You have been hired as a consultant to make recommendations for Smarty's, a healthy fast-food chain that is undergoing major expansion. Smarty's needs to create an enterprise resource planning system

However, Smarty's needs to have this system up and running as quickly as possible or it is likely they will begin losing business. What do you recommend?

Creating new, original enterprise software is extremely complex, and has a 50 to 75 percent failure rating. Because any enterprise software is extremely complex, it is likely that they will run into problems if they implement a system too quickly. I would caution them that an entirely new enterprise system is most likely to fail, and their best options may be to examine their existing portfolio to identify which systems can remain without doing too much damage and which must be revamped in order for them to maintain their growth. Regardless, they will still need to go through a rigorous evaluation and planning process in order to determine the most appropriate software. They may be able to implement web services for rapid, component-based development for the portions of the system that need to be overhauled or augmented. Another option is to use hosted applications for some of their systems.