from implementing their software. To my knowledge, they do not conduct a comparable TCO analysis of implementing their software. If their customers could see that checks (or customer orders or BOMs) would cost that much more going forward at a transaction level they would be far more selective about which processes they choose to focus on. Good solid business investment decisions - not just "trust us - we have world class processes" or the even more glib "but you need end-to-end integration that our software provides".
