Reducing Costs Of Syteline UtilizationEnterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is a major segment of the software industry, and largely consists of a relational database solution allowing divisions of large companies to communicate and share data effectively. The largest vendor of Enterprise Relationship Planning suites is SAP, followed by Oracle, both of which provide server driven solutions based on UNIX, take extensive customization, and large (multi-year) rollouts to get functional, often costing several millions (or tens of millions) of dollars to implement. While all businesses have common business functions (accounting, sales, warehousing, and similar), an ERP implementation typically uses a core setup and several modules; for a smaller business, a full scale Oracle or SAP implementation is overkill, and will typically be more expensive than they can realistically afford. Enter companies like Syteline ERP, which try to implement a lower cost set of ERP tools by using Microsoft .NET framework tools. This maintains (comparatively) low pricing, while keeping a lot of flexibility in place for direct customization. The various Microsoft programming languages that are integrated into the .NET framework are fairly robust and easy to learn, and have a wide adoption, so finding coders who can work on the ERP system for a reasonable price is doable. Likewise, for companies that want to maintain an all Microsoft shop, Syteline ERP allows them to do so with minimal hassle, and keeps Microsoft's willingness to maintain customizable and reasonably well developed user interfaces handy. Because of the .NET framework underpinning it, integration with other Microsoft applications, such as Word, Excel, Access, Exchange and OneNote, is much simpler than with other solutions. This also reduces the cost of training your employees to use Syteline; largely it will be like applications they already know and use, and will exhibit many of the same behaviors they've grown accustomed to. Being able to query data from any cell to anything you have privileges to see on the network is a common feature in all ERP systems, but Syteline makes it easier to do for the average user. The downside of Syteline ERP systems is that they lack some of the direct scalability of a higher end ERP system; there are definite limits to what you can do within Syteline's system, which is the price you pay for easily customized code on commodity hardware; at some point you may run into the limits of the hardware or the code framework; Microsoft's implementation of SQL is one bottleneck that keeps Syteline tailored to medium sized businesses. Likewise, as with most Microsoft server driven systems, there is a notable decrease in overall data and network security. For many medium sized businesses, this is a reasonable trade off for users being able to use interfaces they already know how to use. Even so, Syteline represents an important shift in ERP software; it's an attempt to migrate the kinds of process control information down market to smaller companies that are currently underserved and outgrowing the level of management and resource planning that can be done with individual databases and spreadsheets.
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