An ERP offers you 100 modules? Run.

Have you ever "had a blast" looking through the module catalogs offered by traditional ERP vendors? We have. We have even dissected them, and if you are the manager of an industrial SME, our findings should interest you! There are quite a lot of them: but are all these modules functional and relevant for you? Let us break it down!

Generally speaking, an ERP is a multitude of modules

Something striking about ERPs is that they are generally (self-)evaluated on quantity, not quality. Every ERP fights to have the greatest number of modules, for example:

• Financial accounting
• Production
• Quality
• Planning
• Maintenance
• CRM
• And more…

It would therefore seem that the more modules an ERP has, the better it could be for you. Does nothing strike you as odd?

But these modules are so numerous that they are worthless

Let us put ourselves in the shoes of a software vendor for 5 minutes — it will help us. Imagine that tomorrow the boss of this software company shows up in a meeting and promptly asks to add a "CRM" module. Your teams already have 100 existing modules to maintain, evolve, offer customer support for, etc. The effort is already spread thin across 100 modules, and now there is a 101st. Imagine the quality of the CRM module that is going to be produced. (And no, hiring additional engineers does not solve the problem — it makes it worse; there are entire books that deal with this subject.)

Let us push even further: do you think that a company developing 100 modules has the capacity to build a CRM of the same level as that offered by companies whose core business it is, such as Hubspot or Pipedrive? At a minimum, the module offered will be at least ten times inferior in terms of impact for your company compared to what a specialized solution would offer you.

More broadly, do you think it is possible for a single company to excel at developing a hundred different modules (that is, as many complete and different products)? Succeeding with just one of these modules is already an extremely complex undertaking for a tech company. Succeeding with a hundred is absolutely impossible.

Ok, but so if having many modules in an ERP is the guarantee of having a very poor quality tool (therefore difficult for users to get to grips with, lengthy to implement, very costly to adapt to your real needs, etc.)… what do we do? Do we go back to putting Excel everywhere?

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