From System of Record to Management Platform: How ERP Is Changing

- Anton Galaktionov

Anton Galaktionov spent two decades on the implementation side of Oracle ERP - as a developer, consultant, and eventually architect - before moving to the client side, where he discovered it shifts the perspective entirely. Today he oversees the development of technology solutions at a large European logistics company. In this column, he writes from both sides of the market: why ERP has ended up at the center of transformation - and why the real bottleneck isn't technology, but people.

Where the shift comes from

Twenty years ago, companies implemented ERP for one reason: to bring order to their data. Finance, procurement, warehouses, production - everything in one place, all connected. For its time, that was a breakthrough. But the system itself stayed passive. It recorded facts; people made decisions, often based on reports that took days to compile.

That is no longer acceptable. A COO can't wait two weeks for a consolidated report. A CFO wants a cross-jurisdictional view today, not at month-end. Supply chains have become too complex - and too fragile - to manage after the fact.

Expectations around ERP didn't change overnight, but they shifted under pressure from several directions. Analytics moved inside the transactional layer, into spaces that used to be just data entry forms. AI went from a research topic to an operational tool. And businesses that had tolerated a gap between data and decisions for years stopped accepting it. Systems that can't answer questions in real time lose ground - even if they store data perfectly. Corporate ERP is experiencing a second wave - and that's not a marketing claim. It's what I see in operational reality every day.

What's happening in the talent market

This is where a quieter problem starts to surface.

Oracle EBS still runs at thousands of large industrial and financial organizations worldwide. But people who can do more than keep it running - who can evolve it to meet new demands - are scarce. The market has always been narrow: the system is complex, the barrier to entry is high, and real expertise takes years. What's changed is the gap between demand and supply - it's now hard to ignore.

Companies looking to embed real-time analytics, integrate large language models, or move to current platform versions keep running into the same wall. You can find developers or module-level consultants, but someone who understands the system end to end, knows the industry context, and can speak to the business in its own language - that's rare.

From the integrator side, it doesn't look that way. It feels like those people are out there - you just have to search harder. After moving to the client side, I realized that's an illusion. The market really is that tight. And as technology gets more complex while the older generation of experts steps away, the gap will keep widening.

What it looks like in practice

Watching the market, I keep track of specialists who are actually shaping where the industry is headed. When I need to explain what this level of expertise looks like, I often think of Dmitry Borisov.

We worked together on projects across Europe and the CIS in the early 2010s - I handled the functional side, he led the technical architecture. Where other teams spent weeks aligning business and development, we moved quickly - not because we worked harder, but because we spoke the same language. Even back then, it was clear Dmitry wasn't thinking in terms of code - he was thinking in terms of outcomes. He cared about how a solution would affect operating costs, not just how it was built.

His approach is more evolutionary than revolutionary: take what's already there and make it work differently. Real-time analytics layered on top of existing systems. Architectures that allow language model integration without replacing the core. The question most industrial companies face - how to transform without stopping the business - is exactly his territory.

I've seen it firsthand. Tasks that usually dragged on for months were completed about a third faster - because he could translate business logic into architecture without losing anything in between.

I raise his example not because he is an exception, but because he illustrates what this role looks like now.

Why it matters for business

I hear this a lot: "We've invested so much in ERP already - it's risky to change anything." The instinct makes sense. But it rests on a false assumption - that transformation means replacing the system, and it doesn't.

Companies running current versions of Oracle EBS already have access to tools that turn a transactional system into a management platform. Embedded analytics command centers provide an operational view without exports or manual consolidation. The architecture for integrating language models exists - and it works.

I've seen projects stall with the technology in place, the budget allocated, the intent genuine - because no one could frame the problem correctly. And the opposite: the right person pulling a project out of what looked like a dead end. The difference isn't the platform or the budget. It's the people.

What comes next

The Oracle ERP market in industry and finance isn't shrinking. It's getting more complex. Companies that put off upgrades for years are starting to move. Those already on current versions are asking what's next - how to make the system not just run, but help make decisions.

That takes people who understand how the system works under the hood and why a CFO needs a report by Monday morning, not the end of the week. Demand for that profile will keep growing, and supply isn't catching up.

In twenty years in this field - first as a developer, then as an architect, now on the client side - I've seen a few moments when things genuinely shifted. This is one of them. How companies handle the shortage of expertise will determine who benefits from this transformation - and who ends up stuck with a system that never became a management platform.