ERP: All-you-can-eat buffet or boutique restaurant?
Choosing an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system isn’t just about how many features a system offers. It’s also about how much of that functionality a business will actually use and how the pricing model reflects that usage. In his recently article for Portal ERP, Claudio Callea, co-founder of VK Sur, compares traditional ERP systems to an all-you-can-eat buffet. Companies may get a huge range of features, but they can end up paying for functionality they never use—and often paying more as additional employees need access. Callea argues that newer ERP platforms are taking a different approach. He points to Acumatica as an example, where companies can select the functionality they need while pricing is based on computing resources and transaction volume rather than simply the number of users. The article also looks at the technology behind these platforms. Many legacy ERPs were built decades ago and have accumulated new capabilities over time. Newer cloud-native systems, by comparison, were designed from the beginning around web technologies, integration and continuous updates.
That raises a bigger question: does having more ERP features actually mean having a better ERP? Callea argues that businesses get value from the capabilities they use—not from the sheer number of options available. ERP selection may need to move beyond feature checklists and user counts. Instead, companies should consider what they actually need, how they’ll use it, how easily the system can grow with them, and what they’re paying for along the way.
Retiring Lawson, PeopleSoft, or Oracle? APIX archives the entire application — every table, every year, attachments and security included — into your own AWS account in about 30 days, so you can decommission the legacy system and keep full access to the history.
