Note: A version of this article appeared in the January, 1998 issue of Modern Materials Handling magazine.

I was talking to a friend of mine, the CEO of a pretty good sized company. He had just been to an executive briefing on "Enterprise Computing." As part of the presentation, the CEO was told that the first step was to hire a good consulting firm (Guess who sponsored the event?) to review every aspect of his business.

The CEO saw a problem; to do the job right would take about a year. He knew that his overhead was already eating him alive.

And his vice president of distribution wanted a new warehouse management system; his vice president of sales and marketing was hot on the idea of something called "vendor managed inventory," VMI.

VMI would require a sound EDI/Internet platform and a complete revamp of the sales analysis, master scheduling, and order entry systems. It would even impact the CEO's purchasing group and its contacts with suppliers.

And what else? Our CEO said his Chairman of the Board told him that a golfing buddy thought the only way to survive the next 10 years was to install an extremely comprehensive enterprise system.

The CEO looked at me somewhat bewildered and remarked, "If the chairman knew what it takes to implement that system, he'd give up golf!"

Then the CEO looked at me and said, "So that bar code stuff you are always talking to me about will just have to wait."

I didn't have the heart to tell the CEO about all the transaction data that an enterprise computing system needs and that if one manually key enters all that data--rather than using bar codes or other forms of automatic data collection--he'll either go broke from the costs or build a huge data base full of inaccurate data.

In his frustration, my friend, in a few sentences and two big breaths, had identified the real problem. It isn't enough to just know about the new concepts. You have to understand the relationships between new technical capabilities and concepts and the business practices that they permit or require.

So if understanding these relationships is the issue, what's the solution? Here's your homework: Try to find answers to some fundamental questions (see box) with your management team. I'll be addressing them in this column over the next year and posting relevant comments from readers at the web site.

Before making decisions on hardware/software for data capture, warehouse management, or even enterprise computing, try asking these questions of management team members:

1. Is my company at the top, bottom, or middle of a supply chain? What does that position mean to the purchasing, manufacturing side of my operation? And what is the impact on the sales, marketing, and distribution side?

2. If I need to ""reinvent'' my company, what do I do about the market share and profits I lose while inventors are reinventing me?

3. Where do data capture, document management, and electronic commerce fit into my business?

4. How do I prioritize the changes that I know I must make?

5. What's the fastest way to find out what I need to know?

6. How can I ensure successful deployment of technology?

7. Enterprise computing--what does that really mean? Are complex systems the only way to get there?

8. How do I balance and even leverage improvements to work flow (paper work) and material flow?