Best of Breed or Single Vendor?

Filed in archive Point of view on June 4, 2006

This is a question I have been asked many times: "Which approach do you recommend for adoption of Supply chain IT solutions: Single vendor or Best of Breed?".

And my answer to this is: "Good question! the answer is it depends...". But, even though the answer to the above mentioned question would heavily depend on the size of the company, the type of the industry and so forth, I myself vote for Best of Breed approach.

This approach, where companies hand-pick the best software product for each piece of supply chain process, comes with its set of headaches such as: extended vendor evaluation period, complex software integration problems and version control problems.

On the other hand, it may be an investment that provides greater long-term flexibility and higher quality of the solution. The fact that final solution has better fit to the enterprise, makes it a more preferable solution to me. What do you think?