SAP Business Suite Reviews

Complete suite and it works. Good thing about SAP is the product is mature and has the talent to support it. No other vendors, like Oracle, Sage, or Microsoft, have the maturity of the solution or they require too much customization.

Strong financials for project/logistics integration and most of the functionalities, like interco posting and MM-SD consolidation, work out-of-the-box. 

Most of the integrations work out-of-the-box. The only thing that you need to spend on ABAP is reports. There is hardly any customization required for SAP, if you implement it correctly. 

FICO, especially newGL. It solves a lot of manual consolidation issues. Other than that, interco posting and cost management are a lot better compared to Oracle or Sage. 

The UI: To train one user on SAP ECC takes at least two weeks. Though once familiarized, people can remember shortcuts and t-code for the change management is still high. Thanks to the vast majority of large organizations using SAP, the user adaption is a lot less if users come from SAP/GUI environments. 

SAP Business Suite is an Enterprise Management tool enabling end to end management of most if not all areas of the business. The type of business will determine the type of implementation and the modules utilized. SAP is configured to meet your business requirements but provides standard practices and processes that in most instances should be able to be utilized. As a fully integrated solution the financial impact of transactions are visible at the time of creation/entry. This is the best and the worst thing about the product as if at any part of an end-to-end process the user tries to take short cuts or work around there is a flow on effect right to the very end. To fix the issue is always a case of reversing to the point that caused the problem and then continuing correctly from that point. This is often seen as additional work but reality is it keeps to strict process.

SAP is working on the interface which has been an issue for many years and reporting is always something that is lacking, however as the product is made to be implemented by all different types of organisations it really does come down to each company creating its own reports to meet its needs.

No.

SAP Business Suite is really only for Medium to Large organisations as Tier One ERP solution.

Very good.

Most companies that implement SAP do so having come from multiple non-integrated solutions that provide the individual capabilities of its modules.

Implementation is complex and requires experts in SAP and experts in business to work closely to ensure that the appropriate systems and business changes are made.

Understand it as much as you can, it changes regularly and is an expensive product.

Always – looking at products such as Oracle, Technology One and determining whether you require best of breed and integrate them together instead.

Look to People and Process, don’t change the system, use much standard as possible and only modify if there is a competitive advantage to it as it will cost in the long run. Do your research, understand what you are getting into and hire expertise and train internally, there is an enormous change management impact to the organisation

Valuable for us is the flexibility of the SD module which allows us to address the complexity of this area.

The solution has enabled us to:

• ascertain costs and profitability online
• improve process control
• improve stocks control
• improve our planning and decision making process
• take advantage of critical information online that allows us to quickly take actions, and so on.

We implemented almost all the modules. Modules that don't work so well due to lack of flexibility include:

• Cash Management
• Maintenance
• APO.

With the Controlling and Profitability Analysis, we would like to have daily actual margins and we also intend to integrate budgeting process and planning.

We have been using the solution since 2002.

We didn't encounter any issues with stability.

I would rate the technical support at 8/10, as it is good but expensive.

The solutions we had didn't address our business needs in several ways. For ERP we had Baan, for budgeting we had Oracle. For maintenance we had another solution and several more to address some departmental issues.

The setup was very straightforward. A big bang strategy. Five companies at the same time.

At that time, price and license seemed reasonable to us when we compared with other solutions.

I had been looking for a solution for almost two years. I don't know exactly how many potential solutions I saw. But it was not difficult to exclude them because we knew exactly what we wanted to address.

It depends what you are looking for. The questions should be:

• Why do we want an ERP solution?
• What are the issues we want to address?

Costs vs benefits should be taken into consideration.