This month’s CIO breakfast event – held yesterday at the Crowne Plaza hotel – acknowledge that despite over a 30-year existence, experts say that about 60% of ERP systems fail to meet one of their objectives, including user acceptance. Sponsored by SAP and Alliance Technologies, the breakfast event carried the theme “Future of ERPs”, focusing on the lessons and best practices that CIOs have learned towards achieving success in deployment of ERPs.

Giving lessons on the future of ERPs, Alvin Paules, Chief Technology Architect, SAP Africa stated that the there is need for efficiency and actual innovation in modern business. To Paules, cloud computing, mobility and in-memory databases make up the future trends in ERP technology. Besides all the innovations in technology, Paules’s key message to CIOs was the focus on technology boosting the business process, “Successful organizations master the execution of new technology,” he says.

Ngige Waithaka, CEO Alliance Technologies perceives Open Source architecture as the future of ERPs. “Open source architecture pushes for innovation, sharing and collaboration. It allows organisations to focus on their core needs,” he says. “Organizations should engage in peer production where different firms come together to achieve a certain target goal, hence Open Source,” he noted.  Waithaka compares this type of peer development to how different companies contribute to the Android platform, and then use it independently.

According to Waithaka, some customers have shown dissatisfaction with their ERP projects citing reasons like low returns on investment, projects that extend past their timelines, projects over shooting their budgets as well as low productivity after the installation of an ERP projects.

At the event, participants voiced complaints like high cost of investments needed in implementing an ERP project. SMEs and start-ups ventures expressed concerns ERP producers have not scaled down their projects to accommodate them and that they cannot find suitable cloud outfits for their businesses. To this, Paules expressed that ERP projects so far have been targeted at large organisations with a good volume of data to be managed. He added that there are ERP systems hosted in the cloud that SMEs can benefit from. However, he cautions that organizations need reliable connectivity, and mature infrastructure. Waithaka stated that the local market has not matured enough to have an ERP service on the cloud.