If you are looking at ERP, enterprise resource planning, solutions for your organization, or even if you are not in the Technology field, you most likely have heard of the enterprise system giants Oracle and SAP. In the past, the “big” ERP vendors catered mostly to the Fortune 500, or even Fortune 100 companies who had pockets deep enough to afford the capital intensive software and implementation resources required for a large scale ERP deployment.
If you are looking at ERP, enterprise resource planning, solutions for your organization, or even if you are not in the Technology field, you most likely have heard of the enterprise system giants Oracle and SAP. In the past, the “big” ERP vendors catered mostly to the Fortune 500, or even Fortune 100 companies who had pockets deep enough to afford the capital intensive software and implementation resources required for a large scale ERP deployment. However, given the competitive and economic environment the “big” players in the ERP space are focusing on a new market, small to mid-sized companies. The emergence of less capital intensive alternatives on the market such as SaaS, software as a service, and other open source applications in the CRM (customer relationship management) and human resources space amongst other application have gained market share and the large ERP vendors such as Oracle and SAP are fighting back to gain back this lost market share. Sofware solutions come and go, and many mid-sized companies are reluctant to take on the risk factor associated with new vendors and applications on the market given the lack of history and track record. Assuming you are narrowing your focus to a big ERP vendors, such as Oracle or SAP, and are convinced that they can fit the needs of your smaller sized business, here are some pros and cons between both enterprise solutions: The main factor for any capital investment of any sized company is the return on investment, or ROI. This is critical for smaller companies as budgets for operations are slim and mistakes in and capital investments could be catastrophic to an organization as there is little solace in taking a write off on the balance sheet. In independent and general opinion survey, over forty percent of small businesses found and ROI on SAP and over 90 percent found an ROI with Oracle solutions. A second key factor was getting the solution up and deployed. Again, for a smaller sized company with limited resources to assign to “new” initiatives, any downtime or increase in implementation time can seriously affect profits. With respect to SAP, almost 70 percent of implementations were completed on schedule, while almost 80 percent of Oracle implementations were on time. However, from a budget perspective, only 40 percent of SAP implementations were on budget while over 60 percent of Oracle implementations were on budget. Probably the biggest statistic to which solution comes out ahead is whether a current customer would choose the same vendor the next time around. Almost 70 percent of SAP customers said they would recommend SAP while almost 90 percent of Oracle customers said they were satisfied with their application and recommend them to customers. With mixed general data like this, the best process for ERP practitioners looking to ferret out the right enterprise solution for their organization would be to take their analysis one step further and drill down on Oracle and SAP clients/customers with their identical company profile, size, industry, and business strategy as their organization and do a more streamlined analysis on these key ERP success factors.
Source: www.erp.com
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