Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Are Supply Chain IT systems so costly to run and maintain?

Miya Knights from Computing has written an article recently, regarding the results of a survey between 400 European and American companies. In the survey 26 percent of the companies said that SCM solutions are so costly and if they invest large amounts of money on these solutions, they won?t have enough money to spend on the business itself.

Actually a critical question arises here: Should the managers invest in buying these solutions or not? I myself think, the answer depends on the size of the company and also a concept which I call SCM Readiness.

Let's start with the Readiness. I think that achieving a level of maturity in implementing and using IT systems is a predecessor for buying a SCM solution. Otherwise, it may lead to more frustration and high costs. I will come back to this idea of maturity later in the next articles.
And about the size, yes, maybe it's to costly for small businesses to run such solutions and they'd better use some simple soft wares instead.

So, it's better to look at these issues too before buying these expensive complex packages.

3 Comments:

Blogger FIVE ELEMENTS said...

Yeah, thats true. Thse softwares are not affordable to all companies. It depends.

This is the reason why, there are some research groups working on developing softwares at low costs so that small companies can afford that.

8:35 PM  
Blogger ehsani said...

Thank you very much for your comment Yogeshwar.

I'll be happy if you share your ideas more with us.

You can also send me emails at ehsan@creative-weblogging.com

12:36 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi Ehasan,
Though SCM solutions being a costly affair, i believe that a proper PPT (People, Process & Technology) analysis will yield a better results. It seems that many companies just get into the hype of the SCM solutions with too narrow focus in mind. Instead, a proper Global Optimization Consideration (Effect across the supply chain) will help these comapanies in making a proper choice of the SCM solution.

7:03 AM  

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