It's difficult, I think, to get a good estimate of the relative costs of
migration vs. replacement. I don't disagree with either Terry or Chuck -
there are real costs to retraining users and dp staff, replacing the
infrastructure, and so forth. But, there are real costs to migration as
well, especially if the systems being migrated have been around for a
while. All too frequently, source does not match executables, documentation
is spotty, out-of-date, or never existed, and the knowledge carried around
in departed programmers' heads left when the programmers left. This makes
migration risky and expensive. Furthermore, migration almost always
involves conversion of vplus or character-mode screens with a GUI, and
IMAGE with a RDBMS (unless Eloquence is used). This involves risk and cost,
as well.

Sometimes, replacement can be the better choice in spite of the risk. Some
companies are really struggling with making changes to their home-grown
software dictated by changes in their business environments. In these
cases, replacement may be more cost-effective than migrating and
reengineering home grown apps.

But, for companies with relatively stable business environments and
software that meets their needs, neither migration or replacement makes any
sense. For them, homesteading is the only rational choice.

At 02:50 PM 10/8/2002 -0400, Chuck Ciesinski wrote:
>Terry after Gavin stated.
>" Replacing your ERP system is a monumental effort, the biggest
>piece of which is user training and the lost expertise/capability provided
>by years of
>"tricks and secrets work arounds".  No matter how well you train, on the
>first day the new
>system is in place, users are dramatically less productive.  It takes
>months if not years
>for them to find new ways to "do their job" and to make those new
>processes and procedures
>second nature."
>
>IMHO, Terry hit the one cost which a lot of companies overlook.  He missed
>that replacing an ERP system
>also introduces an enormous new software costs, seat licensing for the
>application, new types of database
>licensing, and of course, the new ERP application probably requires
>multiple application servers and
>database servers, upgrade pc's, enhanced networking infra-structure
>capabilities, UNIX and NT...
>
>Gosh I could go on and on...
>
>
>Chuck Ciesinski
>Hughes Network Systems
>Germantown, MD

--------------------------------
Tom Brandt
Northtech Systems, Inc.
313 N. 1st Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48103
http://www.northtech.com/

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