Innovative ERP Strategies - A Forum for Superior Solutions

Not so small business!

You can hardly pick up anything pertaining to Business Applications or ERP without hearing the term SMB, Small and Medium Business.  Every vendor has an SMB team, and the prevailing thinking is that the "mid-market" (aka SMB) represents huge opportunity.

I couldn't agree more.   But let's not equate small with simple!   Let's not equate small with unsophisticated.  And let's not equate small with small-time. 

What we're finding is that there is a new class of SMB's out there - companies that are 20, 30, 50, 70  or 100 million in sales that have needs that are almost as complex as far larger companies.  In many cases, they've been successful growing because of an intense focus on customer satisfaction, or in focusing on a niche.  And they have some very customized processes and approaches. 

What they don't have are the resources, particularly IT management and strategic management and planning skills that it takes to re-engineer and streamline.  That's where we come in.

It creeps up on them.  Many of these companies don't even realize how complex they have become, or how many different systems, tools and applications they use on a daily basis to keep things running.

Part of the challenge in the SMB space is the challenge of education.   Software can be made simpler and easier to use.  But implementing it and re-engineering business processes still takes a large, focused effort, and many SMB's refuse to accept this fact of life.   

Small business is big business today!!! 

Pricing cents and nonsense

I don't know about you, but more and more I find clients completely turned off by ERP vendors pricing models. 

Some vendors are masters of confusion, turning every licensing decision into a major configuration exercise with differences such as concurrent vs. named users, professional vs. regular vs. lite users, vs. remote users and occasional users.  Not to mention module, sub-module and the ever popular "granule" pricing.  It's no wonder that customers view licensing as an opportunity for the software vendors to take advantage of them.

Some vendors have adopted the "one price for all" model, in which customers get the entire system for whatever number of users they need. Vendors such as Adonix and SAP Business One take this approach.  Microsoft, the 10,000 pound gorilla trying to become a major player in the enterprise applications space, still plows on with a variety of complex pricing schemes, particularly with Dynamics/NAV ( Navision) and its hundreds of sub-modules, called "granules". 

We believe that this approach is on the right track for the mid-market, since customers like to be able move ahead with additional areas of functionality as they have a window of opportunity.  If they have to purchase licenses to move ahead with using some additional capabilities, this becomes an obstacle to further use of the system. 

But that's our opinion.  What do you think?   Support pricing?  We'll tackle that one another time.