1/18/2024 0 Comments Erp success story![]() SMB customers have fewer than 25 employees. “Already 21,000 of our more than 37,500 worldwide customers are SAP Business One customers and we expect to see a very strong contribution from SAP Business One in achieving our goal of 100,000 overall customers in 2010,” Hume says via e-mail. ![]() SAP’s ultimate and oft-stated goal is to get to 100,000 customers by 2010, and the SMB market and more user-friendly BusinessOne suite is an important piece of the plan. “BusinessOne is just too easy to navigate.” ![]() “Because I had to educate a lot of non-technical people about a system, I wanted to do it in something that was easy to learn,” he says. That familiarity, in turn, is giving Microsoft an advantage as it continues to market and roll out its SMB ERP and CRM product lines, called Dynamics.īailey says he considered the Dynamics ERP product set as well as several other vendors’ offerings, but for the staffers that would be using the new system, the BusinessOne software offered the easiest training environment. Microsoft often wins ease-of-use comparisons, simply because everybody knows Office. What’s also interesting about Bailey’s decision-making process: Microsoft did not win out. “That’s what I was shooting for, and I succeeded.” The big thing for me is: the information is being put into the system.” In addition, “at any point of time, any person can walk up to a station, log in, get a phone number, fax number, account balance, get an agent report-anything like that,” Bailey says. Today, he says, he can see Artisan’s financial and operational picture “much clearer than I could before. “It’s one of the easiest products I’ve see to operate, both all the way from operations up to the accounting department,” Bailey says. One of the key selling points for Bailey was BusinessOne’s ease of use-an area where some of SAP’s product sets have earned reputations for exactly the opposite in terms of usability, especially within large, complex implementations that required business process change. Just after SAP’s April announcement about its channel strategy, Patricia Hume, SAP’s senior vice president for channel sales and strategic alliances in the SMB sector, told CIO: “Right or wrong, SAP has been for 35 years the leading industry supplier of ERP to large enterprises.” And now, she added, SAP’s goal is to “bust the myth that SAP is only for great, big companies.” So by the time those SAP consultants left, I probably could have been one.” (To read about the workforce implications of SAP’s SMB strategy, see “SAP’s Push Into the SMB Market Is Creating a Skills Gap for IT Departments.”) “I became a research junkie, and I learned about pieces of software in our price range and picked the best one,” he says. ![]() Unlike inside big companies, where sometimes no one wants to take full responsibility for an ERP rollout, Bailey became immersed in the software purchasing and rollout process. The implementation team was just three people: two from TBC and a consultant hired by Bailey. After all, SAP made its bones implementing large, complex and expensive software rollouts almost exclusively to the Fortune 1000 set: the Coca-Colas and Wal-Marts of the world were its signature deals. dealers.Įven with the modicum of complexity between the separate operations, Bailey (the de facto CIO for big tech decisions) was going to need only a dozen or so seats for a new software package, which has not been an area that SAP (or Oracle, for that matter) has had much interest in selling to in the past. ![]() So he began looking for a new package that could unite back-office functions of Artisan’s three separate business lines: a flooring installation business a lumber yard that imports wood from South America and sells both at retail and wholesale and a distribution arm to a network of U.S. “We didn’t have any network between operations and accounting,” Bailey recalls. Like most small businesses, it found itself in 2007 running a couple of disconnected software packages for operations and accounting, and relying heavily on manual processes, says Pat Bailey, a general manager and co-owner of the business, as well as a self-described “guy who does everything.” The New Breed of SAP Customers: Pat Bailey, GM of Artisan Hardwood Floors Located in Austin, Texas, Artisan Hardwood Floors is a family owned and operated company with 37 employees and virtually no in-house IT staff. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |