ERP-Maintenance-Proposals - An Early Start Pays Dividends

Expenditure on maintenance continues to be seen by too many companies as a necessary evil. The annual fee, along with emergency aid, ensures that the use of ERP falls within the law, when the product is still in the bidders' maintenance mode. However there is one positive exception to this: SAP's “Enterprise Support” proposal expands the validity of maintenance agreements and in doing so covers the implementation phase. Furthermore, the system is permanently monitored to identify starting points for technological and business improvements.

Table 1: Comparison of support elements by life cycle phase

A comparison between the maintenance offers of the bidders (Infor, Microsoft, SAP and Oracle) shows, by looking at the scope of support, the first implementation and the subsequent upgrades, expansions and optimizations offered, a considerable difference: only SAP offers such support to the desired extent.

From this i2s identifies the following additional benefits for SAP's end customers:

• Enterprise Support's extremely wide-ranging understanding of support generates value for money in all phases of the software's installation: the standard price of maintenance is reduced through savings in the man-hours for the management operator. For the operator this has the benefit of getting the customer started sooner and with more coverage for a project of the same size. Thus the amortization phase starts earlier with SAP, during the planning of the installation, because the best practices for SAP's solution manager enable a more efficient implementation.
• During the implementation phase, Enterprise Support offers a very large – in some circumstances the largest – amortisation through, for example, supporting the installation of configuration management.
• By standardizing, indeed almost industrializing, support, dependency on specific co-workers and providers is reduced.
• An examination of the total costs over the long term and adequately taking into account internal expenditures shows the simple use of the requested percentages for the different support programs to be unhelpful, especially when this examination also includes absolute figures for statistically significant savings. Although opting for SAP's Enterprise Support might seem more expensive at first glance, projections of the total costs are generally positive.
• In Solution Manager changes to the system are fully documented. This gives the customer a transparent system and allows them the flexibility to, for instance, change their support provider.

Potential customers confronted with a choice of ERPs should take into account in their decisions the different scope of services offered, which generally have comparable costs (ca. 22% of license value). All four offers include, to approximately the same level, standard support coverage such as upgrades, an online community and legal actualization. SAP emerges as the leading offer through its inclusion of implementation, system and process optimization in the maintenance program itself, and in doing so meets not just the technological standard required, but also the customer service standard. In this way standards are established that lead to more efficient projects and lower costs.

You can download the whole whitepaper here: http://tinyurl.com/ERPMaintenanceWP