An ERP System in Less Time, for Less Money

An ERP System in Less Time, for Less Money

Bob Barrett knows something about the midmarket. He's CIO at Babcock Power Inc., a $500-million Danvers, Mass.-based engineering firm that's nipping at the heels of some dominant bigger companies that supply large utility companies. In his fourth stint as a midmarket CIO, Barrett was tasked with standardizing Babcock on an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, and he chose Costpoint from midmarket player Deltek, which was one of three systems already in use at the company. (Finesse and SyteLine were the others.) In just 11 months, the newly customized ERP system was running in 14 locations, and the project cost less than its projected $3-million budget.

In selecting a system, did you consider larger vendors?
We took a real quick look at some of the bigger packages -- some of the Oracles and SAPs -- but we were in a hurry to do this. I took this approach: "Let's pick one of the packages we already have -- unless you can convince me it can't work." In this case, we picked an ERP system that was more project driven.

How do you get people outside IT involved?
You don't make it an IT project; you make it a business project. We had to get some of the best people from each division. We actually had a matrix -- it's sort of a user group. One represents finance, another engineering, then manufacturing and so on.

You said you've seen some project failures. What went wrong?
I've been at companies that rolled out ERP, customer relationship management, manufacturing and project data management and declared a victory because the software was running. Six months later, they found out no one was using it. They weren't even logging on to it. If you don't have user buy-in, don't bother getting started.

Ellen O'Brien, a former senior editor at CIO Decisions, is now a senior editor at Storage magazine. Write to her at eobrien@techtarget.com.

This was first published in April 2006