The company I currently work for has over 1,000 SAP Business One customers, so I am pretty sure it covers a large breadth of use cases.
The most valuable features of the solution revolve around the fact that it is easy to deploy and scalable and is not resource-intensive. It is effective for small and medium-sized companies, predominantly in warehousing, distribution, trading, manufacturing, and discrete manufacturing. We have a bespoke product in the area of regulated beverages, including wineries, breweries, and distillers and it is all more of a SAP Business One add-ons.
Improvements are required in the support for partner-delivery add-ons, functional graphs, user development, and BI since certain shortcomings exist in these areas.
I have experience with SAP Business One.
It is a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a five out of ten. There are other solutions that are far more scalable than SAP Business One. SAP Business One is pretty much limited now because SAP is not really investing in the further expansion of the solution because it has other successful solutions right now.
My company deals with small and medium companies that operate in as low as 10,000,000 in revenue to multi-country or fairly large multi-million dollar organizations ranging from three-quarters of a million dollars to half a million dollars in revenue.
With SAP Business One, support is mostly delivered by partners. SAP doesn't deliver direct support. Established partners, and many of the partners out there with 20 or 30 years of experience with SAP Business One, have some established practices in place. The issues that usually pop up in the tool aren't really easy. Everybody knows what to expect and what kind of issues can arise, and SAP has mechanisms to help the customers. I rate the technical support a seven to eight out of ten.
The product's initial setup phase is very straightforward. It has been done so many times that there are no areas to explore left in the process. Most implementers know what to do and what to expect from the tool.
Usually, one person is enough to take care of the deployment of the product. Maximum of two people can easily take care of the product's deployment phase, where one can look into the functional aspects like scopes, blueprinting, development deployment. If customizations or add-ons are required, then a technical resource would be slightly involved in the deployment process.
In terms of the price, I wouldn't know exact numbers, but I feel the prices are at par with most ERPs. When I say ERP, I am not including accounting software. When I talk about complete ERP solutions and packages, the prices are at par with what SAP Business One offers.
SAP S4/HANA is a much more comprehensive and complete ERP system, especially in terms of the functional breadth and depth compared to SAP Business One, while also being more scalable.
If I speak about a feature in the tool that helps with financial management, I would say that of all the products I have ever worked on, used, or implemented, the finance part is pretty much the same in all ERPs and bookkeeping software tools. Finance is a regulated thing. It has to generate financial statements related to all the accounts. All financial management systems will look into the ledger, accounts payable, and accounts receivable.
Generally the tool has two models. If the tool's in-house model is opted, then just one person is needed to maintain the product as an ERP administrator. If it is through a partner, then we usually have managed services, so you get access to a whole bunch of resources, technical, functional, finance, manufacturing, supply chain, or resources that you can have as part of the managed services contract.
My company does not use much of AI with SAP Business One since it is pretty much manual now. It's still pretty much manual for business process enhancements and it still requires more of a consultative approach with more of a human touch. With SAP S4/HANA, there is a process navigator, process data mining tool that does help users since with the use of AI it provides answers to their questions.
Recommendations are subjective to the requirements of the users. I would not recommend SAP Business One to a financial services institution or a bank. I would most definitely recommend it to a small family-owned business with about 20,000,000 of revenue, and that too in the area of discrete manufacturing.
I rate the tool a seven out of ten.