In part two of my blog series I will answer the remaining questions that Microsoft suggest you should ask SAP if you are looking at SAP Business One.

Question 3 – How many users can Business One reasonably scale to? How many references can you provide of existing SAP Business One users of my size?

SAP Business One was built from the ground up to meet the needs of growing small businesses and we have customers with 2 users of the software right up to customers running SAP Business One with 100+ users across multiple companies as well as implementations of all different sizes in between with hundreds of reference customers of all sizes from Large Enterprises such as Checkpoint through to small companies such as .

Heres a video about the guys behind Dave’s Insanity Sauce and why they chose SAP Business One.

In fact you can find many customer case studies on the SAP web site here.

The important thing to think about when considering an ERP solution is what are the business processes I need to automate, what countries do I need to roll the solution out in to, how complex are my transactional requirements. Thanks to SAP Business One’s robust and extensible architecture, the solution can address many different companies needs and can be extended with industry specific solutions – similar to Microsoft Dynamics ERP solutions – in fact most small and midsize business solutions take the same approach.

SAP Business One runs on Microsoft SQL Server and so when you are sizing your hardware for an SAP Business One solution, you should size according to Microsoft’s recommendations for SQL Server – the same as you would for Dynamics GP, AX or NAV.

The one thing that separates SAP Business One and the Dynamics ERP family is the SAP Business One offers a single set of code that addresses the needs of customers with 40 country localisation’s that have been deployed in more than 80+ countries by thousands of customers – with Dynamics ERP solutions you’ll need to consider different solutions for different countries – for example Dynamics GP is not available in many countries so you may need to look at different solutions in different countries.

Question 4 – What are my choices if I outgrow Business One? Can you provide details on the cost and steps to migrate to SAP Business All-in-One or Business ByDesign?

As industry analysts, Gartner have pointed out, one of the advantages of choosing an SAP solution is that we have a product portfolio that stretches from small enterprises (with SAP Business One) right up to the largest Fortune 500 companies (with SAP Business Suite) and of course you can choose on premise solutions  like SAP Business One, All-In-One and SAP Business Suite or on demand solutions as well such as SAP Business By Design – and of course you can have a hybrid solution that combines the best of both deployment approaches – all backed up with Business Intelligence solutions from the SAP Business Object portfolio – again from small to large enterprises.

So if you want to know the costs of deploying any one of those solutions, all you need to do is ask your SAP partner – they can give you the information you need – but bear in mind, the solution you choose today will depend on your business today and as you expect it to grow over a 5 to 7 year period…often times its difficult for you to predict what your business will look like in 7 years and what your business processes will look like – and  that will determine things like cost of deployment and so forth. But rest assured that from an SAP perspective we want to ensure that once you choose an SAP solution, you’ll want to be an SAP customer for life, so we’ll be doing our best to help you migrate from solution to solution with pre-built data migration options and so on.

Question 5 – How much of the functionality being demonstrated is native, “out-of-the-box” functionality versus functionality developed by a partner or through a third-party developer? How will this add-on functionality affect upgrades?

This is a great question, and is one that you should ask any ERP solution provider. As I mentioned in my earlier answer to question 3 – all ERP solution providers work together with partners who deploy the software, write customer specific implementation code and build complementary solutions to take those ERP applications in to specific vertical markets. Whether its SAP Business One, Dynamics GP, NAV or AX you can be sure that partners provide key components of all the solutions – in fact much of the specific industry functionality in the Dynamics ERP applications has been written by Microsoft partners and then in many cases acquired by Microsoft and now sold as part of the product.

What we do at SAP is ensure that our Software Solution Partners have a robust tool set to build on – we call it the SAP Business One SDK (Software Developers Kit) which allows developers to seamessly move from one release to the next with minimal code changes, if any. In addition, SAP also offers a rigourous Certification program for those solutions, so you can chose and SAP Business One partner solution with confidence knowing it has been certified by our SAP Labs teams in accordance with a strict process that ensures compatibility, consistent design and support.

So hopefully this has answered your questions, of course, if you have further questions I would be more than happy to answer them.

Leave a comment on my blog or email me at richard.duffy@sap.com and I’ll be happy to help.

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