A new report out today from research firm, AMR, claims to have discovered a small but significant trend amongst big companies that currently maintain separate Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems in different world regions.

According to the report, called ‘Minimising ERP upgrade costs requires sychronising with business improvement projects’, out of 250 global companies responding, 29% currently have what it calls 'regional instances', but none of those questioned indicated that these instances were their long-term goal.

The study claims that these large corporations mostly plan to move to using a single system that will cover their entire global operations. However, the report also warns that unless this is done with due care and attention, especially to timing, then these big world roll outs could very easily come unstuck.

The fault apparently lies with what the report calls ‘regional instances’, and how these are then integrated into the larger new system. According to AMR, companies that intend to go through the process of consolidation need to start planning, and do it carefully.

Each Enterprise Resource Planning upgrade, major expansion, or acquisition is, the research firms advises, an opportunity to eliminate redundancy and propagate global best practices.  Given the upgrade cycles of two to three years, this is a long-term process, but one that must be deliberately pursued, they add.