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The ERP Column The Infrastructure Imperative By Partha Iyengar
An ERP initiative is not a normal progression in the continuum of the enterprise's business and infotech initiatives. It is a discontinuity driven by strong external or internal factors. These factors necessitate that the enterprise revamps its infotech infrastructure. And that puts enormous strain on the resources--financial, personnel, management bandwidth, external service-providers et al--of the enterprise. Unfortunately, most organisations tend to ignore the infrastructure aspect, allowing the vendor to dictate the requirements. Another element that is often ignored is the management of the infrastructure over the life of the ERP solution--a critical factor in being able to commit appropriate Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with the stakeholders of the ERP system. This emerging requirement, generally referred to as Infrastructure Resource Management (IRM), needs to be factored into the ERP plan. At its most mundane, IRM entails paying attention to the appropriate systems-management tools and processes to ensure overall availability and up-time of the system. At a higher level, though, IRM encompasses key aspects of asset management. Research reveals that a typical enterprise either over- or under-states its infotech assets by as much as 50 per cent, which is exacerbated by the increase of asset-deployment associated with an ERP initiative. Another critical area of coverage of IRM is asset optimisation to ensure that access to the ERP system can, in fact, be consistently delivered. ERP is based on an underlying management strategy, constraint management, which requires an understanding of the load of each sub-process so that a change to the constrained node increases the process' throughput. Unfortunately, however, optimising the infrastructure requires a level of sub-process measurement that is generally not available with existing systems-management tools. A focused IRM effort is critical to ERP-availability due to the following reasons:
It is critical to invest in some level of formal IRM to protect the investments made in ERP and to ensure the reliability of the ERP solution over time. Given the lack of maturity of systems-management tools, through 2001, the greatest point of leverage in improving erp systems and applications-management will be investing in highly-skilled individuals. These resources will be needed to reduce the shortcomings in functionality of the available systems-management tools and the inherent systems-management capabilities of the ERP systems themselves. For large ERP implementations, the first step should be to obtain, train, or hire skilled specialists and use them as ERP administrators. They must be involved in the early design phase, working with the ERP implementation consultants. For mission-critical ERP, an enterprise should establish implementation expectations or metrics between business units and the organisation, including scheduled up-time, availability goal, and response time goals. Enterprises should set up a centralised support desk to address the management complexity, measure SLAs proactively, and report applications availability. |
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The world's best ERP system
will be of limited use if its availability and up-time cannot be ensured. Once CEOs start
relying on an ERP system for their business information and decision-making support, not
having reliable and instant access to it could be worse than any pre-ERP situation. In
fact, the longer an enterprise has been running an ERP system, the worse this problem gets
since, over time, the alternatives to getting such information are either forgotten or
cease to exist. 