There are many software companies that have gotten fat on revenue earned by selling the same technology over and over again. When the customer tries to innovate they are told that "modifying the system would make it hard to upgrade later". Yet it's the "modifications" that make a pro-active manufacturing team out perform a lack luster team. In too many cases competitive advantage is taking a back seat to upgradability. There is hope on the horizon though. In the last five years or so the software industry has developed several companies that specialize in specialization.

Advances in Internet communications, model driven architecture and open source are making it possible to develop and maintain specialized functionality in a shorter cycle time. Tuppas is one such company that is worth taking a good look at. They have a framework that allows highly configured modules to be implemented in weeks, not in man years as is the case with many in house production efforts. They also maintain MDA capability. MDA or model driven architecture allows systems to be rapidly upgraded as technology changes without the need to rebuild or reprogram the configured business logic.

If you’re looking for more articles on SCM or ERP you might want to take a look at the SaaS ERP Blog. The Blog has good information on it. Another site that you might want to take a look at is Supply Chain Management solutions.com. This is a new site that we’re working on and I know we’ll do a good job on it as time goes by.