{"id":9633,"date":"2019-10-15T03:26:28","date_gmt":"2019-10-15T03:26:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/totalsynergy.com\/?p=9633"},"modified":"2022-09-19T13:38:48","modified_gmt":"2022-09-19T03:38:48","slug":"the-death-of-erp-what-does-the-aec-design-industry-do-now-its-gone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/totalsynergy.com\/the-death-of-erp-what-does-the-aec-design-industry-do-now-its-gone\/","title":{"rendered":"The death of ERP \u2014 what does the AEC design industry do now it\u2019s gone?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t
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Your built environment design business\u00a0runs on\u00a0digital technology. That\u2019s just how it is now. When you\u2019re designing, when you\u2019re\u00a0invoicing<\/a>, when you\u2019re interacting with clients, when you\u2019re\u00a0collaborating<\/a>\u00a0on\u00a0projects<\/a>.\u00a0All this digital used to be\u00a0managed and automated by a process management software\u00a0called ERP (Enterprise resource planning).\u00a0ERP is dead, friends.\u00a0You need to know that to\u00a0keep your architecture in the now and into the future.\u00a0Here\u2019s\u00a0the why and the wherefor:<\/p>\n

ERP\u2019s history \u2014 the one-stop\u00a0shop<\/h3>\n

Historically\u00a0the one-stop\u00a0shop was what everybody was talking about.\u00a0A situation where\u00a0all the\u00a0business software\u00a0you need\u00a0comes from the one vendor.\u00a0That had attractive benefits\u00a0\u2014\u00a0everything in the same product,\u00a0supposedly\u00a0similar user interface,\u00a0only one\u00a0company\u00a0to argue with\u00a0if there were problems with any of it,\u00a0a single\u00a0invoice\u00a0so there was less paperwork, and theoretically, because it all came from the one vendor, the\u00a0features\u00a0of the application integrated\u00a0with each other better.<\/p>\n

Jack of all<\/h3>\n

That was a really good theory, but it didn’t\u00a0exactly\u00a0work out that way.\u00a0Instead of the one-stop\u00a0shop, you got the Jack\u00a0of\u00a0all\u00a0trades.\u00a0One vendor trying to be an expert at everything.\u00a0That\u00a0didn’t work out so well.\u00a0The end of the \u201cjack of all trades\u201d phrase, is \u201cmaster of none\u201d.<\/p>\n

In\u00a0the hope of more quickly building a\u00a0broader\u00a0system\u00a0software,\u00a0companies\u00a0didn’t actually write everything themselves. They started going out and buying third-party systems and bringing them into\u00a0the fold.\u00a0Then they had the problem of trying to integrate these things to make them work together.<\/p>\n

We\u00a0really no longer had the one-stop shop benefit, other than the invoicing. You still had a\u00a0third-party\u00a0piece of software that wasn’t terribly well integrated, had a different user interface, etc.\u00a0It had all the same problems.\u00a0A\u00a0great idea,\u00a0that\u00a0didn’t really work in execution.<\/p>\n

Best-of-breed<\/h3>\n

That’s the ERP side of it. Then there’s the best-of-breed concept. And that’s\u00a0equally\u00a0attractive.<\/p>\n

We swung the pendulum the other way, and said, “What we should do instead is go out and find the vendor that has the very best of each\u00a0thing we need, then we’ll build our own ERP by buying\u00a0dozens of different\u00a0applications from dozens\u00a0of\u00a0different people.\u00a0Then we’ll work out how to make them all talk to each other, and that’s going to be great!”<\/p>\n

And it was great\u00a0\u2014\u00a0for the IT department. They now had almost as many staff as you had professionals running the business, and\u00a0the IT team\u00a0were probably getting paid more. But then you had the fragility of trying to connect all those different applications.\u00a0Connecting them together\u00a0depended on how well they could import and export data.\u00a0It got a bit easier if they had decent APIs\u00a0but the complexity there is that every system has different APIs\u00a0\u2014\u00a0like a power plug in a power socket. If you take your Australian plug and try and plug it into\u00a0an American\u00a0socket, it just won’t work.\u00a0For the API to work\u00a0both\u00a0sides\u00a0must\u00a0match up in the right way to get the data to move around\u00a0correctly.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s say one product\u00a0has\u00a0a connector that can export receipts excluding\u00a0tax. But the other connector\u00a0that\u00a0imports receipts wants them including tax. So really, they don’t match up, they’re not going to talk to each other the way you would like them to.<\/p>\n

How do you handle exchange rates? What if it’s in\u00a0a\u00a0different currency?\u00a0As\u00a0soon as you get into the really heavy business kind of stuff, there\u00a0are\u00a0a lot more subtleties and complexities, and there just aren’t apps that do those connections.<\/p>\n

The platform\u00a0approach<\/h3>\n

We started off with the ERP thing where we were going to build one ourselves because we were going to be the single source of truth\u00a0\u2014\u00a0the one stop shop. That didn’t work.\u00a0Then we’ve swung\u00a0entirely\u00a0in the other direction and decided\u00a0on\u00a0best-of-breed\u00a0\u2014\u00a0we’d make them all work with each other.\u00a0We found that that didn’t work terribly well either.<\/p>\n

Where\u00a0the pendulum has now settled is that it’s good to head in the direction of the best-of-breed, but instead of getting all of those individual products to talk to each other, you’re better off getting them to talk to one central platform,\u00a0and then\u00a0the platform coordinates the data between the apps.<\/p>\n

If you were to draw it as a diagram, the first one\u00a0looks like a spiderweb where everything’s trying to talk to everything else\u00a0\u2014\u00a0lots of connections in lots of different directions.\u00a0Difficult!<\/p>\n

The other way of looking at\u00a0it \u2014 the platform approach\u00a0\u2014\u00a0is more like\u00a0the\u00a0hub and spokes of a wheel.\u00a0You’ve got a central\u00a0core\u00a0and everything’s plugging into\u00a0that.\u00a0Let\u2019s say that\u00a0core\u00a0is Synergy.\u00a0So long as\u00a0an\u00a0app can talk to Synergy, and Synergy has worked out how to move the data appropriately between the two,\u00a0then anybody who writes the\u00a0API to connect to Synergy<\/a>, can also connect that same data\u00a0through that connected app.\u00a0Then\u00a0on top of that\u00a0we can add\u00a0a level of\u00a0built environment\u00a0business knowledge that says things like, “Well who should be allowed to\u00a0access this data<\/a>? Who can read it, who can write, who can change it?” Synergy, your central platform,\u00a0adds\u00a0a level of control and\u00a0sophistication that makes it so much easier to connect these apps together.\u00a0There is an in-built\u00a0layer of\u00a0AEC business knowledge that just isn\u2019t\u00a0present in other platforms.<\/p>\n

You’ve got the benefit of the single source of truth, the one-stop shop, because there\u2019s one company that’s making\u00a0that data coordinate. But you still get the best-of-breed benefit that you can go out and pick\u00a0the\u00a0best\u00a0add-on apps<\/a>\u00a0to\u00a0suit you perfectly.<\/p>\n

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Recommended reading<\/strong><\/p>\n