Imagine a smartphone without apps. You can do no more with this than with your old, heavy cell phone bones from the 1990s – make calls, send a message. Perhaps, if the manufacturer meant well, organize your appointments and play a game during the break. That’s it. It is very similar with business software. With the standard functionality, you can probably map most of the necessary processes in your company. But what defines your individuality falls by the wayside. You can only do what everyone can do.
With classic on-premise solutions, this inevitably means that the ERP is expanded to include customer-specific solutions. Developed for a customer and adapted to his or her special needs, many good ideas that emerged in this adaptation process could actually benefit more than one customer.
It is understandably not possible to cover all the requirements of medium-sized companies in all industries with just one standard cloud solution. The standard solution as a basis must therefore first reliably offer all common business processes with tried and tested best practices – and above all be adaptable to industry and customer-specific requirements.
The ideal cloud ERP: strong basis, flexible extensions
A cloud ERP should offer you the option of managing incoming and outgoing data using add-ons. Third-party software, for example for a time recording terminal, should be able to be connected without any problems and where the fields available in the system standard are not sufficient, the user interface should also be easy to adapt.
From the point of view of the developer of customer-specific solutions, it is also advantageous not to let a good idea dust until another of your own customers happens to need this adjustment. Rather, every customer of the ERP solution can search for the desired functions via a central store, regardless of the provider, and, should a solution already exist, buy it as a ready-made package to save time and money.
What is taken for granted for smartphones today must be transferred to the world of business software. The apps developed by partners should be centrally available to all customers, easy to install and inexpensive to use. Instead of a complex world full of thousands of providers and numerous different app stores, information and expansion options are bundled in an app center. The advantage for the customer is an even more flexible, customizable cloud ERP with a strong basic structure and flexible expansion solutions. You can build on this and book modular solutions or entire sets of extensions individually. This creates the necessary flexibility to be able to react promptly and successfully to changes in the market and the company.
App store for SAP Business ByDesign
Bradler GmbH has already developed a large number of expansion solutions for SAP Business ByDesign. Some of them are already published on the SAP App Center, the official store for SAP solutions.