Evert Bos' Profile

I started working with ERP systems in 1985, in the Netherlands. That system was Ims7. It ran on Honeywell DPS7 hardware, the operating system was GCOS7. It had excellent functionality, even a Kanban module! But the trend to switch to (much cheaper) UNIX became stronger and our consulting business at Bull changed horses to the BaaN ERP system that ran on UNIX. I did many BaaN implementations in Europe, and after 1995, in the USA, working in the BaaN practice of Ernst & Young. Almost all of these projects were at manufacturing companies, and a large percentage were Make-to-Order or Engineer-to-Order, an industry segment I was mostly interested in. In 2004 I changed my ERP-horse to Dynamics AX, then called Axapta 3.0. The company I worked for was Streamline Systems, who merged with Sikich in 2013. The functionality of AX 3.0 was limited so I became really good in defining and testing customizations. In the BaaN days, customizations were a rarity. With AX, they were a given. The fact that AX is so easy to change will always remain a two-edged sword. With the tremendous expansion of functionality in AX 2012 one would expect we customize less. But so far this has not been the case. With the LCS boxed solution approach, customizations are bound to become less common but the jury is still out at this moment.

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