The ERP license market denominated in dollars is growing in Poland at a rate of approximately 11.5 percent per year. The coming years will bring further development of the ERP market for the small and medium-sized enterprise sector, according to the latest report by DiS. The fastest-growing segment is the so-called medium ERP systems, which recorded a 37 percent growth, while the segment of large ERP systems grew by only 1.6 percent.
According to the tenth edition of the DiS report on ERP systems, the value of the ERP software license market in Poland grew slower than the entire IT market, by only about 15 percent. This is because the main changes were determined by consolidation trends and, at the same time, by the development of ERP systems for small and medium-sized enterprises.
The offer of ERP systems is constantly changing. Consolidations of manufacturers, system replacements, new implementations, and functional changes are continuously taking place. Sticking solely to the large enterprise market results in the marginalization of ERP system manufacturers. This is shown by the results of such suppliers as Ross, Baan, PeopleSoft, Intentia, Geac, or Mapics, most of which are currently in financial trouble and are being taken over by stronger capital partners. For many years, the burden of research and development costs for ERP systems was actually borne mainly by large enterprises.
Nevertheless, the foundations of MRP, MRPII, and ERP now constitute elements of a widely accepted standard, and it is difficult to treat a widespread standard as an element of building a competitive advantage. A certain level of innovation is brought by techniques that extend the ERP standard, such as Business Intelligence, ERPII (meaning the expansion of management towards CRM, SCM, SRM, AWM), or finally MRPIII – that is, moving away from traditional inventory management methods in favor of minimizing their levels.
The market has become less crowded, especially after several mergers of international ERP providers. Several products have experienced marginalization of their position and have lost their number of users. An example of a product important for the ERP market, currently somewhat less noticed, is Movex Intentia. Due to capital problems, shares in Intentia were taken over in 2004 by the Symphony Technology Group, present on the American market, which sold it to Lawson in June 2005. Products popular in the 1990s: BPCS, Max, Baan – currently in the hands of SSA Global – did not make a stunning career on the Polish market.
The number of ERP system licenses is constantly growing, and as before, in cumulative terms in 2004, there were more users of large systems (approx. 105 thousand) than users of medium systems (approx. 80 thousand). In 2004, the total number of enterprises in which ERP systems were implemented in Poland amounted to 5.3 thousand (1066 implementations of ERP systems for large enterprises and 4232 for medium ones). The number of enterprises using ERP systems in Poland is growing, however, the share of new ERP system implementations in the total number of contracts concluded for system implementations is slowly decreasing.
Data on the implementation of medium ERP systems confirm the growing role of this software segment. In 1999, they accounted for almost 72 percent, and in 2004, already about 88 percent of the total number of ERP system implementations. According to DiS forecasts, in 2009, large implementations will account for only about 4 percent of new ERP implementations. Currently, medium-sized companies, if they reach for ERP systems supporting management, introduce them as a new implementation much more often than large ones, rather than as a modernization.
The demand for specific functional areas of ERP systems determines certain directions of development for both systems and service providers associated with these systems.
According to DiS research conducted on the basis of about 500 implementations in the large enterprise sector, functionalities such as controlling, Business Intelligence, maintenance management, HR and payroll, and finally materials management (MRP) and production support (including MRPII) were implemented much more often than in the medium sector. It is interesting that although there are fewer such areas, medium enterprises invest in some of them slightly more often than large ones. Let two serve as an example: logistics and CRM.