I won't tell you your plan is stupid. On the contrary, I believe it's an idea whose time has come (I think it's come more than once). Nor will I say that it won't work, though it will certainly be a hard road to slog.

I comment as someone involved in roughly three dozen ERP implementations (along with a dozen or so CRM and HRMS) over the past decade, for a number of mid-market and larger enterprises (mostly North American, a few international), across the manufacturing, software, healthcare, and pharmaceutical industries, in many roles ranging from developer, to technical architect, to implementation manager.

We have a number of experiences and opinions in common: (a) I too haven't seen (nor met someone who has seen) a class A implementation, (b) I'm still appalled at the poorness-of-fit and poor quality of this class of software, (c) I remain utterly unconvinced that the current model of ERP software development and implementation will _ever_ produce a modest-cost system.

Of your line "No two businesses are alike", nothing could be more true, and nothing could be more at the heart of the misfit between desire and reality in this software space.

Every business has grown their own a wide variety of their own processes. In smaller businesses, these process are unique. In larger ones, these are fairly standard, but only to a point. There isn't a single company where one can 'drop-in' a business process from another company and have it work without mistake. (You realize the impossibility of this by how silly my example sounds.)

Not only are there dissimilarities between businesses that prevent standardized software from working out-of-the-box, there are also dissimilarities within businesses that make the off-the-shelf solution unappealing.

Consider that a good number of mid-sized and large businesses are an ungodly combination of merged, acquired, downsized, and spun-off companies. (Somewhat like the custom firetruck manufacturer you used in your example.) How often does the surviving company from a merger, acquisition, or spin-off cleanly adopt a uniform set of business processes from their predecessor organization(s)? In my experience, not very often. You will find many pockets of heavily-resistant 'non-standardization' in mid-sized and large firms.

So no two businesses are alike from the outside, and few are even uniform from within. Now consider how many forces of change are pressing on a given organization.

New management: how often has the new CEO, new division head, new head of operations come in wanting to put "their stamp on the place" and decided that the old way of doing things just won't work? The new sales head decides a territory realignment and new incentive compensation plan is the way to start. Hey Mr. ERP? We need something from you.

New competitive responses: Oh I see that our main competitor now has a new offering that completely sinks ours. Time for more than a SKU respin, time for a whole new product, new packaging, new bundling, new discount strategy. Hey Mr. ERP? We need something else from you.

New channel strategies: Your distributors and their resellers are now pressing you on margin, they're demanding better insight into supply chain, their business systems are better, faster, and more responsive than yours. Hey Mr. ERP? Here's another thing we need from you.

New regulatory environments: Sure you can usually see these things coming years ahead (HIPAA, Sarb-Ox), but they demand change to the business, which means change to the businesses software systems. Hey Mr. ERP? Are you listening?

New IT changes: moving from Unix to Windows, moving from self-hosted to colocated, moving from insourced to outsourced, moving from here to hell and back. Hey Mr. ERP? I'll understand if you want to stick the shiv in yourself and save me the bother.

Lightly into this morass tapdances the ERP software industry. It promises the essentially undeliverable: we can sell you a bunch of software that _will_ allow you to uniformly conduct business across your enterprise. Forget about all of the sources of non-uniformity described above, and forget about the fact that your business is itself different from one division to the next, and from one year to the next, and that change is a constant. We'll give you a modular system which you can glue together (using the expensive services of our various third-party partners) to fit your unique business requirements.

Strangely familiar lyrics? That's right. You're listening to the pied piper. Keep your children close at hand.

But, you say, the ERP industry _is_ doing this (for WalMart, for Boeing, for the Home Depot; for 3M, for AT&T, for Staples; heck, even for your neighbor's mid-sized $50M dollar electronics manufacturer, or your former bosses $20M industrial supply firm.)

Just how are _these_ companies making ERP work? They're squeezing their size 12 body, with their 38DDs, into that svelte little one piece they saw on the runway, hoping like hell a seam won't bust before the photographer gets the money shot in the bag. Short answer? They're shoe-horning their business into the ERP-maker's box.

If one of their existing business processes doesn't fit, they'll stop performing that process to make themselves 'work' with the software. If one of their processes is more efficient, they'll forgo efficiency for the sake of harmony with the software. If an existing practice gave them the flexibility to deal with odd customer requests, they'll become rigid in order to keep from changing the software.

In the end, though they don't know it, they've tied themselves to a rock, and are slowly wading into deep water. Yes, they're now standardized and have mated their business to an ERP, but the real cost of doing so is a hidden one. Everyday, their business loses time, money, efficiency, and customer goodwill, as their business now does business according to the dictates of the ERP firm.

Sure, it's natural for ERP proponents to counter that the business is now truly more efficient for having standardized their business processes across the board, is now faster as the computer can calculate things much faster than people could, and is far less error-prone by being able to check and double-check things in real-time.

Well there's no point in getting into a huge he-said, she-said over this. Just ask yourself, though, when was the last time you truly ever saw a real apples-to-apples comparison of the cost-benefits of an ERP implementation? May I say, after having been involved in well over 30 of these myself, I've never seen a real comparison. I've talked to many colleagues, who've also never seen a real one.

So all the damage behind this is what (I presume) prompts your idea.

Forget about the large-scale ERP software packages--they are too bloated to be the right fit for any single organization, too crufty a code base to ever be called well-written and maintainable, and too buggy to be reliable, bet-your-business platforms.

And yet, it's not as though the ERP makers deliberately set out to write shitty software. At one time or other in the distant past,	they hired some really smart people, and had them grew some fairly impressive software. Impressive (when viewed through the eyes of a software developer, at least) for it's depth, breadth, flexibility, documentation, platform adaptability, updateability, price, etcetera.

So there's a lot for you to do, and a great deal of resistance to overcome. I wish you the best of luck.