Engineer To Order

According to a recent study from engineer to order provider IFS North America, the majority of enterprise resource planning (ERP) users have been directly affected by the heavy merger and acquisition activity in the market over the last few years. Unfortunately, this has caused concern about the ongoing desirability and stability of ERP products.

The information from this study is based on a survey of over 200 manufacturing and other industrial executives, while the data was analyzed by Cindy Jutras, a widely recognized expert in analyzing the impact of enterprise applications on business performance and founder of Mint Jutras.

About 54 percent of survey respondents say they are running ERP or other enterprise software from a vendor that has recently been acquired, while 90 percent of those running software recently affected by merger and acquisition activity expressed concerns over possible negative effects from these products. The specific concerns expressed include that the product being used could be discontinued by the vendor, or that the new owner might not continue to invest in the ERP product going forward.

"Loyalty to a product is more likely to occur than loyalty to the company that owns or develops the product," said Jutras in an IFS podcast. "So the number one concern is that the product may be discontinued, forcing them to switch products. And they're using that to run their business and they chose that company specifically because they thought it was the best one to run their company, however they're not going to take lightly to having to switch to another product."

IFS North America and Jutras also recently partnered to see what kind of effects ERP software systems have on the operations of manufacturers. The study focused mainly on aerospace manufacturing, defense manufacturing, construction contracting, batch process manufacturing and others whose focus tends to be on individual products.

Similarly, another recent IFS study also found that traditional ERP products will not work successfully as they tend to not focus on the types of projects associated with something like engineering or constructing a processing plant.

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