by Dattatreya R. Kulkarni Posted October 19, 2016 In Benefits of SAP Business One, Management
I met the Managing Director, Director Operations and the Business Coach of a company last week. We had a very interesting discussion that lasted for hours. Since the interaction brought out great discussion points, that may serve as answers to many business owners, I thought of sharing the same with you all. It’s no rocket science but it does make you think of your business’s readiness to handle rapid growth in an increasingly competitive global market. It may be noted that the customer does not use any ERP solution currently. They use an accounting software supported by spread sheets to run their business – that too quite well!
Of the several questions answers, I am bringing out three key questions posed to me and my counter questions to that, answers to which led to a debate, saw great participation from stakeholders and in parallel, answered the questions beautifully. Here goes:
Q1. “Why to move to SAP B1 at all, when everything is hunky dory?”
Well, everything is in great shape today as you have the required software which was acquired at a relatively small price, you have the people who are comfortable using them and business is growing. But, what happens when your business grows five times? Will you be able to manage the business with the same ease as of today without being concerned about controls? Will you get five times the employees to run your operations? Will you take the risk of malpractices that may be happening without your knowledge? Will you have an MIS that gives you meaningful information on time, every time? Will you keep making decisions more on ‘gut feeling’ than on actual data? Answers to these questions led the group to re-look at their own position about migration to world class solution like SAP B1.
Q2. “What does SAP offer additional to what our current systems do?”
What percentage of the work done by your employees is essentially manual and repetitive in nature? How long does it take to generate reports? What percentage of the reports are truly accurate? Do you trust the information which you receive in today’s reports a one hundred percent? What are the chances of manual errors today? What are the chances of database getting corrupt? Do you have a robust maker-checker system today? Does your system prevent mistakes from happening? Does your system offer financial controls, business alerts, and early warnings? Does it work in a multi-location environment? Can it be scaled up to handle five times today’s business without compromising on various factors mentioned earlier?
Q3. “How does SAP help in decision making, if the primary usage of the system is to capture operational transactions?”
Do you have access to previous year’s data in a structured manner today? Do you get analytical reports giving you comparisons, trends, MoM/QoQ/YoY performance of your company? Do you get access to business dashboard which illustrated the KPI of your business crisply and brings up exceptions that can help you make quick decisions and thus help reduce your response time to changing market conditions? Can you do a what-if analysis?
Summary
Answers to all the questions are in the positive if the company adopts SAP Business One, a comprehensive, tightly integrated, robust-yet-flexible, scalable, easy to adopt and easy on pocket ERP solution from SAP, especially developed for the SME sector. Makes you think, right?
