Napoli, August 23 AD 79
Dear mum,
I am so excited. I have just signed the tablet with the local estate agent to purchase that villa I told you about in Pompeii. My estate agent says it’s a fantastic property with great views of the mountain and you can also see the sea. He says that I cannot go wrong with the location because the villa is right in the heart of the town, not far from the market. I thought we could move in today but my estate agent says he cannot give me the keys because he’s been told that there’s a big barbecue going on today on the mountain and he doesn’t want to miss out. There’s certainly a lot of smoke coming from Vesuvius – they’ve clearly started cooking the meat – so perhaps it would have been fun to be there as well. But me and Fulvia have rather decided to spend the weekend relaxing on the Amalfi coast and we’ll move in on Monday.
Yours, Marcus.
Amalfi, August 25 AD 79
Dear mum,
I have some bad news. My estate agent has messed up big-time! I’ve just heard that not only has my villa disappeared, the rest of the town has gone too. Something about a volcano eruption, whatever that is. My estate agent gave me terrible advice! I guess we’ll have to start looking again…Sigh.
Yours, Marcus.
Well, you know what they say. Location is everything when you buy a house, and you can’t always trust the estate agent to get it right so you also need to do your own homework.
Buying ERP software can likewise be a tricky matter; it’s not location that matters in this case but value, value, value. Establishing which ERP system is going to provide you with the best value is not at all easy. Maintaining that value as your business evolves and your ERP requirements change is not that easy either. The person who sold you your current ERP system may well have tried to do the best for you at the time you purchased it, but now it’s maybe 5 years later and you haven’t really had the time to find out what the latest release of your ERP system can do and whether it can add value to your business.
I think you need to appoint someone in your organization who is dead keen to get the best value out of your system. Someone who will take the trouble to make sure your system behaves nicely at all times and more importantly to look for that extra something out of the software. And someone who is constantly investigating ways to maximise the use of the software you have already paid for. Some call this person the ‘product champion’, others the ‘seeker of value’. What’s in a name?
You should regularly talk to either your ERP vendor or the person who looks after your system, and find out what’s been happening in your ERP world. In the SYSPRO community you can subscribe to the SYSPRO Support Zone and receive a regular newsletter, and you can also find a source of information on the SYSPRO Forums. On the LinkedIn social media site there are groups covering SYSPRO users and education that you can join.
You should be constantly asking your ERP vendor what they can do for you … and perhaps you will start to get more value out of your system.
