Putting Two and Two Together

So, We Can Just Integrate What Makes Sense?

Start by analyzing your company, advises Lisa Reisman, director of thedigital strategy and research group at Andersen Business Consulting inChicago. According to a recent study by Reisman and fellow analyst KimCollins, different types of companies have varying integration needs.For instance, if your company doesn't drool over leading-edgetechnology, it might make more sense to choose software from a bigenterprise software vendor, such as SAPSAP or PeopleSoft. That's becausetechnology laggards can typically afford to wait for such vendors toroll out add-on software modules for different business functions. Theintegration benefit is that a single vendor's add-ons are easier toglue together. Conversely, companies whose competitive edge is honedon the latest and greatest technology are more likely to addcapability in such areas as supply chain management or CRM from theso-called best-of-breed vendors, who tend to get their products tomarket earlier than the big enterprise software companies. Alles zu SAP auf CIO.de

David Root, the CFO at Eagle's Flight, a training company based inGuelph, Ontario, suggests following up with some cost-benefitanalyses. "Integration is an ROIROI decision," he says. "You need to askwhat's the dollar cost, what's the cost in terms of time and people,and what's the relative benefit?" The outcome will help executivespinpoint which business processes merit integration, he says. Noteverything does, as crunching the numbers can show. "Lots of times thecosts of integration are a lot higher than people would like, and thebenefits a lot less," says Morelli. "It doesn't mean it's not theright thing to do, but it does need to be thoroughly lookedat." Alles zu ROI auf CIO.de

PHH's Talbot says that his IT group works closely with businessexecutives to identify areas that are ripe for integration. Theycompare the current costs of managing the process with the estimatedcost of integration.

"For example, let's say we use a certain up-fitter to customize pickuptrucks with bucket lifts," says Talbot. "Right now, the process isdone by phone or fax and takes about two hours of a PHH employee'stime. But we only need to have that kind of work done maybe once ayear. So even if it would only cost $5,000 to $10,000 to integrate oursystems with those of the up-fitter, it doesn't make sense. If we didtwo or three such jobs a month, it'd be a different story."