What costs affect the price of implementing SAP Business One

Feb. 25, 2013 - PRLog -- How much does SAP Business One cost (http://www.bluekey.co.za/sap-business-one/) to implement? This is a question that we at Bluekey Software Solutions need to answer on a regular basis. Choosing a reputable and experienced SAP Business One partner (http://www.sapone.co.za/sap-business-one-partner-south-africa/) will ensure that you get a complete solutions configured to your business processes and can significantly reduce your implementation costs. You can assess the complexity, and the implementation costs, for your business by considering:

SAP Business One Software licenses
SAP Business One offers businesses and users a choice of Professional, Limited CRM, Limited Financial, Limited Logistics, and SAP Business One Starter Package users. SAP Business One pricing will depend on the number of users and the type of licenses that your business requires and also if your solution is on-premise or on-demand.

SAP Business One Implementation
SAP Business One costing for implementation will depend on a number of factors including – number of SAP Business One users, business location, number of branches or subsidiary companies to be implemented, reporting needs and requirements , data cleaning and conversion, development / integration requirements and current skill level of system users.

SAP Business One Support and Maintenance
As part of our vision for long-term partnerships with our customer we offer a range of SAP Business one support (http://www.bluekey.co.za/support/) options to ensure that you get the support you need when you need it. Our objective is always to ensure you receive the best possible SAP Business One Support, value and up-time from your investment in SAP Business One and Bluekey.   As part of the SAP Business One support package, Bluekey provides all SAP Business One customers with an annual maintenance plan which is priced based on a percentage of the upfront software pricing – charged on an annual basis – which entitles customers to software upgrades and patch releases, access to the SAP portal, and help-desk facilities for bug resolution.

Hardware requirements for SAP Business One
SAP Business One requires a server, operating system and database. When purchasing SAP Business One you should ensure that your server and client machines meet the minimum required specifications. A bit like implementation pricing the question with regards to minimum hardware requirements for SAP Business One cannot be answered without first asking several questions. Questions such as – number of users, is remote access required, potential growth plans, are complimentary or integrated solutions being used and what volumes of data will be processed. SAP Business One is a highly scalable and configurable solution – making sure that you have the right hardware solutions in place is a relatively straight forward task that the team at Leverage can assist you with.

How many branches/locations will be implementing SAP Business One
Is the implementation for a single branch or head office or are there multiple branches or companies that need SAP Business One implementations? If you have multiple branches or companies, will you require inter-company/branch and data consolidation? SAP Business One offers some great tools to enable quick implementation of additional companies from a master company but you will need to ask yourself – are all your branches or companies configured and set up the same way?

Geographic location of SAP Business One implementations
Is the SAP Business One implementation going to cover multiple cities or expand into neighbouring countries? If so, there are likely to be different set-ups and configuration requirements based on the different legal and fiscal requirements for each country. Another potential complexity with multiple country support is different language sets. SAP Business One offers support in multiple languages covering multiple legal and fiscal requirements – great for companies that are looking to expand geographically.

Data conversion
Unless your business is a start-up it is highly likely that you will want to convert data from your legacy system. Data conversions are categorised into two broad categories – master data and historical data. SAP Business One provides a Data Transfer Workbench (DTW) which assists with the upload of master data, and enforces data integrity and business rules. There is still some work to be done – export data from your legacy system, check and clean data, import into SAP Business One and reconcile / check data again. From a pricing / implementation point of view, you should consider whether you will be able to extract, clean and validate the data sets internally or whether the consultant will be required to assist with this process.

SAP Business One reporting requirements
SAP Business One offers many standard reports and Dashboards. Even so it is highly likely that you will want some reports changed or custom written. The number and complexity of reports to be written to your specific requirements will have an impact on the days (and therefore price) to implement SAP Business One. You should however seriously consider keeping custom reports to a minimum if you want to reduce implementation time.

SAP Business One user training
How many people need to be trained as SAP Business One users? Will training be on-site or off-site and will site-specific user notes be required? Many companies adopt a “train the trainer” approach where the SAP Business One Partner is responsible for training super users of the customer. These super users then pass down their knowledge and train other users in the team. This approach helps reduce implementation pricing for remote and distributed sites by reducing the amount of training days required.

Business Processes
This is something that sounds obvious but is sometimes overlooked. If your business processes are industry specific and your requirements extend beyond the standard functionality or configurability offered by SAP Business One then extra consultancy, customisation or development will be required. There are also industry-specific solution extensions that reduce the implementation price by eliminating the need to customer development.

SAP Business One User skill set
The skill level of users (including accounting, business knowledge and general computer skills) are all factors in determining how long it will take to implement SAP Business One in your business and how long it will take for your SAP Business One users to efficiently adopt the solution.

SAP Business One Project and Change Management
Sound project management, change management and a proven project management methodology is the basis of all successful ERP implementations. The amount of project management required will vary dependent on the topics discussed above and also what change management/project management resources are available within your business to facilitate the transition.