Vanilla Installations

The February edition of CIO magazine profiles the Maple Leaf Foods, inc. decision to move to a “vanilla” installation of its ERP system as it merged the legacy systems from the 35 business units it had acquired over the years. This trend towards out-of-the-box installations is one that we have seen developing across sectors and organizations.

In the past when moving from legacy systems to commercial systems many companies felt their data and business processes too unique or complex to use a standard implementation of their new ERP, CRM, SCM, etc. etc. At the time it may have been the right decision, but when these same companies purchase enterprise software today, many choose to change their business processes to fit within a standard implementation. Doing so reduces the costs and time of implementation, makes the application easier to support with internal and external resources, creates a more flexible infrastructure that can respond to market changes, and lastly makes it easier to switch vendors in the future.