At his last job, Paul Rials made cake mix. As IS manager for a large food manufacturing company, he managed the manufacturing software system that kept the pipes humming and the mixers—each the size of a cement truck-mixing.

But he had a problem.

The problem was that the company's old Mapics software was designed for discrete manufacturing. That means it was very good at tracking countable objects, like nuts and bolts, but very bad at tracking flowing materials that needed to measured.

Like cake mix.

"[The software] really couldn't handle the fact that, in inventory, I may have a hundred thousand pounds of flour in the bin plus 10 thousand pounds or so in the pipes that go from the bins to the mixers—a pipeline of goods that wasn't necessarily discrete all the time," says Rials. Compound several inexact measurements and you may wind up with way too much flour or sugar or salt or yeast. Which is not good. Conversely, you could end up with not enough flour, sugar, salt or yeast, leading to idle manufacturing lines, missed delivery dates and irate customers. Which is also not good.

And that's not all.

The right proportion of ingredients for cake mix varies from batch to batch depending on variable factors (like the humidity) in the manufacturing area, so Rials needed his software to generate a flexible bill of materials (so much sugar, so much salt) that would take all that into account, cake mix-wise. None of which Mapics ("A classic machine shop tool," says Rials, that his company bought in the 1980s when "the blue suits [read IBM] walked your management through the shop floor, asked what you needed and then said their mainframe was a perfect fit.") was designed to do at that time. Of course, Rials' job was to make it do it anyway.

"It aged me," he says.

ERP to the rescue?
Nobody today would choose a system that wasn't suited to his business processes, you say. After all, that's why we have enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems: to integrate key business and management functions, particularly in the manufacturing, finance and human resource areas, to provide a high-level view of everything that's going on in the company.

Before ERP software systems, when a CEO wanted the big picture he would have to get data from the heads of each business division, and then he would have to integrate the information they provided. Now the ERP software does the integrating job, allowing the business to spend less time figuring out what's going on and more time improving what's going on. Of course, ERP packages are enormously expensive, but the savings in efficiencies should also be enormous. So you would think companies would be enormously careful about choosing the right one.