Customization: A Two-Edged Sword

Introduction

When implementing a mid-market ERP system, it’s often suggested that the base ERP should provide 80% of the needed functionality and then the other 20% is provided by customization. The rationale behind this is that although GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) is standard, each business is unique and has unique requirements in addition to GAAP, especially in modules outside of the core financials.

All Sage ERP products offer quite high levels of customization ability. Generally we use this as a competitive advantage to make sales, since we can more closely match a customer’s requirements. However some customizations can lead to quite high costs and problems down the road (perhaps a version or two later).

As more and more customers are looking to move to the Cloud, we need to rethink customization and what we are trying to achieve. This blog post looks at some of the problems with Customization and some things to consider when recommending these. These apply to both hosting current ERP’s in the Cloud as well as to how we have to think about Connected Services and Features as a Service (FaaS) in the Cloud.

Problems

This is a rather unfair list of many of the problems we typically see with customizations:

1. Cannot upgrade to a new version of the software because it means doing the customizations all over again.
2. An initial product implementation fails because the costs and delivery of the customization go over budget and behind schedule.
3. Some customizations cause system stability issues. For instance adding SQL triggers to the database. Then if the trigger fails, the transaction that invoked it fails with a really hard to diagnose error.
4. Some customizations cause performance load problems. Perhaps a custom report or inquiry causes a SQL query to run that takes hours to finish, slowing everyone else in the meantime.
5. In a hosted version everyone runs the same programs, so some customizations can prevent you moving to the cloud.
6. Extra testing is required for every product update or hotfix to ensure they don’t interfere with customization. This restricts the use of things like automatic updates.
7. Getting support and diagnosing problems. Customer support has a hard time diagnosing problem in and around customizations because they don’t know what the customizations are meant to do and what they might affect.

Moving to the Cloud

As we look to move more customers to the cloud, we have to deal with all these customization issues. Some level of customization is necessary, so the question to some degree becomes how much? In the cloud we want everyone sharing the same set of programs, so no customized DLLs or EXEs. In the cloud we want everyone to immediately receive hotfixes and product updates, so customizations must be upgrade safe. Further when a new major version comes out, we want everyone in the cloud moved to this new version in a quick, transparent and automated fashion. Hence any customizations allowed in the cloud can’t prevent data activations and can’t require a lot of special testing for each new version.

Causes

So what causes many of the problems above? A lot of customization can be a sign of an initial incorrect product choice resulting in trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. It can also indicate an overly eager to please sales team promising the product will do many things that it normally doesn’t. Plus many companies main line of business is developing customizations, so providing these is a major source of revenue.

A big cause of problems with upgrading customization is the result of database schema changes in the core ERP. This is usually the result of adding new features or streamlining functionality for performance and scalability reasons.

Often business logic changes can have unforeseen effects on customizations, even though the database schema doesn’t change, perhaps a customization relies on something in the way the business logic used to work.

Solutions

As solutions move to the cloud the nature and scope of customizations is changing. This affects both vendors like Sage, in how we need to make sure all customizations can be automatically updated and it affects customization consultants now that you can’t install EXEs or DLLs into the ERP or CRM system itself. So what do we do, since there are still vital business needs that need to be addressed?

First off, we as a vendor have to be much more disciplined in how we change our applications from version to version. Long gone are the days when we could just make any change we wanted and then throw it over the fence to the Business Partners to figure out how to accommodate in the whole eco-system. This made the cost of upgrading quite expensive and detracted from the overall customer experience because generally upgrades introduced all sorts of problems that then needed to be stamped out. As we begin to automatically update people, both in the cloud and on-premise we have to ensure the whole process is automatic and seamless. We have to:

• Maintain application API compatibility so customizations and ISVs continue to work.
• Limit schema changes so that we don’t break customizations or ISVs. Mostly just add fields or tables and even if fields are no longer really used, leave them in for compatibility.
• Provide tools to automatically convert anything beyond the database that is affected like Crystal Reports or VBA macros, so no additional work is required.
• Ensure that we can upgrade independent of database state, i.e. don’t require that all batches be posted or such things.
• Work closely with ISVs and Business Partners through alpha, beta and early adopter programs to ensure the entire ecosystem won’t be disrupted by new features and versions.
• More tightly control the customizations that are allowed in the cloud. Even for custom reports and VBA macros, have rules and monitoring procedures so that badly behaved ones can be found and removed (or fixed).

When we are running our application in the cloud, how do we perform common integration type customizations? A great many of our clients create programs to feed data into and out of an ERP to integrate to things like perhaps a custom subscription billing service, a company shopping web site or one of any number of things. Since you can’t install EXEs or DLLs and even if you could do this via a VBA macros, chances are external communications would be blocked by a firewall, so what do you do? For these cases you have to switch to using Web Services. Which in the Sage world means SData. With SData you will be able to create Cloud to On-Premise integrations or Cloud to Cloud integrations. Basically you are removing the requirement that the two applications being integrated are on the same LAN.

Summary

Changing the thinking on customization will take time, but the industry and customer expectations are changing. Sage and its Business Partners need to be more disciplined in how we all customize to ensure we don’t create longer term problems for customers. In the Cloud world these problems show up much more quickly than in the on-premise world. We have to re-evaluate the technologies we are using and re-evaluate how our common customization design patterns are changing.

I tend to think once we get through some transitional pain, that we will come out the other side with a more powerful and more sustainable customization model that will lead to a better customer experience.