Over the past few decades, customization in ERP projects has caused many major technical and organizational problems, sometimes limiting a company’s growth potential or even paralyzing it completely. However, some businesses are still willing to base new projects on customization.

There’s a big difference between closing functional holes that are important to increasing customer satisfaction and customizations made “just because” individual employees or departments are resistant to change or “just because” the technology allows it. It’s important to avoid over-customization in your next ERP implementation or ERP cloud migration.

Here are a few strong reasons why:

1. Increased Complexity: ERP software is designed to manage various business processes and workflows in an integrated manner. Over-customization can make the software complex and difficult to use, which can result in decreased efficiency and productivity.
2. Higher Costs: Customization requires additional development, testing, and maintenance efforts, which can result in higher costs. Additionally, customizations can make it more difficult to upgrade to newer versions of the ERP software, resulting in even higher costs over time.
3. Reduced Flexibility: Over-customization can result in software that is inflexible and difficult to adapt to changing business needs. As a result, the software may not be able to keep up with the evolving needs of the print company.
4. Increased Risk: Customizations can introduce new risks, such as security vulnerabilities, data corruption, and system instability. These risks can result in costly downtime and other negative impacts on the print company.
5. Difficulty in Support: Customizations can make it more difficult to provide support for the software. This can result in longer resolution times, increased support costs, and decreased satisfaction with the software.

Don’t Customize – Extend!

Customization has paralyzed many organizations, making it necessary to rethink this outdated approach. As a customer, you have a vested interest in standardizing your business processes to make it easier for your customers to do business with you and to make your organization more scalable. Rather than paying for customization, consider paying your implementation partner for every change request they manage to prevent by solving it within the standard functionality. Additionally, you can pay for the change management services they deliver to implement these changes effectively.

To maintain a high level of consistency and compatibility, PrintVis encourages its customers and implementation partners to rely on extensions rather than customization. Extensions are modules that can be added to the standard system to provide additional functionality, without altering the core code of the software.

Overall, print companies should strive to strike a balance between customizing their ERP software to meet their specific needs and keeping the software as standard as possible to avoid the potential drawbacks of over-customization.

A Standard Solution You Won’t Outgrow

PrintVis is a comprehensive print management solution built on the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central platform. By leveraging the functionality of this powerful ERP system, PrintVis offers a complete solution for the print industry, including estimation, production planning, inventory management, and financials.

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Did you know we host a weekly, live online demo? Each session demonstrates a basic workflow for a common, printed product, from estimate to invoice. We keep it simple and brief (approx. 30 – 45 minutes per demo), so that you can get a general idea of the look and feel of PrintVis and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Go here to register for the next Thursday session (10:30 a.m. EST).

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