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by Jeff Moad, MA Editorial Staff Posted on Monday, October 30, 2006 3:18:21 PM   For many manufacturers, the Holy Grail of enterprise applications is one that deploys a common set of business applications across the enterprise. For good reason: With a single, standard set of enterprise applications, manufacturers could enforce common processes -- everything from end-of-year reporting to material procurement -- across the entire enterprise. The pursuit of that kind of consistency and efficiency in large part drove the widespread deployment of ERP applications in manufacturing companies in the 1990s. But what happens when that consistent set of business processes must be changed because, say, your company has made a major acquisition or decided to outsource production or distribution to a new offshore partner? Can you change your business applications and deploy the changes across your company fast enough to keep up? Or, in times of rapid change, do your enterprise applications act like cement, fixing key business processes in place? As many manufacturers have discovered, the generation of enterprise applications built on client/server-style architectures has all too often inhibited rather than enhanced agility. That's because many of the same characteristics that helped make client/server systems tightly integrated; i.e., procedural code and proprietary interfaces, also made them monolithic and difficult to change. [Click to continue] |