Johannesburg, 05 Feb 2007
Enhancements made by global business solutions giant, SAP AG, to its suite of industry-specific SAP All-in-One solutions, will make them all the more affordable for the mid-size organisations for which they have been specifically developed.
So says SAP Africa small and medium enterprise (SME) and channel director, Derek Kudsee. "The new versions of SAP All-in-One solutions are based on mySAP ERP 2005, using SAP's roadmap for enterprise services-oriented architecture (SOA). So they're extremely flexible and scalable.
"They also incorporate, in the form of proven best practices, SAP's 33 years of experience across all industries. So they're quick and easy to implement and, therefore, deliver a faster - and much more significant - return on investment than any other business solutions available to the mid-market.
"We've been able to achieve all this by commoditising functionality and delivering it on a business process platform. So an organisation can, effectively, choose from a shopping list of functionality only those processes it needs and still be assured that it will be running a best practice operation."
The new versions of SAP All-in-One also provide a dramatically enhanced and more intuitive user experience, streamlined business scenarios, enhanced analytical reporting and integrated (and optimised) management of customer relationships.
"Everything we do at SAP is geared to making it progressively easier for organisations to operate - both from the users' point of view and in terms of gathering, storing, analysing and reporting on operational, administrative and financial information.
"We've been careful, therefore, with SAP All-in-One, not to simply cut down enterprise solutions. There's no benefit to a mid-size retailer, for instance, in using the best practices applicable to, say, Walmart, the world's largest retail chain.
"So we've gone to considerable lengths to develop SAP All-in-One solutions from the point of view of the mid-size company - taking into account its quantities of orders, volumes of receipting and invoicing, typical warehouse space, the number and types of suppliers in its ecosystem, and appropriate financial reporting requirements.
"In that way, we've been able to limit scope creep on implementations and, therefore, offer fixed price implementations with predictable outcomes. In addition, implementations can be extremely rapid."
The reduction in complexity and increase in flexibility created by the new versions of SAP All-in-One also make life easier for SAP All-in-One business partners, slashing the investment they need to make in ramping up on the technology and in adapting the solutions to individual customer requirements. As Kudsee says, "we've given business partners deployment tools that eliminate the need for them to reinvent themselves or the solution with each new customer - saving everyone money, time and effort, and taking the risk out of new implementations or upgrades.
"At the same time, both customers and partners now have the means to adopt new innovations over time in an evolutionary way that minimises costs and alleviates disruption to ongoing operations."
SAP All-in-One solutions' enterprise SOA platform also enables scalability and integration with third-party applications and existing systems environments.
And, with comprehensive functionality and the ability to rapidly configure new processes, the solutions help businesses adapt to meet fast-changing customer demand, as well as regulatory, financial and environmental, health and safety requirements.
"In other words," Kudsee says, "what we've done is provided customers with the functionality they really need coupled to a user interface that makes things really easy - all supported by superbly trained and equipped business partners with years of experience in the SME space, and backed by a global commitment by SAP to ensuring that mid-size companies have the solutions they need at more than affordable prices and total cost of ownership."
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