Out-of-the-box thinking: Creativity for system customizations, or creative processes with the out-of-the-box system?

I have the benefit of living near my retired parents. They are very technologically competent even to the point of being able to text decently. However, when discussing basic travel plans, they enjoy sharing their ever-more creative driving directions to get from point A to B rather than use a driving directions app.

Whether you want the advice or not, you know it's coming. It usually starts with "Oh, the traffic is horrible if you go that way." or "The scenery is so pretty along the way - much better than the Interstate." And then it starts, and there is no stopping it. "It's not hard - you just take route 17, then you have to make a few turns to get through…"

Creativity is great, and I love that they have the goal of relieving stress in their lives by avoiding a crowded interstate, especially after earlier times in their lives dealing with a younger me, but is it really the right way for me to go?

"In 1000 feet, turn right." Ooh, what a soothing voice coming from my mobile app (I chose a nice English accent in the app). Ok, I'll turn onto the Interstate…

Yes, I trust the mobile app driving directions more than my parents. It gets updated with live traffic feedback from other users and other sources. It has machine learning and algorithms to help me find the fastest way, even if I give it a few rules to use.

My mind drifts a little...we work on roadmaps all the time at LTA. What is the best route to take from a business standpoint?

Rather than jumping into the solution, I take a step back and think about the starting point. After all, hard to know where to go without knowing where you are. Understanding what are the strengths, weaknesses, and competitive advantages of the company. This helps identify a long list of things we could do to improve, grow, and expand.

With the starting point, I need to know where we're going - pretty hard to have directions without a destination! So another list - goals and core competencies are at the heart of this list. This in turn gets narrowed to an IT list, specifically systems work. Now there is a clear delineation of what is important to work on and what is not, right? Thinking through the long list, I'm thinking about how to narrow it down more. Budget is one possibility, but I'd like to get more strategic and specific to IT. Time to start with fundamentals…

Competition is fierce in this day and age, and we need to remember the 3 economic differentiators of first to market, product differentiation, and cost as the ways to capture and increase market share. So to close the gap in the list to how to determine an actual roadmap, I need to understand the solutions somewhat more. This involves the team to be sure, but I think about magnitudes of order - what is the price of a change in process to fit the out-of-the-box functions in the ERP system versus customization? Is there a configuration-based solution with the system if we get more creative and flexible? What is a differentiator for your IT department and landscape for your business?

Then my parents pop back into my head - "then turn at that country farmers market…maybe you could stop in there. They have such nice things…" Some more unique instructions.

Speaking of which, we all love to hear praises of how unique we are, how creative, and other flattery. This is something to embrace and relish as it can make a true difference for the world, or at least your company. When it comes to systems, then we need to ask ourselves if the creativity is well placed. If we get too creative, then what are the costs of creating and maintaining that? Is there a payback because it is truly a competitive difference for the company? Are there quality or customer requirements behind the customization?

This can really narrow things down if you are critically honest with yourself. The more you can use from a system out of the box, then the lower the cost will be for support, development, upgrades, and long-term sustainability.

"Then we like to head out towards Middleburg because it is such a nice drive…" Wow. Talk about taking you off the beaten path…

The business beaten path, though, is what these ERP-type system developers use. For the most part, this is beneficial to businesses. However, using out of the box functionality is not always easy. It can involve a dramatic change of processes, but also of metrics, organizations, management expectations, and communication. This realization opens up a great opportunity to take a fresh look at processes. We call that Business Process Re-engineering (BPR), and it is a low-cost, high-return effort, especially compared to customization. This truly is the place where you can apply lean principles, constraints management, and get more competitive. For each process, you go through the same sort of exercise as laid out here: where you are, the goals, what are the constraints, and then what the future process looks like.

Then, you implement. There is change management involved. That starts by involving a team from across the organization, aligning to the company goals for the re-engineering effort, moderating to ensure input from everybody and not just the boldest and talkative person, and therefore buy-off on the new process. For this writing, the main points of this are (1) change management, and (2) applying the constraints of how the system works. By doing this, a team of individuals will either get creative if they understand what other possibilities exist in the system, or they will identify all of the additional steps and work which necessitate some sort of customization. This may be interfaces between systems, or pure coding to get the information and functions needed.

"There was that little roadside restaurant that had the best food. I think you had the biscuits and gravy with eggs, and your bother had the hobo omelet, and…" Do I really need these details?

The details in the solution are necessary. Don't justify customizations around the extreme cases, but rather determine if those can have a separate queue to handle the additional work needed in the standard system. What is the cost of the extra time for 0.01% of the process versus the cost of custom coding, and then readdressing that coding within 3 years or 5 years when upgrades are needed, or the ERP system applies patches?

So, if the direction is set, then you need to commit to it. This means looking at the long term. If you go totally custom, then is the design flexible enough to handle modifications when the business has changed a year from now? What is the response time for those changes? What is the shelf life of the ERP system compared to the custom solution?

The biggest cost of following my parent's directions is time. But their way has a more defined time than the variability of the interstate route I like to take. I could be there faster, but if I take their way, then it is more predictable, albeit much longer. This applies to the configure versus customize question as well. The out-of-the-box system can be implemented much faster than the custom, but are there roadblocks that will affect your company if you do not customize.

This is the importance again of examining every process affected by implementing an ERP and testing it with a cross-functional team. Nothing is more disheartening and revenue-killing than an ERP implementation gone wrong due to gaps missed in the design of system setup and customizing.

Interfacing has so many aspects to it that it will be another blog, but the main thing is to build in inspection for any process including the process of one system talking to another. Report on exceptions and gaps, and automate communication of these reports so information turns into actions.

"You don't get stopped by all that terrible traffic in Fredericksburg or Stafford…"

That thought from my parents raises a good point. If the custom system is a significant advantage for your team, then keep it and build support and plans around it. The key to this kind of commitment is to make sure the system architecture is sound and there are plans for upgrades in future years. Keeping an in-house development team requires a training investment, code controls like DevOps and CI tools for smooth deployments, and microservices to enable better flexibility and smaller modifications when enhancements are needed. Additionally, rather than build EVERYTHING in-house, what is the specific scope of the custom application, and what should stay in off the shelf systems. These scope constraints are critical to getting additional features from off the shelf systems that are much harder to build in-house when it is something not competitive vs your competition.

For instance, if there is a unique manufacturing application, the documentation for the different steps can live in another tool and link into the custom app. Or perhaps invoicing does not need to be part of the custom application, but the sales order system does need to interface with the manufacturing to keep orders synced between the systems. Bottom line is to keep the customizations within a specific scope and benefit from hundreds of other developers from using off the shelf systems for non-scoped items as much as possible. And keep interfaces very limited and monitored as part of the scope.

"Route modified due to traffic. You will now be there 5 minutes earlier." Oh, that soothing voice from my app wakes me out of these thought processes. Truly beneficial to have modern technology rather than build something which may become obsolete sooner than later. Then again, I always take a slightly different route when I get near home so I can avoid some problem intersections and tolls that are not worth $1 to save 3 minutes.

At LTA, we specialize in this decision-making progress as well as how to the most out of your system through a process we call business process reengineering (BPR). Using these services have provided immense efficiency gains for our clients as well as a better change management experience for employees (and the company) and better satisfaction with the end system-processes result. Contact us at LTA to discuss how we can help you.

So, back to the question of customizing versus using standard functionality configured with process changes - what are the goals of the company and IT systems, and where to customize for competitive advantages versus going with off-the-shelf functionality with a good BPR to get processes efficient with the system. Otherwise, enjoy those wonderful meals at the roadside restaurants in the out of the way places like my parents do as timelines and costs grow.

Happy holidays and drive safe.