SAP
SAP (sap.com) is headquartered in Walldorf, Germany, and was founded in 1972. The company had $32.2 billion in revenue in FY2020, and in July 2021 it had 440,000 customers, regional offices in 140 countries, 103,876 employees and 21,000 partners around the world. The company says that more than three-quarters of the world’s transaction revenue touches an SAP system, and that approximately 80% of SAP customers are small and medium-sized enterprises. Its S/4 HANA product is best suited for larger companies or fast-growing middle-market companies.
SAP S/4HANA is an ERP system with built-in intelligent technologies, including AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics. It is designed to help companies adopt new business models, manage business change, manage internal and external resources, and use the predictive power of AI. Users benefit from tight, native integration between processes, industry depth and a consistent in-memory data model.
SAP ByDesign is a cloud solution that delivers pre-built processes for capabilities across the enterprise, including finance, sales, product management and purchasing, on a single, unified solution.
SAP Business One is a single for small businesses that offers key capabilities, including accounting and financials, purchasing, inventory, sales, customer relationships, and reporting and analytics.
Know more about SAP and S/4 HANA.
Product Capabilities
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Financial Management
CRM and Customer Experience
Network and Spend Management
Supply Chain Management
Human Capital Management
Business Technology Platform
Target Industries
Aerospace and Defense
Automotive
Building Products
Chemicals
Consumer Products
High Technology
Industrial Machinery
Life Sciences
Mill Products
Wholesale Distribution
Strategy
Long known for its ERP software, SAP has evolved to become a leader in end-to-end enterprise application software, database, analytics, intelligent technologies and experience management. It is a top cloud software company with 200 million users worldwide. SAP targets businesses of all sizes and in all industries. And its open partner strategy gives customers the choice of whom they work with to design the business models of the future.
Ultra Insight
From Industrial Equipment Manufacturing ERP Vendor Update (2021) DOWNLOAD
SAP is the market share leader in the ERP space. One of the advantages of SAP is its strong technical architecture. The database structure is truly integrated across all the applications, providing solid data integrity for business analytics. Its products can be deployed on public or private cloud, or on-premises.
S/4HANA is a full-featured ERP system with a strong financial application. The manufacturing functionality features a refreshed user interface and rich functionality.
There are many third-party solutions that integrate with SAP's system. The company is advancing S/4HANA by incorporating artificial intelligence to support predictive supply network planning and simulation. It also is leveraging IoT to support remote monitoring of shop floor machinery and to minimize production outages.
For companies needing automation and predictability of your shop floor production, S/4HANA is a product to consider. It is likely that you will need an integration or implementation partner. Fortunately, SAP has thousands of partners in the United States and around the world, and maintains training standards and certifications to ensure implementation quality.
From Distribution ERP Vendor Report (2021) DOWNLOAD
SAP S/4HANA is SAP’s flagship product. It is built on a common database platform for all supported functionality in SAP’s proprietary cloud environment. It has broad functionality that covers most industries and types of companies. However, it is geared for companies that are in the upper-mid-market or larger. It is also a product that is global in scope, with customers on all continents. For companies requiring less depth and breadth, SAP offers other solutions, like Business One.
Within the distribution marketplace, SAP’s largest market share is in healthcare/pharmaceuticals, where it supports the majority of the large distribution companies. They also have a strong presence in food service distribution, Industrial product distribution and technology distribution. With its depth of functionality in complementary industries, SAP S/4HANA is a good option for companies that are moving into another complementary space, such as manufacturing, through either acquisition or expansion of capability.
SAP S/4HANA prides itself in building best practices into their software. Currently SAP has built more than 250 best practices as part of their software flow and functionality. Looking into the future, it will add more functionality to support IOT and robotics. It also is incorporating machine learning, RPA and artificial intelligence to improve office automation and remove manual repetitive processes. SAP prides itself on being an end-to-end business process company that provides customers with one integrated solution.
SAP has been focusing on distribution starting in the late 1990s. Since 2004, it has employed a global team of experts working with distribution customers to make sure the software and best practices it incorporates into its technologies meets the needs of this market. One example of where they excel for distribution is the ability to monitor and provide complex rebates and chargeback functionality, reflecting the continued complexity of marketing programs.
SAP’s goal with their customers is to “Bend the Cost Curve.” This means demonstrating that the use of SAP will allow a customer with stagnant revenue cost per employee to break out of with significant growth through automation of manual processes and providing better employee throughput of orders.
From Distribution ERP Vendor Report (2021) DOWNLOAD
SAP Business One is the small- to mid-market solution from SAP. Business One has around 1,400 different companies running on its ERP globally including customers in Russia, China and Europe. However, 75% of the client base is located in North America. The ideal distributor size for SAP Business One is between $20 million and $250 million in revenue (with flexibility to go higher or lower), and 50 to 100 office workers and 15 to 75 warehouse workers.
SAP Business One has a few sub-verticals that they focus on within distribution, including durable goods, food and electrical, with most of their customers being B2B companies. SAP Business One comes with 43 localizations and is offered in 27 different languages, making them a strong player for global companies. SAP Business One was originally engineered to be a on-premises solution, but it is offered as a single- or multi-tenant cloud solution. This flexibility is a differentiator for SAP.
SAP has an extensive partner network with specific industry experience. SAP is investing in SAP Business One to bring new functionality to the solution, which it does using quarterly patch updates or upgrades that occur approximately every 18 months. Some new functionality in the latest release was around forecasting, mobile devices and improving APIs to allow for automation such as robots and conveyors. Last, SAP Business One has the ability to handle large transaction volumes without impacting performance.
SAP Business One provides its customers with a scalable solution to grow as they grow.
From Food & Beverage Manufacturing ERP Vendor Update (2020) DOWNLOAD
Everybody knows SAP – it’s been a leader, not just in Food & Beverage, but in all industries for decades. In terms of ERP market share, no software vendor owns more than SAP.
SAP offers a fully integrated platform on its proprietary HANA database, and its robust feature set allows it to service organizations ranging from pre-revenue startups to multi-billion-dollar global corporations.
The vast majority of its implementations are handled via system integrators, aided by a partner eco-system that is among the largest of any ERP provider. This all comes with a cost, and SAP implementations are notoriously expensive, and can be complex, especially in larger organizations.
We know SAP invests a large amount of revenue back into the product, and are excited to see new developments in S/4 HANA as it continues to migrate their install base customers to the cloud.
