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Sliedrecht, the Netherlands, 29 August 2008 The mortgage crisis in the US, rising oil and food prices and losses on the financial markets are all fuelling fears of an upcoming worldwide recession. Stock markets are already going down and analysts have been issuing further warnings of doom. Traditionally, management tends to respond to this economic downturn by slowing down investments or even cutting expenditures. Companies try to save on external costs in an attempt to prevent redundancies. IT budgets are no exception to this rule. IT managers are facing decreasing budgets at a time when businesses are under pressure. At the same time, the economic downturn is forcing business to change – whether by mergers, acquisitions, reorganisation, outsourcing, or any other means. All these changes require an adequate response from business software. However, as a result of expenditure cutting, IT managers frequently do not have the necessary resources to make the required changes. Rigidity of business systems takes control, inhibiting changes at a time when agility is more important than ever. "The current economic situation is increasing the frustration IT managers feel with their rigid business applications," said Ton Dobbe, VP Product Marketing at Agresso. "When times are good, budgets are high enough to allow IT managers to keep spending money on their ERP solutions. However, it is at times of economic downturn that the need for system development is much higher, so this problem is growing exponentially." Recent independent research by Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC) among leading ERP vendors in the services sector demonstrates that there is a way out of rigid business systems by traditional ERP vendors, SAP and Oracle. TEC concluded that Agresso Business World allows users to make system changes much faster and cost effectively than its competing ERP vendors SAP and Oracle. In fact, Agresso Business World users can apply more than 95 percent of the required changes to their ERP solution themselves, using standard graphical user interface functionality. Both SAP and Oracle require application level support for nearly all (respectively 100 and 93 percent) of the changes investigated in the research. Dobbe continues: "Few organisations have application level support in-house, so they need to hire external consultants to apply changes. Especially now, when companies are forced to change, this puts IT managers in an extremely difficult position. Budgets are low, while expenditures rise exponentially. As a result, they get caught up in a continual need-spend-need-spend cycle: they acquired a solution that fitted perfectly yesterday, but now it proves very costly and frustrating to modify after it has been implemented. If you are going to have to spend money to change your business application anyway, you might want to consider acquiring a new application altogether, instead of hiring expensive consultants to alter existing applications. Shifting will prove less costly than keeping up with existing technology."
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