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Don't expect to revolutionize your business with ERP. It is a navel-gazing exercise that focuses on optimizing the way things are done internally rather than with customers, suppliers or partners. Yet the navel gazing has a pretty good payback if you're willing to wait for it�a 2002 Meta Group study of 63 companies found that it took eight months after the new system was in (31 months total) to see any benefits. But the median annual savings from the new ERP system were $1.6 million.
What's interesting to note is that according to a the results of a 2007 Aberdeen Group survey of more than 1,680 manufacturing companies of all sizes, those companies that pay the closest attention to return on investment (ROI) at the outset of an ERP engagement "reap far more rewards" than those companies that don't. The companies that Aberdeen Group identified as "best performing" were able to produce, on average, 93 percent more improvement with their ERP systems across a variety of metrics such as cost reductions, schedule performance, headcount reduction or redeployment, and quality improvements, states the Aberdeen Group survey results.
