Dying Applications !!

By: S.Suren

The phrase "Dying Application" is something that most often is discussed by ERP Vendors in seminars and workshops as a method of getting customers to upgrade or do a transformation from their legacy systems to the ones being proposed by the ERP Vendor.

In my previous posts, I had mentioned how the general analysis on the ROI of ERP Implementations has been and how much of the actual life of an ERP System is used at its potential by the business. This article would fill in some of the questions of how you might classify a dying application and decide that its time to review the existing processes and consider new one.

I've listed below some of the symptoms of a dying application :

• Users begin requesting for reports that have no base KPI attached to it - This normally happens when the higher level user in charge of the operation that needs to be performed in the module is not directly involved and hence leaves it up to the lower level users to request reports. This costs previous time and money for the business, which could have been used elsewhere more productively.

• The latency of converting raw data entered in the system to structured data for analysis is in days - It is very important for the user of this data to also on a regular basis consider the latency in generating his/her information needs from the system.

• Reports and data grouped as MIS haven't been generated for sometime - It is quite usual during the implementation phase for the user and consultants involved to categories some reports as very important MIS reports and create separate groups for them in the system and special permissions for relevant users only to generate these reports. Once that is done, a formal handshake a sense of achievement rests in everyone, but if you keep a close eye on how often the information in these systems will be used it could be surprising.

• Users spend more time on related applications in generating MIS than in the system - Its understandable that to some extent users will always revert back to excel to organise their information needs, but its important that information that would be reaching higher level users should not be done through excel since it tends to motivate users to use more numbers and details, which shouldn't be the format of reports reaching higher level user.

• The vendors account managers hasn't contacted you for sometime regarding an upgrade or to keep you updated on the latest deliverable of the application - Lets face it, though the blame game is not suggested here, vendors will have to share the blame for a dying application if they have not made any effort to inform the users of the inevitable.

The above points are just a few, I shall update more on this topic in my future posts.

Hope you found this post useful. Have a nice day.

ssurenlk@msn.com