In decades past, only the largest organizations needed to worry about managing a business across multiple locations, countries or continents. Today, even traditional mid-market companies are becoming global enterprises. But they lack the expansive IT organizations and structures of traditional, large scale multinationals. This means that more and more companies are developing an interest in global ERP, and are confronting daunting barriers to getting to their goal of a single global ERP instance.
They want to achieve the cost savings and simplicity that come from operating far-flung business units on a single database, on a single instance of ERP. Global enterprise resource planning (ERP) is sometimes defined as the integration of a global, multinational corporation’s business on a single instance of an ERP product and on a single database. That definition is probably too narrow for many situations because companies with multiple sites or divisions within a single country may face many of the same challenges as a multinational, and can also benefit from standardizing on a single ERP instance. In this white paper, we will explore the challenges and benefits of achieving global ERP, and take a close look at why some companies that would very much like to get to that global instance of ERP just cannot get there.
