When was the last time your business’ IT team provided your department with a Service Level Commitment for your ERP deployment? How about when they paid a penalty to your department for not delivering the ERP response times you need to run efficiently? Where does your IT team publish your ERP deployment’s performance?
Probably doesn’t happen, right? Lucky for them they’re not accountable - because according to a recent survey (opens in new tab) of senior managers at 588 companies about 43% are dissatisfied with the SAP’s response times. Smaller businesses even have a worse time of it - with 48% expressing frustration. (I guess the only way to reduce end user frustration with SAP is to throw more IT resources at the problem). And worse still, according to the survey, users couldn’t accurately predict future performance.
In the article (opens in new tab), Ray Wang, chief executive at Constellation Research Group (opens in new tab) sums it up well, “In general, most companies are unhappy with their ERP environments. Slow performance, rigidity of user experience, and high cost to manage often lead the list of complaints.”
Yet businesses still have reservations about cloud ERP performance and availability. But the fact is that NetSuite’s cloud ERP solution is way more accountable to you, the end user, than your IT department running an SAP instance will ever be.
Unlike your IT department, NetSuite provides a 99.5% Service Level Commitment. And NetSuite is even transparent – with current and historical availability published on https://status.netsuite.com (opens in new tab). (In contrast, whenever I ask on-premise ERP users what their availability percentage is, I’m greeted by blank stares – invariably they invariably have no idea).
And better still, if NetSuite’s cloud ERP doesn’t meet its availability commitment, we pay a penalty. That’s real alignment between the solution provider and the end user. And real accountability drives results - as of the time of writing, NetSuite has delivered 99.97% uptime over the past 12 months.
So the next time you here a naysayer worried about the cloud vs SAP (or any other on-premise ERP) in terms of uptime and performance, you might want to ask them three questions:
- What’s your IT department’s ERP uptime commitment?
- Where do they publish their performance?
- What’s their penalty for not meeting commitments?
You get it automatically with NetSuite’s cloud ERP. You don’t with on-premise. And if they’re running SAP - you might want to ask the users about their ERP performance experiences. If this survey is anything to go by, about half might utter expletives.
