Develop in house or configure off the shelf?

[Pondlife]

Should have gone wall to wall oracle instead of that poorly architected cobbled together .net solution eh? Will you and Milan ever see the light?

[doomage]

Which option would allow you to bill the highest for the longest time?

All other questions moot imho.

[original PM]

Apologies for being so generic but it's more of a things to consider type question. Assume that the existing source code has been modified so many times that it is of little value and it would be a start from scratch, define new requirements type project. Assume the vendor based solution will give +90% as vanilla but would need to be enhanced for the additional 10%. Hardware reqmt's would be equivalents.

I'm interested in peoples experiences of support costs of in house vs store bought, flexibility to business change. etc.

I am just finishng of a project which involved the development of 2 systems - 1 in house built and the other an off the shelf package (MS dynamics)

With of the shelf you generally tend to find it is not very flexible, cost for development are normally £650 per day minimum and if you want really bespoke stuff it simply cannot be done - so you have to adjust processes (which is not always a bad thing but the users do not always like it)

In house gives much more flexbility and lower costs and increased deployment speed - however this can cause problems if the business do not see the need for proper software release control - you just get people insisting that what they need they need now and we should just deploy to live without proper testing....

[original PM]

Which option would allow you to bill the highest for the longest time?

All other questions moot imho.

tw@

one of the main reason we do not use contractors

[Scoobos]

Which option would allow you to bill the highest for the longest time?

All other questions moot imho.

Awful. Have you no shame?

[cojak]

Consider the 'it' to be the solution (COTS/Bespoke is irrelevant at this point)

WHY does the client want 'it'? (Push/Pull pressures)
WHAT benefits does the client want to have by getting 'it'?
WHAT is required to achieve 'it'?

HOW are the requirements best met - through COTS or Bespoke? - Look at cost/benefit analysis as well as requirements analysis.

Many projects (even massive ones) go tits up because none of this is considered.

[cojak]

tw@

one of the main reason we do not use contractors

Then you have very poor management of contractors.

[oracleslave]

With of the shelf you generally tend to find it is not very flexible,

Oracle.

HTH

[doomage]

Then you have very poor management of contractors.

And not much of a sense of humour. Geez, when did General get so serious.

I could give a much better answer but then I'd have to invoice.

[Pondlife]

Some good points, thanks.

The requirement exists because the ERP system cannot easily handle the complexity of the manufacturing process. The process is such that there are far too many variables (environmental, physical resource availability, product destination, plant connectivity) that the ERP system (glares at OS to keep quiet) cannot handle the detailed scheduling of the factory. But this isn't really my point.

I'm interested really in the support aspects of the two potential options. Eg Vendor OTS means access to cheaper 24/7 support, upgrade plan, certified api's for the ERP, OS patches approved etc With in house you get flexibility to do exactly what you want without compromise but are more limited in longer term support options?