Are you thinking about an ERP business suite or about to embark on an implementation? Making the right choice in an era of such fast paced technological change is a real challenge. Not only have our expectations ramped up but the products and the market place are vastly different to 20 years ago.
Back then it was extremely innovative to implement an ERP but that could have taken a large dedicated team months if not years to achieve. Today we need fast implementation – weeks not months, a lowering TCO and a much smaller team. We’re not prepared to incur huge upfront costs or build large technology landscapes. We want flexible and scalable options with subscription-based models that keep costs to a minimum. And we want to give our staff a modern and increasingly mobile user experience.
The future is functional and standardised
Regardless of vendor, businesses usually want to stay close to standard ERP offerings without any custom build requirements, so you need a trusted product that offers a lot of standard functionality.
While most vendors offer all this, SAP is the leader. And with S/4HANA Cloud the functionality is a known entity and all your other baseline requirements are already on the tick list – cloud enabled, subscription based, modern user interface with SAP Fiori, and of course a digital infrastructure.
Is S/4HANA Cloud offers lot of flexibility
S/4HANA can do all of this and more. On top you get delivery options to suit your needs – for example choose public cloud for a multi-tenanted environment, or private cloud for single-tenanted. Public cloud gives you the highest level of standardisation at the lowest TCO, with a fixed functional scope. Whereas private cloud gives you full industry coverage and your own dedicated environment for more flexibility.
You can also blend on premise with cloud software. In the SAP cloud your systems will be regularly and automatically updated. But if you want to combine your ERP with your other systems or upgrade it on your own terms, you can use S/4HANA Cloud software with your on premise solution. Our strategic partnership with T-Systems enables us to do exactly that for our on premise customers.
Choose best of breed
S/4HANA Cloud is a strong proposition across many sectors, not least in four specific areas –Professional Services, Discrete Manufacturing, two-tier ERP and Administrative ERP. Take Professional Services, SAP’s product is the best you can get in this area. For financial closing you can see what’s happening in your business and already predict the situation by the time you’ve closed your books. This is new and you can’t get much better than this.
S/4HANA is a competitive product that has all the SAP heritage and wealth of experience to bring you the latest best practice and decades of lessons learnt, ensuring you get the very best in innovation.