To Guercio, replacing Trafx didn’t make sense. It would have cost a bundle, and it would have been a tough sell internally?people don’t want to go through the trauma of change when the current system is working, he says. Instead, he decided to augment his existing system with best-of-breed solutions, which, he asserts, have more functionality than systems from ERP vendors. Guercio integrated the solutions using a variety of methods ranging from point-to-point to XML. This strategy has allowed him to preserve his company’s core investment in its homegrown system.

Guercio says that Holly has had more success with the point integration than the XML, both because the company lacks familiarity with the newer technology and because XML tags generate a tremendous amount of data, which slows down overall performance.

Eventually, he believes, Web services could solve that problem.

Functionality. For some companies, a single ERP system is simply too generic to fit diverse or highly specialized business needs. For example, one Rock-Tenn division makes cardboard supermarket display boxes for products such as batteries and toothpaste. This unit needs to track the location, inventory level, lot number and expiration date of the products that will ultimately fill the displays, as well as the customer location and shipping date of finished displays?all in case of a product recall. Another division makes 2-ton cardboard rolls. Rock-Tenn needs to track each roll’s weight, width and dimensions in linear feet and square feet. "There is no ERP system that does that," says CIO Shutzberg.

For Rock-Tenn, "trying to adapt an ERP system to fit our business process is stupid," he says. "And customizing ERP is even more stupid." Instead, the company has had to find the best ERP-type solution for each of its six business units. Shutzberg is in the middle of a two-to-three-year project to integrate each unit’s system.

"It’s no panacea," he admits, but it’s the best solution available to him. Besides, the systems that each business unit now has work, and, he says, "the worst thing to do is throw away what’s working in order to get to the end-of-the-rainbow utopia."

Today, Rock-Tenn’s integration is largely application to application, although there are some Web services at the middleware level. That’s the plan for the short-term future as well; Shutzberg says that there hasn’t been enough development within the Web services community to convince him that Web services integration will be practical in the next year or two. "I like the concept," he says, "but I have to wait and see it mature."