Remember Peoplesoft? JD Edwards? A few years ago, I was on a selection committee to help decide what a ERP environment a large engineering firm should implement. After the project team worked for several months, they came down to four finalists. Today 2 of those 4 are now part of Oracle.

Oracle gobbled up JD Edwards and Peoplesoft over the past years eliminating two of the strongest competitors to Oracle and SAP. Today, these are the two giants of the ERP environment.

Ultimately, the decision the engineering firm made was for SAP. I've long since left that organization so I cannot comment on the success of that implementation. I can speak directly to an upcoming project we're working on here at Delmarva Group.

For a customer that will remain unnamed, we've been ratained to lead a project related heavily to an ERP implementation with a rather interesting approach to a front end system. Executives of the organization want to have remote, unattached access to their ERP. Additionally, they desire a comprehensive knowledge management environment for their ongoing projects related to packaging and marketing products.

We will continue to chronicle this project for you. We'll be posting lessons learned and some best practices as we move forward.

For starters, a project like this depends highly on its support from senior management for success. In particular, senior management needs to be the primary sponsors and openly support this project in meetings and in the general corporate culture. Nothing is harder to fight than senior management for a project manager.

We're very pleased to have support at the highest levels for this project. In part, that's due to management recognizing the value of making the change. It's also related to the confidence management has in the project leadership. Quid pro quo... very important aspect.

We would not even attempt such a project without such support. It's key.