Does ERP really make a difference in company's value chain?

Filed in archive Research on January 12, 2008

This question has always been on the table that "Does ERP really make a difference in the company's value chain?" Another day I was organizing my documents and suddenly found an old article (Nov. 2005) from Financial Times in my documents. The interesting thing in the article was the following:

Many corporations have different ERP systems installed in different parts of the group, as a result of divisional managers making separate choices but based on the results of a research by The Hackett Group, it has been revealed that "The world class organizations tend to only have one ERP package!".

The article was saying that at the end of the day it doesn't matter which solution you are using because they are basically the same, so it makes sense to use as few solutions as possible to benefit from standardization and resulting cost efficiencies.

I don't know how this research has been conducted and whether the results are valid or not, but solution vendors are disagreeing with that as it was also project in FT's report.

What do you think?