Big expenses with big upsides
October 15, 2019
Big expenses with big upsides
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- SAP ERP Financials
Overall Satisfaction with SAP ERP
We currently use SAP for nearly all of our business and financial needs including HR, production, inventory, assets, and financials. We have recently added the transportation management module as well. It allows us to manage our organization more centrally and have much higher visibility compared to our previous ERP system. We currently are on SAP ECC but are exploring the possibility of migrating to S/4 HANA in the future.
- SAP ERP is a large software package and is designed to be able to accommodate a variety of business models and processes.
- SAP has a huge store of information available for analysis and planning. It can be used by just about anyone in the organization to identify inefficiencies and do detailed variance analysis.
- SAP ERP is not very user-friendly and requires a great deal of specialized knowledge to take advantage of its full functionality.
- SAP requires a great deal of human and financial capital to keep it running properly and is very difficult to modify if business processes change. Often, it is better to modify your policies and procedures to fit SAP rather than the other way around.
- Adding functionality is laborious and expensive, and customization often results in greater difficulty when/if upgrades are offered.
- The SAP implementation has consumed a lot more resources than had been originally forecast and has taken longer to complete. We have been doing mostly an in-house implementation, so some issues have come up that may have been solved more quickly with outside expertise.
- SAP has allowed our company to have greater visibility and control over costs, both in administrative spending and production costs. We are primarily a manufacturing company, so keeping a close eye on manufacturing cost inputs and production cost variances has had a very positive impact on our organization.
- Our bottom-line IT costs have skyrocketed with the implementation of SAP, but the payback to manufacturing efficiency has made the investment worth it.
SAP is much more powerful than Dynamics GP. Dynamics GP is great for smaller shops with simple transactions and some inventory or manufacturing activity. It does not hold up well against SAP's advanced functionality and extensive reporting and tracking capabilities. Of course, Dynamics GP is much less expensive and would be better suited for SMEs that are trying to increase their reporting capabilities without breaking the bank.