I’ve been in the ERP industry a long time. Back in 1994, I joined a company called Intentia that was making an ERP system called Movex. You know them today, of course, by the names Infor and M3.
Back then, ERP ran on local servers, accessed manually through a terminal – ERP was literally a black box.
You could tap into the database directly and fetch and write data with SQL queries. There were no security mechanisms, however, so if you messed up you could potentially cause serious damage. Not just potentially, either, it happened many times.
This was a long time ago, and there’s been massive technological progress during the last three decades. ERP today is quite different to what it was all those years ago.
Time doesn’t heal all wounds, though. Despite technological advances, ERP systems remain massive, deeply interconnected, and nearly impossible to rebuild from scratch without enormous resources. Many big ERP vendors also have challenges with interoperability between several systems, often as an aftermath of acquisitions.
The result: We’re trapped in legacy infrastructure.
For battle-hardened old-timers, this is simply the way of the ERP world. Newcomers are used to sleek interfaces and usability, though, and are baffled by these clunky, rigid systems. ERP doesn’t resemble anything they are used to from the consumer world.
Simply put: younger users are expecting more.
But things are changing. Cloud technology is pushing the boundaries of ERP, allowing us to merge, restructure and present data in new and user friendly ways.
APIs and Data Lakes have fundamentally changed the game. Now, instead of plugging into the black box, data lakes give you SQL-like access through the cloud, and APIs let you write information back in a secure, non-invasive way.
In short, we can gather information much more efficiently and combine data from many different sources.
At Vince, we design with the Collect, Analyze, Execute mindset. We want to gather relevant data, limit the number of clicks, and make interfaces that make sense to people.
An example is the Excel add-in we built for M3. Instead of forcing legacy interfaces on users, we meet them where they already work – in Excel. With multiple APIs, they can access M3 seamlessly, without having to think about the underlying systems at all.
This is one example of user centric solutions that don’t require a complete overhaul of the system’s back end. Younger ERP professionals care about systems that look good, feel right and do the job. At Vince, we're trying to do our part in making sure ERP looks, feels and works the way the new generation of users expect.