Disclosure: my new role at SYSPRO

The bloggers I respect disclose their business-related interests. So I feel it appropriate that I disclose my new business role.

I am joining the ERP vendor SYSPRO. My position will be in Product and Industry Marketing and my responsibilities will include some standard duties like:

- product-based messaging and collateral,
- working with Product Managers to understand and articulate product value,
- assist and communicate with sales to position, articulate and sell product,
- working with Marketing to optimise marketing through all channels and drive demand generation and awareness programs,
- support the company’s analyst relations effort,
- work with User Groups around the world.

In addition I will be able to participate in social media and networking, so what used to be a hobby now is part of my job.

I will also be working with the team on the launch of a new release of SYSPRO in the coming months.

SYSPRO announcements

SYSPRO recently made some performance improvements and new release announcements for Service Pack 3.

I suspect that developers controlled the news release, because they were not clued up enough to consider announcing these while SAP’s SAPPHIRE was on – ie, do some ambush marketing.

SP3 enhancements

Toolbars, menus and forms – lots of easy customisation given more functionality and made even easier
SYSPRO Workflow Services – a platform based on the Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation, will include:

in-process workflow host engine,
a designer,
workflow controls,
code editor,
persistence and tracking of workflow processes,
rules engine,
notification services,
will also be web-service enabled.

Inventory optimisation enhancements
More warehouse management functionality, including automated control and orchestration of warehouse tasks
Manufacturing unit of measure
Real-time General Ledger
SYSPRO executive dashboards using Xcelsius 2008 (so paying SAP/Business Objects)
Quality Management System – will enable product quality control by allowing the configuration of multiple measurement metrics as well as inspection points per inventory item
Actual cost tracking – required by companies that use materials which have large cost fluctuations over a period of time

Performance testing

SYSPRO’s performance testing was done using HP’s LoadRunner. This puts SYSPRO up with the majors in terms of large-scale deployment capability.

Hardware specs
Dell Power Edge R900
- 4x Intel 6 Core processors (2.6GHz) = 24 Processors
- 64GB RAM
- Windows 2003 Server Standard Edition x64
- SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition x64
- 1Gbps network connection

What was tested
Total Number of Users: 510
- 125 Users: Sales Order Entry
- 60 Users: Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable
- 325 Users: Inventory movements

Test results (transactions per hour)
Sales Orders:               1133 (average of 39 lines per order)
Inventory movements: 4387
Invoices (AP, AR):         1593

The Office gets into ERP

If you enjoyed The Office TV series (the UK version, and even the US one), our SYSPRO colleagues in the UK have created a series of humourous videos about ERP in manufacturing - The quest for the perfect ERP solution.

Which manufacturing ERP?

If your company was looking for an ERP to help manage a manufacturing operation, which ERP vendors would you turn to for a solution? It seems that most large companies would include SAP on their selection list because SAP is the biggest. But biggest is not necessarily the best.

Recently we were called by one of our client’s competitors to discuss some possible custom development for their ERP system. Our client uses SYSPRO, the competitor (which is large) uses SAP. I had an opportunity to get some information on how the competitor was using SAP in their manufacturing environment. This company must be spending millions a year on SAP maintenance fees while not getting anywhere near the benefit that our client gets from SYSPRO.

I was talking with knowledgeable colleagues what reasons a business would choose SAP rather than SYSPRO:

1. If you are in a couple of industry verticals, like financial services, in which SAP specialises.
2. If you are in certain process manufacturing sectors, such as aluminium production, you might also be able to justify selecting SAP.
3. If you are a global company needing to run separate local financial operations, and consolidate to regional and global operations, SAP’s financials are strong.

Apart from these three reasons, and if you are in manufacuting, there is absolutely no reason why SYSPRO shouldn’t be one of your short-listed ERP vendors. It amazes me therefore, in the current economic climate, that so many companies are still using SAP for their ERP and spending so much on SAP maintenance, rather than migrating to a more useful and cost-effective ERP solution.

What’s all this about SOA?

There have been a couple of interesting blogs recently about SOA (Services Oriented Architecture).

Gartner’s Thomas Otter has attempted to explain SOA in terms of coping with coffee damage.

Of interest to me was the article by AMR which discussed SOA as one of SYSPRO’s strengths (subscription required).

While others we still coming to grips with it, SYSPRO recognised the value of SOA early on (in 2002), using Microsoft’s .Net Framework. As a result, our company has been able to deliver some very useful industry-specific and customised functionality to a number of our manufacturing customers through SYSPRO’s e.Net architecture.

What I have seen in terms of SYSPRO’s growth and their customers’ use is echoed by AMR:

A major driver of this success in recent years has been the vendor’s ability to deliver service-oriented
architecture (SOA) to the midmarket … the references AMR Research spoke with indicated their organizations have been able to grow with, not into or around, the SYSPRO products.

I am running with four projects at the moment involving either integration to other enterprise software, or custom development, that are easily deliverable because of SYSPRO’s SOA capabilities. 

The spikey ERP world

For some time there has been a debate about whether the world is flat or spikey. This refers to whether globalisation has made everything uniform (flat) around the world, or whether there is still significant regional diversity (spikey).

A survey of the ERP market in South Africa seems to indicate to me that the world is definitely spikey. If the world was flat, I would have expected that the relative market shares of the major ERP players in the developed ‘north’ would be reflected in the SA market. But as the research found, that is not the case.

Looking at the SA mid-market (companies with 50 to 250 PCs, or 251 to 500 PCs), 35% of the survey were manufacturing companies; about 30% were in professional services, wholesale trade, and logistics; and rest in areas like construction, finance, mining, and parastatals. Over 50% of the survey were in the Gauteng province where Johannesburg is located. 70% of the respondents had between 50 and 250 PCs.

When it came to products, Microsoft Dynamics GP (ex Great Plains) and CRM had over 50% recognition; the other Dynamics products were not well known (NAV had some awareness but AX was very low).

What were the best known ERP brands? SAP (not surprisingly) and SYSPRO (SA’s own ERP) … by far. So much for the other big ERP players efforts in SA!

So when you read another press release from a large ERP vendor which describes them as “leading”, check which geographies they are referring to.

The survey also asked what factors made companies change their ERP, in order:

1. greater functionality
2. new business requirements
3. company growth
4. lower cost (note this)
5. merger/acquisition with company with different ERP

What were the reasons for choosing an ERP, in order:

1. good fit to business
2. quality/reliability
3. technical superiority/innovation
4. ease of implementation
5. low cost of ownership (note again)

The vendor selection criteria were:

1. quality/reliability
2. understand our business/industry
3. customer service
4. ease of implementation/doing business

For the ERP marketers, the major sources of ERP information were:

1. search engines
2. vendor/product websites

What had the biggest impact in creating awareness:

1. customer reference
2. technology/business events
3. sales person visit

Tenacious SYSPRO

Yesterday I attended a presentation by SYSPRO to its resellers in Johannesburg. One of the sessions featured Kay Nash of Yellowwood, a company described as a ” leading specialist marketing and brand strategy organisation”. Looking at their client list, they must have some special talent.

Kay has been working with SYSPRO for some years, and her talk covered the work she has done to develop and position SYSPRO’s brand. The key word she used to describe that brand is “tenacious”.

As she said, the ERP world is fiercely competitive, and dominated by really big international players (SAP, Oracle, Microsoft), but SYSPRO has managed to not only survive for 30 years but also thrive, in South Africa, as well as US, Canada, UK, and other places. She is obviously pretty impressed with what SYSPRO has done.

In my opinion, the tenaciousness of SYSPRO shows a particular South Africa trait to push through. From the early settlers of the Cape, to the Boers trekking north, to the diamond mining in Kimberley and the gold mining on the Rand, South Africans just had to get on with things because we were so far away from anyone, and could not rely on someone else to quickly come and help.

SYSPRO’s strength is in the small-medium business (SMB) space, and its ability to deliver value to business managers and owners led Yellowwood to come up with a tag line for SYSPRO –
“simplifying your success”.

For me it’s a pity that the major analyst groups are US or European, and don’t seem to have grasped the significance of a major ERP player ”down in Africa”.

Shortest ever ERP deal closed

I have just been involved in the shortest ever ERP deal closure in my +10 years of working in the enterprise software industry.

An engineering company came to us for help in managing construction inventory between South Africa and a big project in the DRC.

They came to see us last Tuesday, we sent them the project proposal last Friday, and today – 6 days later – they have told us they have accepted our proposal!

It’s a smallish SYSPRO licence, so the ratio of implementation cost to software cost is +3 to 1. The company had looked at SAP (and JDE, I think) but were put off by the initial costs and the change management those solutions would have required.

I am speculating a bit here, but I think the reasons for the speedy decision were:

- their project is big, and so are the budgets
- there is a time-critical factor
- they are a medium-size company so not a lot of IT skills and experience
- we were able show them from our experience how we could make their operations work with the minimum of fuss
- we did a damn good sales job!

Styles of partner management

I have become aware recently of two very different styles of partner management – from SYSPRO and Microsoft. One is collaborative and knowledgeable; the other is selfish and is poorly informed. Guess which partner?

At an informal meeting with SYSPRO, we got an assurance that they would would work with us in 2008 to get four 50+ user deals, which are a good size in this market.

The attitude at Microsoft Dynamics was to ask us to change to a NAV reseller, from AX, as it is not doing well in South Africa. A comment afterwards was that all Microsoft is interested in is having feet on the street. The fact that, as a NAV reseller, we would have to re-skill and would be up against a large incumbent, did not seem to be an issue to Microsoft.

I don’t know why Microsoft believes it can treat partners like foot soldiers in a battle. Perhaps it’s a cultural difference between a US and a South African company. I also wonder whether it’s not the old problem that US companies have about working in Africa – it’s far away and they don’t take the time and effort to get to know how business works here.

Is any ERP reseller happy with their vendor?

This is a question that I have raised before, and anecdotal evidence indicates that many ERP resellers are not happy with their ERP principal. However, from the blogs I follow I get the impression from other countries that ERP vendors are better are working with their partners and developing business than they are in South Africa.

Our two vendors are SYSPRO and Microsoft. Colleagues in the company have recently been complaining about SYSPRO’s bureaucracy and lack of flexibility in dealing with customer issues. The advantage for us, however, is that as SYSPRO is a local company we can escalate issues up the executice chain. They also have in-depth knowledge of local conditions and market expectations and have in many cases been more than ready to accommodate requirements from prospects, in particular.

Microsoft is a different case. Other colleagues in the company are nearly at the stage of telling Microsoft Dynamics to get lost. So what does Dynamics lack in SA? Firstly, stable long-term management; four different heads in four years does not provide stability for partners or continuity of strategy. Secondly, I my opinion (and as I have said before), the local team are very much execution-bound, meaning that strategy, planning and decision-making gets done in Europe by people who don’t have in-depth knowledge of local conditions and market expectations. Thirdly, again in my opinion, Microsoft is too process-bound to be flexible enough when they need to be.

Instead of operating the SA unit as a sub-division, I think Microsoft could learn a lot by studying how Bidvest and Murray and Roberts, both SA success stories, allows their subsidiary companies a great deal of latitude and flexibility while at the same time focusing on some core financial, market and customer metrics.