SAP BusinessObjects Lumira

SAP ERP provides accounting, business intelligence, CRM, ecommerce, human resources, inventory, maintenance, manufacturing, project management, and supply chain functionality for all business sizes. Modules can be purchased independently based on the needs on individual consumers and when new modules are added, they seamlessly integrate with the existing modules. Further, new customized modules can also be created by the organizations at their own and integrate them with standard modules. Another great advantage is the scalability and security of the ERP. The system is not effected by the any amount of data or any number of users. The security is also available at micro level and individual users can be given access to even a single form entry or just reports review rights. Another very big plus is SAP's All-in-One product features best practices and pre-configurations for a number of different industry verticals, with the intent of reducing risk and accelerating implementation.

The biggest downside of SAP is its cost. It more expansive than its biggest competitor Oracle. Further, SAP technical and functional resources are also expensive than that of Oracle. This also means that SAP’s implementations are also more expensive than any other ERP’s implementation. On average SAP customer spends 4% of its annual revenue on its total cost of ownership, while the average Oracle customer spends 1.7%. Another drawback of SAP is the limited customization options available. This makes the product more rigid and change management at staff level is required more. This can also cause the ERP to fail as change management is always more challenging when the software is more rigid and not flexible enough to adopt to specialized business processes.

SAP is an ERP system that handles almost every department of an organizations. SAP provides the industry specific solutions to its clients like, Insurance, Finance, Accounts, pharmaceutical and many more. SAP has some clear advantages over competitors like in-memory technology advantages for faster data processing, preconfigured industry wise best practice based roadmaps for implementation etc. Another good thing about SAP is that while the ERP industry mostly relies on acquisitions of products that they integrate in their ERP, SAP focuses on building their products from ground up creating more of a consistent and "single system" feel. Organizations looking for scalability through consistency and standardization may find SAP is more scalable. Last but not least, Since ERPs are now becoming the backbone of every business and SAP has separate software for Small and large sized organizations, it provides benefits to organizations to select the product that suits them, this has the potential to save cost and at the same time, get benefits of one of the best ERP systems in the world.