System Solutions: A Best-of-Breed Strategy

In addition, virtually all order entry systems these days have Internet commerce modules. This gives you a chance to evaluate, in detail, the strengths and weaknesses of the one that comes bundled with your order management application.

It may make more sense to modify one or two systems to satisfy your unmet needs or to acquire one or more new systems to meet those needs. As a rule, the more systems you implement the fewer the modifications you should make on any of them. After all, a major benefit of the best-of-breed approach is that it eliminates the aggravation of making, testing and supporting customized code that tries to extend systems into places they were never intended to go. And the less custom code you have to add, the better.