![[Out of the Box is a Lie Or Why Your Software Sucks and Oracle APEX is Already in Your Database Part 1 of a 14-part series on building vs renting your digital future You know what actually works ou.png]] ## Or: Why Your Software Sucks and Oracle APEX is Already in Your Database _Part 1 of a 14-part series on building vs renting your digital future_ You know what actually works out of the box? Cereal. That's about it. Last week [Replit](https://replit.com/) raised their prices from free to $500/hour. Everyone's upset, but they just admitted what we all know: the software you use every day is broken and everyone's pretending it's fine. Luttuce begin by reflecting on Enterprise Resource Planning implementers telling you: 1. you're not special 2. the erp can work just fine 'out of the box' 3. with no customizations 4. customizations are bad 5. they prevent you from upgrading your (ugly) erp software That may be true if you are a bicycle manufacturer who makes to stock, but for anyone else, stay tuned... ## Let's Talk About Bob's Spreadsheet Every company has a Bob. Bob's the guy who built that Excel file in 2003 that somehow runs half your operation. Maybe your Bob is named Susan. Or Carlos. Doesn't matter. What matters is that spreadsheet is the real system. Everything else is just expensive decoration. ## The Supply Company That Threw Away What Works I need to tell you about this supply company. They built something that just works. They pack surgical trays for specific operations. Ship them to hospitals. Then - and here's the beautiful part - they take the unused materials back. Shrink wrap them, scan them, put them right back into inventory. Simple. Effective. No AI, no machine learning, just good old-fashioned efficiency. It's not fancy. It's not "innovative" by Silicon Valley standards. But it works perfectly for their business. Low tech, high impact. Their IT leadership's response? "We're not special. We should use standard ERP solutions." Wrong. Dead wrong. You ARE special. That's literally why you exist. That's why hospitals work with you. Now they're ripping it all out for an ERP that can't even handle their basic tray and return process. They'll end up with 50 spreadsheets and three full-time people doing what their simple system did automatically. ## Process Mapping is Procrastination Another client told me: "We're busy doing process mapping, then we'll get you the requirements." Stop. Your processes are symptoms. Every convoluted workflow, every approval chain, every "we've always done it this way" - these are band-aids on broken systems. You created these processes because your data is dirty, your systems don't talk, and your software makes simple things complicated. Fix the root cause - clean data, intuitive systems, zero training required - and watch 80% of your processes disappear. But consultants won't tell you that. They love process mapping. It's billable forever. ## The Licensing Shell Game Here's how software companies actually make money. It's not about solving your problems - it's about maximizing licenses. Take someone in receiving. They're the glue between manufacturing and accounts payable. They need to: - Check invoices occasionally (AP module: $600/month) - Verify quality for manufacturing (MES module: $600/month) - Handle supply chain tasks (SCM module: $600/month) That's $1,800 per month for ONE person who uses maybe 5% of each module. Find me an ERP that bundles this into one license. The whole model depends on you paying for overlap. Meanwhile, that same person probably has three spreadsheets open doing the actual work. ## Why Software Companies Don't Care Here's the dirty secret: When [SAP](https://www.sap.com/) sucks, [Deloitte](https://www.deloitte.com/) makes $50 million fixing it. When Oracle's ERP is confusing, [Accenture](https://www.accenture.com/) gets another year of billing. When [Microsoft Dynamics](https://dynamics.microsoft.com/) breaks, here comes [PWC](https://www.pwc.com/) with a "transformation." Bad software creates consulting revenue. It's not a bug - its the entire business model. Your vendor knows their interface is garbage. They know you hate it. They know about your workarounds. They just don't care because fixing it would kill the golden goose. ## Here's What Gets Me About Oracle Now, Oracle isn't one company - it's like three companies wearing a trenchcoat pretending to be one. You've got the applications side (ERP, EPM, all the Fusion stuff), the engineers, and the sales org, also split in two. But here's the thing, the database team, the actual engineering team who built the data platform, they included this thing called APEX. It's sitting in every Oracle database. Right now. Already installed. Already licensed. One license, unlimited users, build whatever you want. The applications division probably doesn't even want you to know about it because it competes with their expensive module-based pricing model. That medical supply company? They could rebuild their surgical tray system in APEX in three months. Better than before. Connected to everything. Zero per-user costs. APEX lets you build actual applications that work the way you work. Not how some Oracle Fusion consultant thinks you should work. Not how the "best practices" say to work. How YOU work. ## Every Company Has a Data Problem Let's be real for a second. Every company has a data problem. If someone says they don't, they're either lying or they havent looked close enough. You've got customer data in [Salesforce](https://www.salesforce.com/), financial data in SAP, inventory in some system from 1995 that runs on hopes and prayers, and everything actually important in Excel. Getting a simple answer requires three exports, two pivot tables, and a prayer to whatever god watches over VLOOKUP functions. Clean data solves 80% of your process problems. But nobody wants to talk about data quality because it's not sexy. It doesn't have a three-letter acronym. Consultants can't bill for it monthly. Oracle Database can talk to all of it. APEX can pull from any database, any REST API, any web service. Your data doesn't have to live in Oracle to work with Oracle. Wild concept, right? ## What You Can Actually Do This Weekend Forget the consultants. Forget the process mapping. Forget the 18-month implementations. Here's what you actually need: 1. You have Oracle Database? You have APEX. It's already there. Check your database - it's been sitting there like that gym membership you forgot about. 2. Pick one stupid problem. That receiving system that needs three logins. The approval workflow that takes seventeen emails. The surgical tray configurator that your ERP can't handle. 3. Spend Saturday morning with coffee and YouTube tutorials. By lunch you'll have something working. By dinner, you'll wonder why you waited. The AI assists now are really good. You can literally say "I need a surgical tray builder that tracks usage patterns and handles returns" and it builds most of it for you. One app. One interface. Zero additional licenses. ## The Window Won't Stay Open In six months, everyone will be doing this. In a year, consultants will be charging double to do it for you. But right now, while everyone's distracted by [Replit's](https://replit.com/) pricing drama, you can move. That medical supply company throwing away their simple tray and return system? In two years, they'll pay millions trying to make their new ERP do what their old system just did. Don't be them. That thing you complain about every Monday? That process that makes you want to quit? That brilliant system you built that IT wants to replace? You can rebuild it better in APEX before they finish their requirements gathering. Because unlike your IT leadership, I think your business is special enough to deserve software that actually works. And if they won't protect it, build it yourself with APEX - courtesy of the database engineers who actually understood what customers needed. The alternative is watching your competitive advantage get deleted for "best practices" that are neither best nor practical. --- _Tomorrow: [[Why Your IT Director Saying "We're Not Special" Is Costing You Millions]]_ ## Upcoming in This Series: - [[Why Consultants Don't Want You to Know About APEX]] - [[Vibe Coding: When Warehouse Managers Build Better Apps Than IT]] - [[The $1,800 Receiving Clerk: How Licensing Models Rob You Blind]] - [[Your Competitive Advantage Is Not "Best Practice"]] - [[Clean Data vs. Process Mapping: The Real Solution]] - [[Building Parallel Systems Instead of Replacements]] - [[The ERP Vendors Know (They Just Don't Care)]] - [[Reverse Logistics and Other "Impossible" Features]] - [[The Two-Month Window Before Everyone Catches On]] - [[One Interface to Rule Them All: Killing the Module Madness]] - [[Why AI Changes Everything About Enterprise Software]] - [[Build Your Escape Route: A Complete Blueprint]] ## Tags #OracleAPEX #VibeCoding #BuildVsBuy #DataProblems #EnterpriseIT #DigitalTransformation