At the end of the third and final day of meeting with our ERP Consultants, our company realized that working in the cloud could be good. They keep version(s) of our applications as well as update data as needed to comply with that update. This is what we are looking forward to accomplishing by going to the cloud.
Over the days we found that versions of the various software(s) that they have sold us do not push to the cloud easily or never will. Some of those software(s) deal with automation and they differ between plants of ours depending on the level of automation done at that plant.
We were told about our data being available via accessing our Data Lake but that concept is still not out of alpha/build/test as of yet. Pulling the data from here is where a cost factor. We need this data to continue reporting to the company even though there is a new reporting environment, for us via version upgrade, that we have to learn how to use effectively.
Other software we use will not be in the cloud initially but is planned to get there in the future. One of those is the Bill of Materials another is the EDI just to name two of many.
We do not have a quote as of yet on how much this will cost because they were only getting actual facts on what needed to be done. OTTOMH I am guessing they say 12-18 months at 1 million dollars to be heavily discounted because we are the ALPHA site dong this with them. In reality, it will take close to 3 years and be in excess of 2 million before discounting or bill refusals.
Will the executives be behind IT going down this road is the number one question and that will be a Fall 2018 decision for a 2019 project?