ERP and e-commerce systems creating £600,000 bill

Poor planning and integration of e-commerce and enterprise resource planning systems is costing major organisations up to £600,000 a month until problems are sorted out.

Research by analyst firm AMRhighlighted found that more than a third of data in multi-million pound ERP systems now originates outside the enterprise – usually from customers and suppliers.

While many organisations have tight management regimes for their own data, too little attention is paid to this externally created data, which can result in delays and increased costs, the analyst group said.

AMR found almost 85 per cent of the companies surveyed experienced delays in ERP rollouts due to B2B integration issues.

Some 57 per cent of firms rolling out ERP have experienced a production outage directly as a result of the failure to improve this data handling.

Nearly 85 per cent of firms interviewed said integration issues with the data of their business partners had delayed their ERP rollouts.

Over six in 10 respondents said they had performed inadequate testing of partner data before launching their ERP systems and 79 per cent of businesses ended up with a over one percent of their partner data being erroneous.

Senior managers at 121 large companies were interviewed, across the food and beverage, high tech, consumer products and automotive industries.

Steve Keifer, VP product and industry marketing at e-commerce supplier GXS, which commissioned the survey, said partner data was too often overlooked during ERP rollouts.

“Project leaders often forget the critical supply chain links and external data flows needed to power ERP applications,” he said.

“Too many companies get half-way through a new ERP roll-out to discover that they are not staffed to support the massive mapping, testing and trading partner management activities necessary for ERP upgrades.”