While SaaS is great .. have you taken care of integration?
Lately I had a chance of interacting with CXO of a leading UK retailer who was considering SaaS but was extremely wary of integrating SaaS with its disparate non-ERP systems in the supply chain space. It's worthwhile to note that supply chain solutions in most of the cases would fail to live up to expectations if it is not ingrained completely with other peripheral applications thereby limiting you to access much needed visibility in this fast paced economy. Though most of the product vendors provides basic framework for integration using standard touch points and may assuage you of integration concern, it's only when rubber hits the road you realize that the incompleteness of data or information will not actually allow you to take a fast intelligent business decisions.
Interestingly most of the hosted SaaS solutions have been morphed from the products actually been designed or meant for traditional on-premise architecture and so lack sophistication in responding to system integration, secured connectivity & customization needs of the customers. It is risky to assume that SaaS vendor has the necessary experience to drive integration touch points beyond the standard vanilla interfaces because the technology reality is strikingly different from this. It is important to involve system integration partner in the beginning and assess integration requirement considering your customization need, back end systems, frequency of updates and type of integration so that the entire workflow and data touch point should work in a seamless fashion. The platform model is build on the fundamental blocks of outcome centric framework and by default would ensure that your customization and integration needs have been addressed to a large extent by design.
