If you are small business with reasonably complex processes possible including manufacturing or maybe better say assembly on order, picking and packing, long sales cycle with personal relation establishing then you should place SAP B1 on your list of ERP candidates.
In general it is recommended to compile requirements document with checklists. Also try to think about the reputation of the software vendor as well as proposed consulting firm. Consider requesting executive and technical presentations. Now let’s take a look at Business One and its competitors:
1. Expansion pace. We would like to compare it to the situation with Great Plains Software Dynamics back in late 1990th. Dynamics was backed by perfectly thought through architecture concept realized in Dexterity and was open for ISV software development and integration. SB1 is even more flexible and open with the possibilities to add user defined fields and tables without programming. However active expansion here in the United States was launched around 2005 where the situation in US economy was not as shining as it was in Clinton era back in late 1990th. But if you look at the international picture then you will see that Dynamics GP which is successor of Great Plains was actually pulled out of the continental Europe ERP market as well as from Russia and Brazil. Business One on the contrary did rapid advances in these regions as well as in China. So we believe that if economy situation in the North America improves in 2012 and later down the road then SAP BO should be seen as one of the champions
2. Competition and web based products plus Cloud. First of all we would like to mention Microsoft Dynamics GP which has huge number of active installations here in the USA. It seems to be slightly more expensive but it is reasonably easy to find reliable consultant to support GP. Dynamics GP has at this time larger number of add-ons and cover more horizontals and verticals. Now let’s take a look at web accounting trend and Cloud. These ideas are great and allow you to save money on internal IT department and probably on such regular chores as software version upgrade. However there are some questions that we recommend to review. First one is this. What happens if in the future you decide not to renew subscription or maintenance plan? Does it automatically mean that you will lose access to the application hosted on the Cloud server? At this time this question is probably open ended but it is difficult to predict future marketing tactic from the side of popular small business ERP development companies. Second question to think about is the following. If your accounting software is hosted somewhere else then do you think that this hosting provider will allow you customization, integration or data repair? Probably not as they would like everything that you do to be guaranteed not to cause any harm to their servers where your application is part of the community. If you are favoring web interface option we recommend you to take a look at NetSuite
3. SAP Business One functionality at a glance. It has strong Sales Order Processing, Inventory Control with Discrete Production, Purchase Order Processing with simple Requisition and Human Resources. Plus it is also a gold coin if you are doing field service and warranty contracts
4. International Business. It is localized in major world regions and available in Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian and European languages just to open the list. If you are opening facility internationally then B1 would be a good option to consider for their accounting package. Or vice versa if you are opening subsidiary in the United States being European company then Business One is an option
5. Popular IT questions. They are often about database platform and this is Microsoft SQL Server. Recommended managerial reporting tool is Crystal Reports as SAP owns Business Objects at this time. Customizations or integrations might be programmed in Microsoft Visual Studio and code samples could be found in Software Development Kit
6. ERP brands. If you would like to think about software vendor reliability then we would like to share opinion that major ERP brands in the United States are Oracle, SAP, Sage and Microsoft Dynamics
7. ERP Software Life Cycle. There are theories recommending you to pick the product which is at the beginning of its maturity phase and do not risk to take something that is too new and risky to fail or something too old that might be subject to phasing out. We are writing this page in January of 2012 and the timing is perfect for SAP Business One
8. Please call us 1-866-304-3265, 1-269-605-4904, help@efaru.com. We have local presence in Chicagoland, Southern California, Atlanta, South West Michigan, Houston and Dallas areas of Texas. We serve customers USA and Canada nationwide and internationally via web sessions and phone conferences (Skype is welcomed)
Dexterity Customization for Dynamics GP Evaluation Level Paper
When you are developer it is always a good idea to read technical manuals. But if you was just assigned to the IT team to decide if Dexterity is the right tool to customize your ERP application then first you need something which is in style of ‘easy reading papers’ or FAQ
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If you are reading this page then chances are high that you were not able to find ISV add-on and need customization project. Let’s talk about planning, quality assurance and future event such as version updates.
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