New Survey by ERP Vendor Finds Dissatisfaction with Microsoft Dynamics, Other ERP Leaders

The big enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors aren't meeting the needs of mid-size companies, according to a new survey conducted by YouGov for ERP vendor Intact Software (not to be confused with the financial and accounting software firm Intacct).

The research coincides, as one might have guessed, with the launch of Intact Software's new Intact iQ ERP platform, which Intact bills as having an 80% faster implementation cycle than competing products.  While the numbers are interesting, the range of questions and results appear to be somewhat unconventional, possibly even leading, compared to what you may be accustomed to in a more rigorous analyst-led ERP study.

Twenty six Microsoft Dynamics ERP customers took the survey out of 137 total respondents with an unknown distribution across AX, GP, NAV, and SL, so it is difficult to draw many conclusions about the overall health of the Dynamics ERP customer base from this survey.  By contrast, a new Mint Jutras ERP Solution Study - findings of which will be presented by Cindy Jutras at Decisions Fall 2011 - has collected responses from 124 Dynamics customers (39 AX, 32 GP, 35 NAV, 18 SL), which ought to provide more representative results.

As for the actual results reported in this survey, companies said the top three problems with ERP systems are:

1. They're expensive to upgrade (30% of respondents)
2. Costly to maintain (22% of respondents)
3. They're inflexible and don't adapt to meet changing business needs (20%)

75% of the surveyed companies are experiencing some level of problems, citing maintenance costs (33%), inflexibility (19%) and underperformance (23%) as some of the main issues. And ...