SAP Who? Inside One of SAP's Smallest ERP Customer Success Stories
Artisan Hardwood Floors, a 37-employee company in Central Texas, doesn't look like a typical SAP buyer. But its decision to purchase SAP, and its experience so far, illustrates the promise and peril for SAP and rivals Oracle and Microsoft as they go after the small business ERP market in a big way.
In April 2008, SAP announced a new referral and incentive program for its partners and nonpartners to drive SMB customers' business SAP's way. The move, paying for new software business, was a first for SAP, and it shows just how much thirst enterprise software vendors have for new customers in the SMB business applications market. (See "SAP Pays Partners, Goes with Gusto for Small and Medium-Sized Business Customers" for an in-depth look at SAP's strategy.)
TBC International Consulting of Salado, Texas, was the SAP channel partner that eventually sold Bailey on the software and did the implementation. (Bailey was not the warmest of potential customers at first: "This SAP guy came in and he said, 'Hey, I want to sell you this product.' I ran him out of here a couple of times before he got through the door.")
The implementation team was just three people: two from TBC and a consultant hired by Bailey.
Unlike inside big companies, where sometimes no one wants to take full responsibility for an ERP rollout, Bailey became immersed in the software purchasing and rollout process. "I became a research junkie, and I learned about pieces of software in our price range and picked the best one," he says. "I'm a bit of an overachiever. So by the time those SAP consultants left, I probably could have been one." (To read about the workforce implications of SAP's SMB strategy, see "SAP's Push Into the SMB Market Is Creating a Skills Gap for IT Departments.")
Just after SAP's April announcement about its channel strategy, Patricia Hume, SAP's senior vice president for channel sales and strategic alliances in the SMB sector, told CIO: "Right or wrong, SAP has been for 35 years the leading industry supplier of ERP to large enterprises." And now, she added, SAP's goal is to "bust the myth that SAP is only for great, big companies."
Can SAP Beat Microsoft's Ease of Use?
One of the key selling points for Bailey was BusinessOne's ease of use—an area where some of SAP's product sets have earned reputations for exactly the opposite in terms of usability, especially within large, complex implementations that required business process change. "It's one of the easiest products I've see to operate, both all the way from operations up to the accounting department," Bailey says.
