Affordability of SAP Business One to be proved at Futurex

The affordability of SAP Business One, the comprehensive enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution for small businesses introduced in October 2004 by global business solutions giant SAP AG, will be proved at SAP Africa's stand at Futurex 2006.

"Many small businesses don't understand the contribution to their bottom line that a comprehensive, integrated business solution like SAP Business One makes," says SAP Africa's Business One manager, Paul Vermaak. "They see it as a cost rather than a tool that provides them with the kind of information they need to make revenue-generating decisions.

"We realised that in the first few months of bringing SAP Business One to market. We lost no deals to competitors. But we did lose deals to customers who decided, after investigating various software options, not to buy any software at all."

In spite of that kind of reticence in the market, SAP Africa's new SME channel has brought in an average of 10 new SAP Business One customers a month in the past 18 months.

"There's a very real need for the kind of efficiency and productivity improvements SAP Business One offers and as soon as small businesses realise the quite extraordinary value - in financial and customer retention terms - that it offers they sign up very quickly," Vermaak says.

"And that's why we've introduced an internal training programme and tools for our SAP Business One channel partners that equip them to demonstrate the value of the solution to potential customers.

"That value is most easily proven in terms of the speed of return on investment - which for a small business needs to be one year. Certainly, it shouldn't take longer than two years. If we can't demonstrate that sort of return for any individual customer, then we walk away from the deal - because the customer clearly doesn't need SAP Business One."

The portal-based value selling training given by SAP Africa to its SAP Business One channel partners is aligned with the broader SAP BusinessEdge programme - by means of which a potential customer is provided by independent consultants with a 'business development charter' that articulates the customer's business strategy. The strategy then defines the type of technology support the customer needs.

"Like our value tests, the business charter is an objective tool and may indicate that there is no need for something as comprehensive and integrated as SAP Business One," Vermaak says. "The value tests are more simplistic and take less time than developing a full business strategy - but they're based on the same principle: we won't try and sell our solution where it's not needed.

"It's an approach that also benefits our business partners, because they don't waste time pursuing a customer who can't or shouldn't buy. And it protects our brand, because the product goes only into business environments where it can really deliver superb results - and create only happy customers."

Vermaak says it is usually quite easy to show a customer how SAP Business One can benefit his or her company. "For instance, we had a company a few months ago that was incurring up to R20 000 a day in penalties for each day of late delivery of its product. A quick calculation based on their actual losses to penalties versus the purchase and implementation cost of a solution that would save them those losses through alerts and escalation functionality made it very clear that they needed the software!

"And that's the kind of thing we'll be doing on our stand at Futurex - showing visitors that SAP Business One is not only immensely affordable but that it can actually cost the business more to not buy it than to buy it."