Five things to know before committing to SAP

May 8, 2008 from itWorld Canada – “Installing SAP applications is not easy. Employees who are capable of deploying and maintaining SAP software are in extremely valuable and practically form a whole profession by themselves.

SAP, which built its reputation with ERP software, is rarely chosen by enterprises for one-off applications, AMR Research analyst Jim Shepherd notes in a report this month titled "The five SAP strategies that you need to understand." "For huge organizations, this is typically a multiyear, multimillion-dollar effort to transform the business," he writes. Unfortunately, executives often pay little attention to SAP installations after they are deployed, he adds. That's a big mistake. Let's take a look at the five SAP strategies Shepherd details in his report, and how they affect your technology decisions…”

180 View – Despite bad press, SAP keeps on truckin. The thing is they had the vision and ability in early ERP days to build systems that would work across large organizations with complex business and infrastructure. Decision makers are risk adverse and think that if it works for the best companies (as the SAP ad says), then it will work for me. Another compelling reason to go to SAP is that the most well known and trusted consulting and accounting firms were on board and would help with the implementation.

SAP won the first ERP War fought over automating business across departments, Client/Server technology, and support for multiple databases and operating systems. We are now in the midst of the second ERP War being fought in the trenches of ease of use, web based architecture, SaaS, embedded BI and CRM, customization outside of source code and integration tools.