- Digital transformation
ERP or Best-Of-Breed?
When organisations start looking for a new ERP system, they are often faced with a classic decision: should they choose an all-in-one ERP solution, or adopt a Best-of-Breed approach?
What is Best of Breed?
A Best-of-Breed strategy is based on the belief that no single software platform can support every business process equally well. Each domain within an organisation, such as estimation, project management, production planning, or logistics, comes with its own complexity and unique requirements.
Rather than selecting a single all-in-one ERP package that covers every process "well enough," a Best-of-Breed approach deliberately chooses the most suitable and specialised software for each individual process.
The underlying idea is that specialised solutions are often deeper, more user-friendly, and more innovative within their specific domain. For example, a CRM platform focuses entirely on customer relationships and sales opportunities, while a project management solution excels in planning, structure, and budget tracking.
By combining these tools, each department gains access to a solution that genuinely supports its day-to-day activities, improving both user adoption and operational efficiency.
A Best-of-Breed landscape, however, is not a collection of isolated systems. Its true strength lies in integration and connectivity. Through integrations and APIs, data is exchanged between systems, ensuring that information only needs to be entered once while remaining consistently available across the entire value chain.
Think of customer and project data flowing seamlessly from CRM to project management, from work orders to invoicing, and ultimately into the accounting system. This preserves a complete business overview, even when multiple applications are involved.
By selecting the best solution for each domain and connecting them through integrations and APIs, organisations combine flexibility with performance. This enables every business process to receive the support it needs without sacrificing consistency or visibility.
Key Considerations
While a Best-of-Breed ERP strategy offers significant advantages in terms of flexibility, specialisation, and future readiness, it also requires a well-considered and deliberate implementation approach.
Unlike all-in-one ERP solutions, where many functionalities are integrated by default, Best of Breed relies heavily on collaboration between multiple applications.
This introduces several important considerations that should be evaluated from the outset. Addressing these factors early helps minimise risks and maximise the return on the organisation's IT investments.
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Integration Complexity
A Best-of-Breed landscape consists of multiple systems that must communicate with one another.
These integrations ensure that data flows accurately and efficiently between applications, but they also introduce technical complexity.
Setting up, testing, and maintaining integrations through APIs or middleware requires a clear architectural vision and technical expertise. Without sufficient attention to integrations, organisations risk data inconsistencies, manual corrections, or temporary disruptions when one of the connected systems is updated.
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Cost Structure
With a Best-of-Breed approach, each specialised solution comes with its own licence and implementation costs.
At first glance, these investments often appear manageable. However, organisations must also account for the necessary integrations between systems, which can significantly increase the overall initial investment.
Ownership and coordination are equally important considerations. Clear responsibility must be assigned for managing and maintaining the overall application landscape. Will this responsibility sit with the internal IT team, or will an external partner coordinate the systems and integrations? This decision directly impacts both costs and long-term manageability.
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Management Overhead
Managing multiple applications requires a more active and strategic governance model.
Updates, changes, or extensions in one system can affect connected applications. As a result, organisations must continuously monitor dependencies and coherence across the technology landscape.
Without central governance and periodic evaluations, management efforts can quickly increase, making the environment more difficult to maintain. A structured approach and clear ownership are therefore essential to preserve the benefits of a Best-of-Breed strategy over time.
Data governance and security
Data governance should be considered from the very beginning. Organisations need to determine where data is managed, which system serves as the "single source of truth," and how changes are synchronised across applications. Without clear governance rules, data can become fragmented, resulting in conflicting information and reduced confidence in reporting. By defining data models, ownership responsibilities, and validation rules, organisations maintain the quality and reliability of information across the entire application landscape.
Security is an equally important consideration. Every application and every integration creates a potential access point to sensitive business information. A consistent, organisation-wide approach to user permissions, authentication, logging, and security standards is therefore essential to minimise risk. Here too, a holistic vision is required. Security should not be managed separately for each individual application but should instead be implemented and governed consistently across the entire IT ecosystem.
Conclusion
A Best-of-Breed approach offers organisations a high degree of flexibility. As processes evolve, new requirements emerge, or the organisation grows, individual tools can be expanded or replaced without redesigning the entire IT landscape. This makes Best of Breed particularly attractive for SMEs that want to digitise step by step while retaining the flexibility to adapt to change. At the same time, this strategy requires strong governance and a well-defined roadmap.
The presence of multiple applications brings considerations related to integrations, initial investment costs, and management complexity. Clear agreements around data ownership, data flows, and security are critical to prevent fragmentation, inconsistencies, and increased risk. Without an overarching architectural vision and central governance model, the complexity of the landscape can grow rapidly. Ultimately, Best of Breed is not about deploying more software. It is about carefully selecting the right support for each business process and ensuring that the organisation is structured to manage it effectively.
By choosing the most appropriate solution for every domain and enabling secure, controlled collaboration between systems, organisations can build a flexible, scalable, and sustainable IT landscape that evolves alongside their ambitions.
Are you considering a Best-of-Breed approach for your organisation?
Would you like a clear and structured view of your current IT landscape and insight into which systems best support your processes and growth ambitions?
Feel free to get in touch. Together, we will analyse your existing application landscape, identify your key requirements, and advise you on how to evolve towards an integrated, future-ready digital ecosystem.
