Vertellus Specialties, a $450-million-a-year manufacturer of chemicals, could be the subject of two business-school case studies. One would explore the reasons behind the company's history of mergers & acquisitions. The other would document why the company settled on a single ERP system to support the business through those transitions.

The second case study also would reveal how 15 years after ERP first started gaining traction in America's boardrooms—and 10 years after Y2K concerns sparked a mass rush to adopt it—companies like Vertellus are discovering that ERP still has strategic relevance. No longer is ERP about delivering competitive advantage through mere adoption. These days, when a manufacturer of almost any size already uses ERP, the playing field is level.

Today ERP's strategic relevance is around leveraging common processes, templates, and infrastructure across multiple businesses to create value through economies of scale.

“ERP has matured,” agrees Jaisankar Venkat, VP of Infosys Technologies' enterprise solutions group. “It's not just about delivering standard, defined processes—but processes and templates that are proven best-in-class, and complemented by industry-specific add-ons such as business intelligence and analytics.”

That's exactly what SAP's mySAP ERP suite has delivered for Vertellus, says its VP and CIO, Michael Boster. Vertellus, based in Indianapolis, was formed in 2006 via the merger of two chemical companies, and Boster says that union proved a success—already yielding more than $14 million in annual savings, and well on the way to creating an additional $10 million in yearly cost reductions.

“Statistically, a high proportion of mergers fail to deliver,” says Boster, who attributes Vertellus' odds-defying feat to its standardization on the mySAP suite.

“We've got 'one version of the truth' with a single instance of ERP, rather than separate instances,” Boster explains. “We also have standard best-practice workflows across the company. Instead of making the same decisions in duplicate, we're making them once—and not just making them faster, but saving money in the process.”

The Vertellus migration to mySAP began before the company was officially formed. Boster had been retained by Arsenal Venture Partners to manage the spin-off of a company called Rutherford Chemicals from its previous corporate parent and found himself needing to replace a 10-year-old ERP system that no longer had vendor support.