System Integration and Packaged ERP Solutions

Summary

Today, we discuss packaged software solutions for industry and finance and elaborate where system integration can create value. We also highlight that system integration can create healthy competition between major system and cloud providers to facilitate progress or explore new innovative technologies, with example from finance. Finally, we elaborate on an ownership-aware, end-to-end facilitation approach to such projects.

Why Packaged ERP solutions and Systems Integrations

System Integrations fills the gap where the packaged industry solution can or intentionally will not provide the exact functionality you as customer must have. The real decision point is to create a custom solution, to procure another partial system or to fit an existing legacy system by connecting it to the new system. System integration is usually central to this.

Overall, we are very positive to the economy of packaged solutions since they since they streamline how you work and provide value out of the box, often proved in industry at large. The gaps are usually not that easy, but we have significant experience being on that custom code and custom system integration teams, and we want to help you by navigating these dangerous straits. This is a balancing act of value promised from the new solution, and the strategic intent and long-term competition and investment in the vendor ecosystem, and of course other factors.

The promise of cloud and industrial solutions

For many years, we have been a proponent of cloud solutions, and today cloud has been realised in the packaged solution and ERP world. However, this is a new model that many corporations are hesitant to adopt, sovereignty being one current factor, but cost and new accounting implications of SaaS being another.

What we have seen is that many invest in pilots to stay current with the technological trends, but over time standard solutions absorb such initiatives to turnkey ready offerings. What really shapes the connection with the market is understanding the processes and how to simplify them, adjust them and how to connect them in larger contexts.

How to connect solutions strategically

Industry solutions are usually extremely complex, so it’s impossible for even few persons to master it all. Nevertheless, we believe that system integration can facilitate more openness to competing solutions not only by providing a new technology, but also by creating competition between leading and robust systems. It is the performance over the years that is the real measure. A system integration bridge is often intended temporarily, but we believe that this essential way of thinking also can open doors for new financial technologies, new automation and emerging winners in say CRM and document handling. The opportunities are changing year by year.

Connecting the business with system integration objectives

System Integrations start out as manual processes. Then they are streamlined. Thereafter they can be automated. On large, packaged solutions project, we walk through all scoped process streams end-to-end. For instance, in collaboration with the CFO, we engage different accounting teams and controllers to understand the process flow. If you have a new invoice scanning system, perhaps with AI, then it must also be integrated with the existing general ledger flows. If you acquire a new company, we have to align both processes and integrate existing digital invoicing systems with the main ERP. All these steps require multidomain thinking and experience, and financial thinking of how financial flows are structured.

Balancing of System Integration projects

Finally, it must all be balanced. The vendors, the system integrators, the systems and projects versus current business operations.

The cost of system integration is high both in expertise and in added complexity. The value of packaged solution is often high measured with the costs. Enabling automation is another potential benefit. What really matters is ownership of processes and seeing the flow from beginning to the end. In that perspective, system integration can elevate the value of the overall solutions by enabling flow of information and improved efficiency that the packaged solution could not carry alone.

Our role

We take responsibility for facilitating end-to-end process understanding and decision alignment across stakeholders. If the CxO believes system integrations have good business cases, we facilitate and coordinate collaboration between external vendors and system integration providers with your business objectives in mind. If the CFO owns the project, we facilitate workshops, structured dialogues, and executive decision support from project ideation through vendor-led implementation.

Prosjektsentrum has no preferred view on system solutions, but we have extensive experience with packaged solutions, system integration and project management. As CFO, CIO or COO, you are welcome to call us today and discuss your ongoing or planned ERP project and what we can contribute with as independent advisors and facilitation leads.