I just finished an educational session for my friends over at Master Builders of Iowa. This was the second of a two-part series on technology in Construction. The session was…

Future of ERP

There are two aspects of ERP that make that solution among the stickiest in the industry (meaning least likely to be changed out); cost and disruption. Said another way, both relate to the difficulty in implementing the types of systems. In my 30 years within the industry, I have yet to hear a controller or CFO express delight in the prospect of another ERP deployment. Even so, a significant number of people evaluate the ERP marketplace each year with a view to better automating their accounting and operational functions. This seemingly benign process can bring its own cost, frustration, and risks. Certainly, making the wrong decision can be costly in terms of investment and personnel time to not meet the organization’s expectations. This topic could easily fill two or three newsletters. However, for those considering their options, the focus here is only on the most significant developments that are in the ERP space for contractors.

In no particular order, these developments include a lack of support for manufacturing/fabrication functions, sufficient project management functionality, an open architecture for integrating with other applications and publishing tools that provide a higher level of capability than typical report writing.

The first part of this series looked at the primary IT trends occurring in the heavy/highway marketplace. We discussed some of the developments in trucking, drones, productivity tracking, fuel, and safety among…

The pace of acquisitions in the Contech space has reached fever pitch. This is coming from both large publicly-traded companies acquitting mature solutions (think AutoDesk, Trimble, Oracle and Roper) to…