Today I offended a co-worker by pointing out the limitations of our ERP system that resides on our AS/400 server. This application wasn't created by this individual but he maintains some processes within it--particularly reporting. I can see that this is going to be a touchy issue with him, so now I am forced to find ideas elsewhere and I would like suggestions. What to read, forums, opinions, etc.
A little background: Our ERP system does everything from human resources, accounting, and production. The limitations that exist are on the production side of things.
First, the ERP system was not designed for our organization's industry, therefore, we have had to make customizations within it to make it work. These have been done prior to my employment here. Customizations are allowed but they are limited. For example, we need to add five new fields for recording data but we only have two left. This means we need to use an extension table for additional data. However, the ERP's data entry system was not designed to handle the new table. This requires us to pay the software vendor a maintenance fee to update their user interface screens, internal code, and very expensive fees to handle future software upgrades to this system for our special scenario.
To bypass these expenses we have created weird and convoluted code concatenations to put into these fields. This makes it difficult to process as some records (for our different vendors) mean something different than others.
Furthermore, the data entry system is lacking validation checks so we have many data entry errors which is taking an enormous amount of time to fix. Apparently, these custom validations existed in times past but had to be removed because it was so difficult to install software upgrades.
My background is with .Net and SQL Server. I am confident I could write a Windows app in 6 to 9 months to handle our data entry needs and that would allow us to be extensible. We would no longer be constrained with proprietary tables but we would still be able to pull data from the HR portion of the ERP system and push data to the accounting portion for accounts receivables and invoicing.
Is this idea too far off the mark? What resources/forums are available that I could read that have implemented this type of solution for ERP? Are there better ERP systems to look at that are more flexible?
Thank You.