One of the smartest healthcare IT managers I have dealt with said that regarding enterprise hospital software. The major hospital products have the same issues as ERP products: they are very expensive and implementation projects tend to involve a lot of painful customization. After getting burned a few times that manager swore off customization altogether. Now if they decide to buy a commercial product they implement it as-is, even if that means changing the business workflow to accomodate the software. Over the long run this has delivered much better results.
I don't have much direct experience with ERP but I question whether all those businesses are unique and special snowflakes that really need custom software. Are organizational differences in common areas like inventory control and accounting actually adding any value? In most cases I think they could be standardized without any long-term loss. So then the only reason to customize is to avoid the short-term pain of reengineering current processes.
I don't think your idea is stupid. There are already plenty of other custom development shops doing similar work. So if you hustle and deliver results I'm sure you can win a decent share. But unless you focus more on building a real product I think you may get stuck at just having a small "lifestyle" business rather than something that would be attractive to VCs.
"Are organizational differences in common areas like inventory control and accounting actually adding any value?"
Absolutely! That's the entire basis for my business. If there was anything remotely close to what my customers have been asking for, I'd be out selling it.
"In most cases I think they could be standardized without any long-term loss."
That's why you and I hack and our customers run businesses. It took me a long time to learn it, but now I listen to what they say, not what I think.
Incidentally, this is how all software used to be. When software was an add-on to the millions of dollars of hardware you bought, all the software was custom-written for the purchasing business. Once computers got cheap enough that many, many more businesses could afford them, there was an economy of scale that enabled mass-produced shrink-wrapped software. When the software cost went from hundreds of thousands of dollars down to thousands of dollars, businesses changed their practices to match the packaged software because it was cheaper than writing custom.
I'm not sure what would ignite that change in ERP because I think the number of businesses that need that scale of organization isn't going to increase dramatically, so there won't be economies of scale. I guess a valid question would be - how many companies aren't using an ERP at all that would benefit if one was available at the right price? My computer centric view makes me forget that some people still use paper and pencil, land lines, and write checks.
One of the smartest healthcare IT managers I have dealt with said that regarding enterprise hospital software. The major hospital products have the same issues as ERP products: they are very expensive and implementation projects tend to involve a lot of painful customization. After getting burned a few times that manager swore off customization altogether. Now if they decide to buy a commercial product they implement it as-is, even if that means changing the business workflow to accomodate the software. Over the long run this has delivered much better results.
I don't have much direct experience with ERP but I question whether all those businesses are unique and special snowflakes that really need custom software. Are organizational differences in common areas like inventory control and accounting actually adding any value? In most cases I think they could be standardized without any long-term loss. So then the only reason to customize is to avoid the short-term pain of reengineering current processes.
I don't think your idea is stupid. There are already plenty of other custom development shops doing similar work. So if you hustle and deliver results I'm sure you can win a decent share. But unless you focus more on building a real product I think you may get stuck at just having a small "lifestyle" business rather than something that would be attractive to VCs.