Dear Bob ... I used to have a book and highlighted the passage that claimed it was cheaper in the long run to buy vs. build in-house software tools. Would you happen to have any such passage? - Shopping Dear Shopping I'm afraid not, although it's become a truism in the industry. And like all truisms, it's wrong often enough that a closer look is usually in order. What I think is true (if it helps) is that Dear Bob …I used to have a book and highlighted the passage that claimed it was cheaper in the long run to buy vs. build in-house software tools. Would you happen to have any such passage?– Shopping Dear ShoppingI’m afraid not, although it’s become a truism in the industry. And like all truisms, it’s wrong often enough that a closer look is usually in order. What I think is true (if it helps) is that when you’re using software to address a business situation that’s similar across many businesses, it has to be cheaper to buy the application for the simple reason that the software vendor gets to amortize the cost of development over a large number of customers, where in-house development can only amortize it across one company.As a company’s needs become more specialized, these economics can easily change, and there comes a point where the cost of customizing an off-the-shelf package to a unique situation outstrips the cost of developing from scratch. Here’s where it gets tricky: A major cost of customization is integration with all the other software your company has to run to get the job done. That’s one reason that no matter how expensive it is to install an ERP suite, it almost has to be less expensive than integrating a bunch of separate point solutions. Integration that’s built in just has to be less expensive to maintain than a spiderweb of interfaces that are bolted on after the fact.Now we have to contend with the dreaded plain-vanilla vs customize question. Install ERP plain vanilla and you have to re-engineer your business to fit the ERP suite’s idea of how it should run. Customize the ERP suite and you’ve boosted the cost of every upgrade by a bunch.Would it cost you less to build from scratch than to install the ERP suite? Maybe, but I doubt it. If you look closely at the process of installing an ERP suite you’ll be left with a surprising conclusion: One way to think about ERP suites is that they’e specialized languages, optimized for building pre-integrated business support applications. So in a sense, if you install SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle or what-have-you and heavily customize it, what you’ve really done is to build your enterprise applications from scratch, only you’ve used a tool built specifically for that purpose instead of something more general-purpose, like COBOL or Java. Which isn’t a quote from a book, but perhaps it will help.– Bob ——– Technology Industry