Big Name Company Software vs Local Legacy Software

I've spent my career on both sides of this argument: rolling out global ERP platforms like SAP across manufacturing plants, and building the small, homegrown tools that quietly fill the gaps those platforms never cover. Neither side is automatically right, and anyone who tells you a single vendor solves everything hasn't run a real plant floor.

Big-name software wins on scale, support, and standardization: one SAP instance across every global site means one data model, one audit trail, one vendor to call. But it moves slowly. Getting a small process change through a global ERP roadmap can take months, and by the time it ships, the plant that asked for it has already found a workaround.

That's where local, "legacy" software earns its keep, and I don't use legacy as an insult. A tool one developer builds in a week, tailored exactly to how a specific line actually works, can outlive its reputation for being disposable. I've kept systems like that running & improving for years, precisely because they were built to solve one real problem well instead of every problem adequately.

The right answer usually isn't "big vendor" or "custom build," it's knowing which parts of the business need standardization and which parts need speed.

The real skill isn't picking a side, it's integration: making sure the custom tool talks cleanly to the ERP instead of becoming its own island of untrusted data. Every system I build, whether it's a full ERP or a single-purpose dashboard, is designed to plug into SAP or whatever backbone a company already runs on, not fight it.