I recently got a call from the owner of a local manufacturing company asking my advice on whether to implement SAP.  This is a single-site, $5 million operation with one nice, big, contiguous manufacturing floor, making rather uncomplicated widgets that have a raw material lead time of a couple days and a manufacturing cycle time of a couple of hours.  The next sound he heard was the bam-bam-bam of my head banging against the wall.He obviously hadn’t read my post on the False God of the Almighty Algorithm or he could’ve guessed my opinion.

Of course, SAP is not designed for companies of that size, and the cheapest implementation I’ve heard of is in the $500,000 range.  The same can be said for almost all enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.  Some form of system may be needed for large multisite or complex operations, but they’re often not appropriate for smaller companies, and they’re almost always overly relied upon at larger ones.

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