The author is trying to address various techno functional aspects of the enterprise application such as the ERPs for the organizations with special reference to the success of the ERP usage and the path to the same.

It has been the effort of various organizations to get into the enterprise application level to monitor the various organizational activities.  With best effort from all the three partners namely the product development company, the implementer and the customer, it is often heard that the enterprise application is not being used in it’s full extent and there are various reasons for such situation.  With reference to the current technology trends, the business has become a “GLOCAL” activity “I mean globally local” with various users at different offices, on move, on different devices with different levels of usage and information requirements.  Thus unless the application serves all the users across the organization the acceptability is generally not satisfactory.

In most articles we read and hear that the top management involvement is very important for the success, but nobody will define what this involvement is.  At real top management it is always a case of just reviews.  We personally feel, while the decision may come from top management, when it comes to implementation, the involvement must be from middle management and the actual users.

In this connection I feel some of the following guidelines will lead to the real success of the enterprise application implementation.

1. Keeping the technological improvements, target a web based application so that the basic hassles of the installation, HW/SW version problems are resolved at once.  These web applications will use simple browsers like Internet explorer, Firefox, chrome etc which are fairly standardized.
2. Most people feel that their business is unique and is not like other business.  Please note this is a generic statement at outside but the core activities of most business are same, it is only a skill of mapping the application to your requirements.
3. Look at the solution how it addresses the local scenarios like for example, some customers may not place formal orders and some will not allow you to deviate a factional deviation from the quantity to be supplied.  The application must ensure both the scenarios to exist and survive simultaneously.
4. With the advent of the web technologies and the HTML outputs, it is often difficult to support the dot matrix printing and the laser printing is the only way out.  Please be prepared mentally and financially for the same.
5. Any enterprise application worth it’s name will not allow you to change data once the data is posted.  Unfortunately some customers feel this as a constraint and the vendors also take this as an opportunity and provide a feature to edit even a posted data and claim that as a feature.  This is very important ingredient of any good application and must be respected. 
6. One more area is that the management must ensure most (if not all) users must be able to access the application and required user licenses must be ensured.  This is sometimes a major constraint in real life implementation of the solution and the user participation issues.  Never expect an ERP with 5-10 users to be effective however small the organization is. 
7. Please note that just because I was a cancer patient for over years, I cannot become an oncologist.  Only thing is that my experience helps the doctor to cure me better and faster.  The enterprise applications are developed keeping various situations in mind and are definitely much robust and address various scenarios.  Too much customization to address local difficulties must be restricted; this is where the middle management role helps in studying the situation with users and the implementer.
8. Do not impose too many restrictions in the beginning, which scares users such as “No material is received without a formal Purchase Order”.  This may be kept as a target but there may be many situations where the material is purchased on emergency and must be addressed by the application.
9. Generally the customer feels that the users have no knowledge and the application should be able to run by nowise people also.  Please remove this concept from mind.  The training is the solution for this situation. Do not put too many validations which sometimes tie your from future enhancements.
10. As a customer we always wish that the application should hold us and help us. But keep in mind that the application should be my friend and not the boss.  For example, we push to implementer to such levels such as sending mails, SMS for every event and after sometimes you stop respecting the mails, which is more dangerous.
11. The most controversial area is the reports.  Even if the provider has over thousand reports, you need the next new report.  While this is definitely respected, it is observed that after few months of the implementation people lose track of what report is used when.  Then the second exercise of removing the reports start.  As it is said learn fishing than buying a fish.  Check if the vendor has a facility to develop reports than providing reports.
12. With thanks to the inventor, Excel is unavoidable and inevitable ingredient of any business reporting.  Ensure that the reports are 100% exportable to Excel which gives a huge comfort the presenting the reports as required with some little massaging the existing report(s).

While these are some practical points I feel must be addressed by all the members of the enterprise applications, there are many more.  We will try to bring in the various other techno commercial aspects of the enterprise application in the days to come.