Lukas Beeler's IT Blog

Disclaimer: I work for DATALINE AG, which sells the ERP Software DIAS-iS. This isn’t a unbiased review, but more of my insights into this market.

As soon as a small business has more than one or two people, there comes a need for professional management of business resources. This includes bookkeeping, management of projects, management of orders, articles on stock, etc. pp. To do this, you will need an ERP software.

Let’s start with the cold reality – ERP software, if you want good, well integrated, well documented and well developed solution is expensive. More expensive than a good server. There’s also cheaper software available, but they’re not really meant for small business use, instead oriented towards clubs and one-man-shops.

The market for ERP software is very, very big. There are many software packages to choose from, and even multiple companies offering the same packages.

If you are doing IT in your small business, it is very important that you are not the one choosing the ERP software – while this may be the usual case for choosing infrastructure products like server OS, groupware, etc., this approach shouldn’t be used when choosing an ERP software. Instead, get the people involved which will be using the software, and get them to write appropriate functional specifications.

In general, these are the steps you’re going to take:

• Writing functional specifications for the software itself
• Writing technical specifications or requirements
• Evaluate products by list of features (on your own or with a consultant)
• Refining your specifications
• Evaluating products (together with their vendors)
• Refining your specifications
• Choosing a partner for implementing the software

Functional specifications for the software

It’s very important that you have very clearly laid out requests of functionality. In german, this is called a “Pflichtenheft”. Never buy ERP software without having written a “Pflichtenheft” or functional specification before buying software or talking to a vendor. This can be a preliminary version which you can refine later together with a vendor.

You need to know what you want, before you go shopping. If you’re a normal small business, with few established processes, most standard software available on the market should work fine for you. Maybe a little bit of customizing is needed in order to get everything fitted to your processes, but this is normal.

Technical specifications

The technical side with ERP software is different, and there are many ways leading to the target. Software can come web based, logic in client, logic in server, using Java, using VB6, using a combination of their own client server technology, etc. There’s also a big question on how to integrate the software into other technology your using – the mostly interesting candidate here is Microsoft Office.

Our Software DIAS-iS offers a very nice suite of macros to integrate Office into the software called OSP. It’s also based on a lightweight client, which allows to upgrade most of the functionality in one place, and having no business logic in the client itself – we call this technology the DIAS-iS Network Client. Due to the nature of this protocol, it’s very easy to use DIAS-iS over WAN connections, since one screen just needs one roundtrip.

If you have some Linux or Mac machines, it’s very important to have a multiplatform client available. For this, we offer Java Client. Please note that due to the implementation of DIAS-iS, with all the business logic on the server, the functionality of the DIAS-iS Java Client and the DIAS-iS Network is almost identical. This allows you to choose your client platform at will.

We also offer integration into a lot of other sectors, like Telephony, Point of Sale, Mobile data access and e-Commerce.

Our server platform is the IBM System i. If you don’t know the System i yet, i suggest you to read up on it. It’s a technically very nice platform, offering advanced features like a hardware hypervisor, well integrated systems management and other nice features. And if you can administrate a windows platform, you can also administrate a System i. (It’s always a good idea to know more than one platform anyway).

Evaluating products

At the first step, you can evaluate products you’ve found from a variety of sources (online databases, references, advertisements) based upon their list of features, requirements, etc. This allows you to cut a down a list of several products into a much smaller list of vendors you’re interested in dealing with. At this point, you should get in touch with these vendors, and get offers. Note that this will need quite some involvement from your side, in order to get a fair and complete offer.

This is as far as i know about this topic – here comes a lot of stuff that is usually done by executives – the most important thing for you is to get a solution which fits all the needs of your company, not just those of the IT people. This will help you to get a solution which is accepted in the whole company.