Has your consultant recently advised you to search for a best of breed application to start your ERP solution? Of course he did. Who else is going to charge you to stitch together the different solutions you decide on? The debate really comes down to whether the benefits of a best of breed solution outweigh the benefits of an integrated, single source solution.

Experts would tell you there are a few advantages to starting with a best of breed application. Generally, best of breeds have deep industry-specific knowledge and can be customized to match the client’s business processes. Because the whole system is strung together from many different vendors, the client isn’t locked into a single vendor for updates or upgrades. The disadvantage to this approach is the significantly higher total cost of ownership. The client must purchase the premium priced application and pay for its integration with the rest of the system. Future system upgrades are expensive and time-consuming due to this lack of integration. The best of breed approach also adds complexity to the client’s IT footprint.

Integrated systems also have three major benefits. First, they are much quicker to implement and will produce return on investment rapidly. Second, they create a simple IT frame that is easy to maintain and upgrade. Third, they have a much lower total cost of ownership due to a lower initial investment and fewer ongoing development needs (e.g. integrating new applications, upgrading disjointed applications, and/or fixing broken integration). The disadvantages to an average integrated ERP is it usually lacks industry-specific functionality. Some might say integrated ERP is a cookie cutter solution. Integrated solutions can also be inflexible, forcing organizational changes on the client in order to match the capabilities of the software.

Carillon^®ERP is a top ten solution because it has resolved the disadvantages of an integrated system. After 22 years of building customizations back into the core solution, Carillon^®ERP has developed a depth of functionality that covers hundreds of industries. If the function does not exist in the solution, it is because no organization has requested it in the past two decades. Carillon creates all its own software enhancements to match the operating procedure of each specific client. Because the solution is scalable, using any of the thousands of features we have developed is as easy as turning on that function.