5 ms·

I think this is both very wrong and very right. The title, "You can't..." starts right. The subtitle... "startups can't" takes it off course. It's not about st

I think this is both very wrong and very right. The title, "You can't..." starts right. The subtitle... "startups can't" takes it off course. It's not about startups, small companies or whatnot. I mean, some things require scale... but this is not really about specific design features. It's about "good enough" vs "really good." Imagine "AverageCo." It's the 19th largest industrial cleaning product supplier in the world. 2nd largest in west belgium. They have decided to invest in a custom ERP system that will handle all their business problems. Stock. Accounting. Manufacturing. Sales. Everything. You are advising them. AverageCo needs to aim for adequate. If they aim for excellent, they'll fail. It's not a good idea to demand UIs be slick like netflix, or clever like google. The brutal reality is that designing and project managing a good Salesforce or Oracle implementation is likely a stretch for AverageCo. They are not about to outdo amazon. It does not matter how many consultants they hire. Outside consultants get you to adequate, not excellent. OTOH, a lean, agile software startup may well outperform amazon in some specific area. The way they will do this is by being clever, tactical, and knowledgeable in little areas. They know what's easy or hard to solve. They'll pick good goals, make clever trade offs and slick compromises. They'll choose a stack that makes the hard parts easy. They'll avoid getting bogged down, changing the plan dynamically to avoid difficulties. Those tactics are only possible when you are close to the process. If you hire a prototype company, followed by an industrial design consultant, then outsource manufacturing... you are not close enough to the process to be brilliant. You'll need to live with adequate. This isn't because excellence is impossible, it's because you are not excellent at this. Big companies are famously incapable of admitting they are anything but excellent at anything. Startups can be conceited too. In this case, a lot of startups need to realize that they are suits. You are not the hacker who can write his own JS framework or patch the OS. You are the guy who has no idea how to design the manufacturing process yourself.

ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
> 2nd largest in west belgium. Strong vibes from Borat's sister here, tbh.
marcosdumay 4y ago
Hum... You got a bad example, since good ERPs do not exist. There are minimally sufficient ones and insufficient ones. The one you get from Salesforce or Oracle can land on either of those categories. The same applies to the one you develop in house.
- quartesixte 4y ago
  A good ERP system is totally possible. You just have to hire a SWE team to custom make one for you and then fulltime maintain it.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    Which is the best, and most expensive, way to never have a working, let alone acceptable not to speak of good, ERP.
  - PeterisP 4y ago
    A custom ERP can work well for a company that stays mostly the same, however, at the size where you can afford a SWE team to build a custom ERP that is not a reasonable assumption - you will be getting many merger&acquisition events, so if you're not using an industry-standard ERP, then pretty much all the time you'll have ongoing migrations of acquired divisions/overseas branches/etc from "their ERP" to your custom one (as well as having to run these other ERPs for many months in parallel while you manage these migrations, and still need to do consolidated reporting while its happening) as well as this custom ERP causing you to take a discount when spinning off or selling parts of your corporation (or all of it). If you're running the same ERP as almost everyone else in your industry (e.g. SAP) then this compatibility enables much less friction and cost in M&A. Companies and lines of business aren't eternal, they merge and split, and it's a big question whether the investment for a custom ERP will pay back over its inevitably limited lifetime, including the migration to it and afterwards from it.
- hef19898 4y ago
  Salesforce is CRM, customer relationship management, and not an ERP. Oracle is, as far as I onow, mainly accountong, and not great. Proper ERPs come from the likes of MS (MS Dynamics, an aquisition), Siebel (or whatever they are called...), INFOR and, obviously, SAP. The implementation is make or break so, regardless of vendor.

ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago

> 2nd largest in west belgium. Strong vibes from Borat's sister here, tbh.

marcosdumay 4y ago

Hum... You got a bad example, since good ERPs do not exist. There are minimally sufficient ones and insufficient ones. The one you get from Salesforce or Oracle can land on either of those categories. The same applies to the one you develop in house.

quartesixte 4y ago
A good ERP system is totally possible. You just have to hire a SWE team to custom make one for you and then fulltime maintain it.
- hef19898 4y ago
  Which is the best, and most expensive, way to never have a working, let alone acceptable not to speak of good, ERP.
- PeterisP 4y ago
  A custom ERP can work well for a company that stays mostly the same, however, at the size where you can afford a SWE team to build a custom ERP that is not a reasonable assumption - you will be getting many merger&acquisition events, so if you're not using an industry-standard ERP, then pretty much all the time you'll have ongoing migrations of acquired divisions/overseas branches/etc from "their ERP" to your custom one (as well as having to run these other ERPs for many months in parallel while you manage these migrations, and still need to do consolidated reporting while its happening) as well as this custom ERP causing you to take a discount when spinning off or selling parts of your corporation (or all of it). If you're running the same ERP as almost everyone else in your industry (e.g. SAP) then this compatibility enables much less friction and cost in M&A. Companies and lines of business aren't eternal, they merge and split, and it's a big question whether the investment for a custom ERP will pay back over its inevitably limited lifetime, including the migration to it and afterwards from it.
hef19898 4y ago
Salesforce is CRM, customer relationship management, and not an ERP. Oracle is, as far as I onow, mainly accountong, and not great. Proper ERPs come from the likes of MS (MS Dynamics, an aquisition), Siebel (or whatever they are called...), INFOR and, obviously, SAP. The implementation is make or break so, regardless of vendor.