“Postmodern ERP” strategies: Multiple Hubs

Gartner has been talking about "postmodern ERP" for a couple of years now:

"Businesses looking to improve administration today can take advantage of lower costs, better functional fit and process flexibility offered by blending cloud applications with on-premises applications in what we now refer to as ‘postmodern ERP.’"

In SAP Nation 2.0 I expanded the definition to showcase 9 customer strategies to modernize their ERP backbone.  Over the next few days I will excerpt some of the strategies.

The first is what I called “Multiple Hubs”

Many airlines has designed networks where traffic moves along spokes connected to a hub at a central airport. The majors have multiple hubs around the world. Delta, as an example has hubs at Atlanta's Hartsfield; Paris' Charles de Gaulle and other airports. Many SAP customers are moving to similar architectures with hubs for product engineering/R&D, customer facing, industry specific and back office operations.

As they build a next-generation of "smart products" (with embedded sensors, software and other technology), many SAP customers are custom developing much of that product- centric hub. In some industries, even cross-licensing technology from competitors for some of the spokes is preferable to what they can buy from SAP. Similarly, in the customer-facing hub, many customers are finding that Salesforce.com, Oracle and Adobe have made significant strides compared to SAP. The same is true for industry specific processes. This is allowing them to gradually shrink the role of SAP in their overall IT investment strategy to that of limited back office support.

While the book focused on SAP scenarios, the same can be applied to many other ERP environments. More excerpts over the next few days.