Enterprise Resource Planning for Services, and Professional Services Automation: Where Do You Draw the Line? (TEC)

Since the late nineties, it has been evident that the enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors that originally serviced the needs of manufacturing organizations have slowly extended their functionality to service the needs of non-manufacturing industries also. By the year 2000, when many of the major ERP implementations for the manufacturing industry had tapered off, tier one ERP vendors, such as SAP and Oracle, had refocused efforts to market their integrated solutions in the greener pastures of service-oriented vertical markets, such as the health care sector, the public sector, and service based businesses. Simultaneously, professional services automation (PSA) solutions appeared, and best-of-breed vendors such as Changepoint (today Compuware) and Evolve (now part of Primavera’s PSA offering) were developing project- and service-oriented functionality. These PSA solutions were aimed at providing the missing pieces linking back-office solutions (typically provided by ERP or accounting vendors) to project management systems, which remain the heart of most professional services organizations (PSOs).