The world is filled with press releases and trade show booths in which vendors promise "full integration" among their products. But integration can mean two different things: one relatively easy to achieve, the other maniacally difficult.
On the maniacal side is true integration, in which the guts of the two software programs are linked together to look and act like a single software program. They are built using the same basic programming technologies, share the same user interface and use a common data model, which means they refer to information the same way. In a single vendor's ERP software, the system's different software components - such as HR, finance or order management - are all tightly linked. Make a change in a customer's order in the warehouse, and the folks in finance will see their receivables total change automatically. The business benefit of this type of integration is speed. "If you're a company like Gillette or Colgate Palmolive, you need computer systems capable of responding immediately to Wal-Mart, to say Â'I have product and can ship it now'," says AMR Research's Boulanger. "Real-time response to customers with accurate data is critical to staying in business."
Achieving true integration is extraordinarily difficult for even one vendor to pull off, not to mention the four vendors that Oracle tried to put together in CPG.
According to Klaiss, Oracle achieved this level of integration with one vendor, Datalogix, by buying the company and rewriting the software to fit with Oracle's own technology and data model. But the other pieces of CPG were not integrated to become "a single product", as Oracle's original CPG press release promised. "Not exactly, no," says Klaiss.
Instead, Oracle and its CPG partners wrote software interfaces designed to translate information from one CPG component into a form that the other CPG components could understand. This kind of interface integration allows different software programs to exchange information, much like two kids passing notes in class. Though cheaper and less complex than true integration, interface integration is prone to error and moves information more slowly than true integration.
And even interface integration can be difficult when you're trying to do it across four different vendors, as Oracle did with CPG. Oracle and the other CPG vendors had to agree to the specific types of information that should be shared among their programs and then write an interface for each information exchange - more than 100 interfaces altogether, according to Klaiss. CPG customers say the sheer number and complexity of the interfaces led to problems and repeatedly missed deadlines for CPG releases. "Getting everyone at those different partner companies to agree and to work around a common development and rollout schedule was a virtually impossible task," says one former CPG customer from the food industry. Klaiss acknowledges that some CPG releases were late, adding that "it's much more difficult to do integration [across multiple vendors] than if you manage all the resources yourself."
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