Selecting a manufacturing management software solution is a torturous, gut-wrenching test of will, requiring vast reserves of capital and patience. When it's done well, the implementors are recognized as the enterprise's saviors. When it's done poorly, nobody's happy and the implementors are encouraged to begin updating their résumés.

Eleven manufacturing professionals — academics, practitioners and vendors — met at the invitation of APICS—The Performance Advantage during the recent APICS Conference in Washington, D.C., to discuss the software selection issue. But the conversation never actually made it to selection ... instead, participants focused on the inability of manufacturing professionals to identify exactly what problems they want their software solution to solve. The software selection process is difficult largely because prospects do not fully understand their own situation.

Participating in the discussion, moderated by R.T. "Chris" Christensen, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business, were: Richard C. Ling, Richard C. Ling Inc.; Richard S. Perrone, IBM; Terry Clarkson, IBM; Kerry Calderwood, Baan Company; Rhonda Lummus, Ph.D., CPIM, CIRM, Central Missouri State University; Alice Lindsey, CPIM, CIRM, AlliedSignal; Ray Rebello, P.E., CIRM, J.D. Edwards World Solutions Company; Sam Tomas, Motorola; Carol Ptak, CFPIM, CIRM, Eagle Enterprises; and Jim Burlingame, a long-time manufacturing professional recently retired from the Oliver Wight Company.

After listening to the agenda laid out for the roundtable, but before discussion had begun, Jim Burlingame added that "the most important question you can ask is 'Why am I doing this? What do I want to accomplish?'" From there, the conversation never made it back to the issue of software selection.

"Somebody says the software doesn't work, but that's almost never the case," Burlingame continued. "Something else is wrong, and new software isn't going to help unless what's wrong is fixed. Very rarely are you using what you have as well as you could. If you look to a new software package to solve your problems, you may be misdirecting your efforts. Maybe you should be looking internally, at the way you do business."

"The second question you should ask before you even begin to look for software is 'What's the goal?'" said Carol Ptak. "Where are we headed? What is our current reality? What's the future picture? Usually you'll find that whatever is holding you up is not a software issue."

Rich Perrone is the national manager for IBM's ERP Solutions/Start Smart program, which helps small and medium-sized businesses identify worthy software solutions. "The very first day, when we begin our needs analysis project with our client, we want to see executives of that company in the room," Perrone said, "because any selection process must be driven by management's vision of the future."

All agreed that the selection process cannot be turned over to the information technology group. "Part of the danger now is that the software is becoming so complex that it's going to be a real educational struggle to make sure that the operating managers, not just the IT people, understand this software," Burlingame said.


Who's buying, and what are they buying?
Driven by the Year 2000 problem and other factors, more and more software selection processes begin and end with the IT group and the financial management of an enterprise. Often these two groups select "an all-encompassing ERP system," Richard Ling said, "but it turns out to be a bill of goods. If this vendor is partnering with other vendors, then it's obvious that there is some functionality that is not there. So the assumed completeness of the system — 'we'll give you everything you need' — isn't truly there."

"Clearly, that is our experience," said Tony Clarkson. "The system never delivers what was promised by the vendor or by the IT group. The systems being marketed, sold and bought today are so complex in their interactions that they can affect every part of a company, so you must be very careful about what it is and why you're picking it.

"A manufacturer cannot implement every feature and function that the vendor can sell," Clarkson continued. "You need to know and understand where your priorities are, what are the business problems you're trying to solve, and then attack those areas with a lot of caution, because you're putting your entire company at risk. In the 1980s, companies were expanding, and they purchased these systems to help manage their growth. Today, a lot of these companies, especially small and medium-sized companies, are buying systems because it's a matter of survival."

Compounding the problems posed by a poorly selected system is what Alice Lindsey called "a disconnect between the high-level vision of the company and the frontline managers."

"Frontline managers are being asked to streamline their processes, work together with others in teams, increase productivity and cut costs, and upper management presents them with this software, this tool, to accomplish all that. Executive level management is taking the easy way out, or they just don't understand the complexity, and they're expecting a tool to solve their business problems, and that just isn't going to happen."


Education vs. training
Faced with criticism that they sell systems laden with bells and whistles to companies who pay for more than they can possibly use, vendors often respond that users often lack even a basic understanding of manufacturing fundamentals. That sentiment is shared to some extent by Carol Ptak, who delineated the difference between education and training.

"Education," she explained, "is what the vendor assumes you know before you go into the training class. Education is that clear understanding of what you're trying to accomplish, and why you're trying to accomplish it," and that education is prerequisite, of course, to fully applying the power of any software system to solve a problem.

In defense of users who face operations with inadequate education, Sam Tomas pointed out that it's difficult to truly grasp and understand how an enterprise works. He recalled that when implementing a manufacturing information system at Motorola, a 12-member cross-functional team met for nearly a month to diagram the business and the flow of products and information through it. The end product was a 21-foot flowchart. "We thought that was uncommonly large," Tomas said, "but I've found that it's not at all extraordinary to come up with something that size."

"Once we had done that," Tomas continued, "it was easy to see how things integrate, and inefficiencies really jump out at you. It became much easier to answer the question 'How do we want to run our business?' We always had a strategic plan, but this made it much easier for us to identify the tools we wanted to use to take us there." Tomas said that to take an enterprise to the optimal "to-be" vision embraced by upper management requires a thorough understanding of its "as-is" state in the here-and-now. A company specifying a software solution without a clear understanding of its ideal application will specify a system optimized for maintaining the status quo.


People who need people ...
"We keep coming around the people side of things," pointed out Rhonda Lummus. "And the people working in the trenches now don't have the opportunity or the time, or their companies have downsized and aren't allowing them the time to acquire the education that they need to really help put these systems in place and ensure that they're used properly. In the 1970s and '80s there was an emphasis on training everybody in MRP so that everybody would understand it; and now we've gone in the opposite direction, assuming that the system itself is going to do all these things for us, so we don't really need to understand all that stuff ... let's just fly the system."

"If you want a recipe for disaster," added Burlingame, "Rhonda just spelled it out for you."

"If we don't have senior executives committed to the impact of these new systems, we will not take on the project," said Perrone. "It will fail.

"We're dancing around here, talking about a lot of issues," Perrone continued, "but we really started at the end, which is 'Why do implementations fail?' They fail because they lack management commitment, the project is poorly managed, they pick the wrong system, and they pick the wrong system because they don't identify their requirements. We've developed a top 10 list of why implementations fail, and we work backwards from there with our clients. Let's put the things that prevent this from happening in place up front. Nobody wants to be a statistic. Nobody wants to spend $10 million to $12 million on a system and not be able to pull a basic financial summary, but it happens."

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