Enterprise Apps Buying Guide

For an enterprise to be competitive in its business, it has become imperative

to have business application software that can monitor the organization's

workflow, connect people with each other between disparate departments and can

present relevant information quickly during critical business decision making.

Thus applications like ERP, CRM, BI, etc. have become the heart of functioning

for today's enterprises. ERP, for enterprise wide information streamlining, and

CRM for streamlining the customer management business processes are a few

business applications that have helped enterprises to achieve success in the

competitive global marketplace. There are major product vendors like SAP,

Microsoft and Oracle to name a few in this enterprise application arena.

Since business applications like CRM or ERP touch almost every aspects of a

business, it's advisable to investigate all options to arrive at the best match

that's worthy to the investment you are doing for your enterprise. Also, now

there are other deployment modes available besides deploying applications within

the enterprise's premises, which include SaaS and Cloud based delivery modes.

Today's business environment is dynamic and forever changing, therefore

enterprise apps such as ERP and CRM must be flexible to adapt to the changing

business climate and capitalize on new opportunities. It is one that will have

long-lasting effects on enterprises' overall performance. Thus, while choosing

any enterprise class application for your business, consider the following

aspects while evaluating a business application for your enterprise.

Alternate Models: SaaS and Cloud



There are solution providers who provide business applications like CRM and

ERP over the Internet. This type of SaaS (Software as a Service) or on-demand

model offer savings for an organization as most of the hardware and solution

expenses will be borne by solution provider itself. Most businesses prefer

on-premise deployment of the business application software largely due to data

security concerns, and for customization needs and system control over the

applications. The SaaS based applications are more suitable for those whose

requirements can be met by standardized software. The benefits of opting for

SaaS based model are that you get fast-paced implementation and regular upgrades

and startup costs are low.

Downside is that, SaaS based solutions are not flexible enough for

customization. Microsoft and Salesforce are popular SaaS based CRM solution

providers, while SAP and Ramco Systems have initiated offering ERP solutions

over SaaS model.

Though Cloud based solutions are just an extension of SaaS based solutions.

The Cloud computing is based on more virtualized environment and there is no

resource constraint for an application. Therefore an application hosted on Cloud

platform will be able to harness the computing powers of the resource with no

constraints, i.e. if the requirement of application increases, the resource

allocated will also scale up dynamically, whereas in SaaS platform, the

resources allocated for an application are reserved and not dynamic. If you are

opting for a Cloud service you will have all the benefits as those of SaaS

services, while you can also have liberty to have scalability option for your

applications depending on the use of the resources or demand.

With increased rate of adoption of SaaS based or Cloud based services, there

are few considerations to be kept in mind while opting for a service. First you

have to decide what all information you can trust to be kept outside your

premise, and depending on that you can opt for applications that you can have

hosted on SaaS or Cloud environments.

Secondly, since these services are to be delivered over the Internet you have

to ensure necessary bandwidth allocation for it. Also, while signing the SLA, do

ensure that the provider for SaaS or Cloud service is ensuring more than 99.9%

uptime. Because even a meager 0.1% downtime can be expensive for your

organization's productivity.

Integrated suites



An enterprise comprises of several departments and for each department,

there are several business applications available. For instance, CRM is an

application for customer management and for HR and payroll, there are Human

Resource Management apps available. All these standalone applications referred

as 'silos', don't talk to each other. The implementation of an ERP system to

overhaul and automate business processes is a strategic investment for any

organization. While the idea behind an ERP application is that, it is a suite

that works together to achieve seamless business processes, therefore while

evaluating any business application for your business needs, it becomes

essential that the application supports SOA architecture.

There are standalone solutions for each business activity, but for seamless

business environment you cannot achieve much through them. It's good to have an

integrated ERP solution that can integrate all business processes of an

organization. It gives advantages like standardization, lowered maintenance

costs, and organized data integration. Coming to budgetary implications of

standalone apps vis-a-vis integrated ERP solution, with stand-alone apps an

organization has to purchase licenses for each of the application, train the

staff for every installed application and also maintain different teams for each

applications support and maintenance. While with an integrated ERP suite, an

organization gets a single suite that caters to all needs of the organization.

There is the single vendor who provides support as well as necessary

maintenance. While the employees have a single application interface they don't

have to learn different applications to access information of different

departments.

Relevance to your Industry



The ERP market is dominated by the likes of SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft among

others who provide a complete suite for most industry verticals. Manufacturing,

finance and operations and logistics were a few of the industry verticals that

were primarily using ERP solutions. But with the advent of ERP being implemented

in almost every industry sector, these major ERP vendors have also incorporated

packages to support the new industry verticals, which include real estate,

agriculture, apparels and footwear industry as well.

Since solutions developed for generic businesses can't satisfy the

specialized requirements of industry specific enterprises, it becomes imperative

to choose a solution that is designed or customized to meet requirements of a

specific industry. This becomes the second step while considering a business

application for your enterprise, because the industry specific business

applications are designed to comply with industry's best practices, compliances

and government regulations. For instance, even though an apparel company will

fall under manufacturing industry, its requirements from an ERP solution are

very different. SAP offers a specific solution called AFS (Apparel and Footwear

Solution), that is targeted to meet the requirements of the apparel industry.

So, when you are choosing a solution like ERP, then go to vendors who have

products catering towards your industry vertical.

Open Source solutions



Enterprise solutions market once dominated by proprietary solutions from

Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, IBM or Ramco Systems, sees a tremendous flux in open

source domain towards business applications like ERP or CRM. On sourceforge.com,

there are more than 400 ERP Open Source solution available for download, but if

you wish to opt for an Open Source ERP solution from them then it's a tough call

as there are very few success stories. Compiere and Open-Bravo are the most

popular Open Source ERP solutions. In the Open Source CRM side, there are

solution like SugarCRM, Vtiger CRM, etc. available. For an enterprise which is

planning to implement ERP solution, but can't find any solution that meets its

requirements, they can have their developers team work on Open Source solutions

to customize the solution as per their requirements.

The major hindrance that an organization can face in opting for an Open

Source solution package is that they will not be having any implementation

partners for the solution. Also support and maintenance are the major factors

that an enterprise considers before opting for a solution. With Open Source the

support isn't guaranteed. Another factor could be that of customization, the

enterprise will have to do that on their own.

Costs involved



While implementing business applications like ERP or CRM, enterprises dish

out huge amount of money to expect greater RoI. The major part of such an

investment is not the software cost, but the cost involved in planning and

implementation of the application. Consultancy consumes the major part of ERP

implementation cost. Besides, the implementation will involve additional costs

as well. Training of employees across the organization, converting the existence

data and integrating that into the ERP system are few examples where costs would

be incurred. IT infrastructure cost and annual maintenance costs also add to the

expenditure bill. An enterprise should consider all these cost consideration and

devise strategy accordingly for their budget so as to maximize returns from

their investments.

Business Intelligence



Business Intelligence (BI) in recent times has become a tool that has become

part of the ERP solution package. The BI tools helps an enterprise to take

better informed decisions by organizing, analyzing and reporting the information

generated as reports and summaries. But in an enterprise the information is not

confined to just an ERP or CRM application, rather there is mountains of

information in other datastores as well. Therefore, now organizations are

adopting third-party BI tools that could fetch data from all of enterprises data

repositories including those of ERP and CRM, and provide reporting and analytics

facility on them. To accomplish BI success, organizations should identify their

business pains and align their solutions to these issues.

Vendor selection



Choosing the right vendor or implementation partner is as important as

selecting the appropriate solution for your enterprise. Before finalizing a

vendor for the implementation, consider following aspects:



References: You can learn about vendor or even the implementation
partner's credibility to successful implementations through their past

customers, through press releases and also from the peers in your business

network. This way, by interacting with other customers you can come to know

about the challenges faced during the implementation and also the reasons for

failure. The peers from your business network group can recommend you what

software or vendor to choose from their own experiences.

Implementation support: The success of the implementation lies in the kind of

support and services that the vendor provides for the software solution. The

implementation phase requires implementation partner to have domain expertise of

the industry vertical where the solution is to be deployed. M&B Footwear faced

challenge of not being able to find any vendor who had experience of having

deployed SAP's AFS module for a footwear industry. If the implementation partner

don't know the industry, kind of available solutions, then implementation is

bound to fail. The only way to ensure success is to involve partners having

knowledge of both, domain and solution.