Myths and Truths about SAP Business One

By Dattatreya R.Kulkarni Posted December 18, 2017 | Benefits of SAP Business One, Management, SAP Technology
Myths and Truths about SAP Business One
During our interactions with numerous prospects from the SME segment, we have come across few common myths about SAP Business One. Putting them down here for your reference.
MYTH 1: SAP is for large companies, not for us! 
TRUTH: SAP has several solutions to offer to the industry globally. Its flag ship solution which became very popular decades ago & which was erstwhile commonly referred to as SAP R/3 has metamorphosed to SAP Enterprise, ECC6 and now S/4 HANA. This solution is meant for large enterprises and has been adopted by several Fortune 500 companies and most of the leading large enterprises in India too. However, SAP also offers a solution called SAP Business One, which has been developed especially for the SME sector. It is currently being used by close to 55,000 customers across the world and close to 5,500 customers in India. SAP B1, in short, is very rich in features, easy to understand, flexible yet robust and has a very low total cost of ownership (TCO) to its SME customers.
MYTH 2: SAP Business One is for Trading Companies & not for manufacturing set-ups!
TRUTH: SAP Business One has the required capabilities to address needs of a manufacturing company. To name a few, it takes care of Bill of Material (BOM), Routing, Resources, Production Order, Material Consumption, Tracking of variances, Product Cost and so on. 80% of our (Praxis) customers are from manufacturing domain and have been using SAP Business One very successfully over the years. These customers are from Automotive Component Manufacturing, General Manufacturing, Chemicals, and Food Processing etc. and have variety of manufacturing scenarios like Made to Stock, Made to Order, Assemble to Order & so on. You could read about newest features in production domain introduced in latest version of SAP Business One version 9.3 by clicking here
MYTH 3: SAP implementation projects run for years!
TRUTH: Large enterprises are complex organizations having hundreds and many times thousands of users with presence in multiple countries, having several diversified business interests and so on. On boarding an organization of this size onto SAP solution (or any other for that matter) is normally broken down into phases with each phase being a program by itself. Hence, it does take a long time for the entire engagement to get over. However, in case of SAP Business One the implementation projects typically run into a few weeks (say 8-12, sometimes more in exceptional cases) only as SMEs by definition are smaller companies and do not pose challenges that are attributable to sheer size of the organization.
MYTH 4: SAP solutions are difficult & expensive to maintain!
TRUTH: This myth too finds its origins in the misconstrued notion that SMEs will need the same type(s) of infrastructure that large enterprises need to keep their SAP system running. The reality is that SAP Business One needs very reasonable and affordable resources in terms of IT infrastructure. One single server is sufficient for the project implementation and continues to serve as the ‘productive’ or ‘live’ environment on an on-going basis. Consequently, the amount of time or resources needed to keep the system running are practically negligible. Customers also have an option of adopting cloud model. In terms of human resources too, SAP Business One does not demand any specialised or niche skills which results into constant availability of skilled resources at very reasonable cost.
THE BIG TRUTH:
SAP Business One is an excellent solution for SMEs to consider and customers from this segment should not get distracted by the myths or half-truths doing the rounds out there. This solution will not only yield better discipline & higher productivity in your organization but will offer you tight cost control, prevention of revenue leakage thus leading to a positive impact on your bottom line as well as top line. Read more on why SAP Business One is the right solution for you by clicking here.
Please get in touch with us if you want to know more. Do write to us at [email protected]