Gartner: The 10 Factors that Affect ERP TCO

Hi Everybody,

I came across this Gartner report which I though might be of interest to a wide audience. Gartner looks at the key factors that affect your ERP TCO.

Your can downlaod the report for free here :

Take a look, it is a good report.

Thanks Salma for sharing this report. Yes I just glanced through it, and it looks good.

Salma Adib wrote:

Hi Everybody,

I came across this Gartner report which I though might be of interest to a wide audience. Gartner looks at the key factors that affect your ERP TCO.

Your can downlaod the report for free here :

Take a look, it is a good report.

I do agree in general with Gartner on this and I particularly like that they came out strongly in support of the single instance.

I do like the way Gartner highlights the implications of application customization (point 2.2).

We all struggle with this when deploying packaged applications, he business wants endless customizations, we know this does cause problems with application life cycle management and the debate goes on and on during the implementation.

I am one who likes to stick to the best practices embodied in the application instead of modifying the application to match the old business processes.

I find that following best practices coupled with adopting a single instance make all the difference.

This might be difficult during the implementation but makes your life so much easier and less expensive in the long terms ..

Don't take the easy way out by giving in to your subsidiaries and business units, don't customize, don't build separate instances.

For me it is single instance all the way. Saves cost and improves quality of services as well as planning and consolidation.

When we compared Oracle and SAP in this regard we found that Oracle works very well in multi org even when the subsidiaries operate in very different businesses. That is because the Oracle industry modules (if you need them) tend to sit on top of Oracle ERP but do not change the corp ERP functions.

In SAP things are a bit different, installing industry specific modules tend to change the core ERP and hence many consultants do not recommed multipe industry modules to be installed on the same ERP instance. Essentially, you may need multiple instances of SAP if you are running SAP IS modules .. makes it a bit complicated .. but the SAP IS modules tend to have deeper functionality than the Oracle industry add ons.