What lasts long finally becomes good

The big surprise came when the software was virtually withdrawn by SAP due to technical problems. Only in the past one or two years has there been a positive development again.

Some courageous companies have taken the plunge into the SAP Cloud. One customer even told me after a successful ByDesign implementation: "It's going better than expected". Until the next setback came:

Lars Dalgaard, the new Chief Cloud Computing Officer at SAP, launched one of his first major announcements at SAP in such a way that the community had to fear the imminent demise of the software in which SAP had invested what felt like a decade of development. No wonder, then, that potential Business ByDesign customers from the SME sector were very unsettled for a long time.

Let us now look back a few years and consider the birth pangs of SAP R/3, the software that helped SAP to grow immensely within a very short space of time and position itself as the global market leader for business application software.

I've heard rumors that R/3 customers sometimes had to wait several months because SAP sales couldn't keep up. Yes exactly, this software also had quite a few problems at the beginning. There were complaints about performance, lack of functionality and certainly quite a few escalations during the first implementation projects.

That would mean, just give SAP a little time! SAP AG wasn't always the fastest company, but what finally came onto the market as a product (let's say from version 3.0) was really excellent. Holistic, functionally comprehensive, stable and well thought out.

I myself was active in the SAP SRM environment for ten years. It's certainly not bad software. And especially very mature in the current release 7.0. I came across Business ByDesign at the end of 2011 by chance - following my entrepreneurial vision that the standardization of SAP enhancement solutions offers great benefits for customers and partners.

I particularly liked the distribution model of the extension solutions via the SAP Store. When we then developed the first solutions as part of an internal innovation project, I was forced to take a closer look at Business ByDesign.

And I was thrilled - from a consultant's point of view. Whereas with SRM, as a consultant, I had to carry out many manual, often technical customizing steps during an implementation, which programmers could have anticipated and preset, none of this was necessary with Business ByDesign.

What can be preset is preset by SAP with standard values. There is no need for technical configuration; the setup is largely based on business question catalogs. Very effective. In addition, all business functionalities are integrated in a central system.

As a traditional SAP consultant, I was always annoyed by the fact that we had to spend a huge amount of time going through the customer developments and modifications for every upgrade.

Sure, as a consultant you earn money from it, but it gives you a better feeling to use the time paid for by the customer for activities that make as much sense as possible. Business ByDesign can also be expanded through programming (as mentioned above). But the great thing about it is that it is not modified as a result.

So if new functionalities are provided in ByDesign through upgrades, no manual reworking is usually required in the solutions. Another advantage for the customer, who - in the case of a classic ERP - may not have planned for these costs of future upgrades during the initial implementation and then has to be annoyed later.

Well, as far as the current Silverlight-based user interface is concerned, that's debatable. But SAP has announced that it will soon be switching ByDesign to HTML 5. And in terms of usability and user interface, ByDesign is in no way inferior to other competing cloud products such as Salesforce.com.

On the contrary, ByDesign seems tidier to me. The performance might not yet be perfect for some people. Okay, depending on the transaction, you may have to wait a few seconds.

But this has also improved a lot (even in recent months). Hana is supported in the current release, which will certainly also lead to speed increases.

SAP Business ByDesign offers smaller companies a huge opportunity - with this software they can work at the professional level of large companies. Let's take the example of a "management consultancy with fewer than 20 employees" (I speak from experience).

Without ByDesign, sales activities are recorded in some CRM system. The quotation is created in MS Word. The consultants record their times in MS Excel. Based on this, the invoices are sent in Excel or Word, and the check as to whether the customers have paid is done manually in pencil when the bank statement arrives.

Accounting may run in a separate system. There may be isolated solutions for individual sub-processes that are somehow integrated with each other at great expense. If such a company uses ByDesign, all of this information and processes run right there.

Manual interfaces and checks are no longer necessary. If each consultant can invoice just one or two hours more per month as a result of the time saved, it is already worth it.

I believe that cloud computing will be "the next big thing" for SMEs. And with Business ByDesign, SAP is - as far as I know - the only serious provider in this field that offers a holistic suite. Let's wait and see, we'll know more soon.