After a rocky start, the company began seeing the payoff last year. The integrated system, for example, let Owens Corning leverage common carriers and take advantage of overlapping transportation routes. Finally, the company could see for the first time which suppliers it was dealing with most frequently across the entire company, and was thus better able to negotiate bulk discounts and sourcing deals. But they took a long time to pay off.
Few companies can expect quick payback on their enterprise systems.
First you have to get ERP installed, and then you can take a look around and see where major ROI can be achieved. As a result, more companies are factoring such calculations into their ERP-driven business cases from the beginning. Toro's Hansen agrees that ERP is the first of many steps. He says SAP gives Toro a substantially better platform from which to conduct E-business activities. It's after you put third-party applications on top of the ERP building blocks that you start mining ROI out of the system.