There are many enterprise resource planning solutions (ERP) on the market today. For most businesses, SAP automatically makes the shortlist during the selection process because the company is one of the largest ERP vendors with wide industry adoption and some of the deepest understanding of the ERP space. Nobody ever gets fired for choosing an SAP solution. It is the standard.
SAP offers a number of ERP solutions, however. Which to choose?
For fast-growing businesses, the choice usually is between two offerings: SAP Business ByDesign and SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. Let’s look at the two offerings and where they differ.
The Similarities Between ByDesign and S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition
Both SAP Business ByDesign and S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition are cloud-based ERP solutions that serve as the nerve center for a company and encompass all parts of operations. Everything a business needs from manufacturing, sales, distribution, logistics, human resource management and finances is baked into the ERP solutions.
Both also are specifically tailored for small to medium-sized businesses that are expecting high-growth. Small businesses that are expecting a slower growth trajectory might want to choose SAP Business One instead, and already established large enterprises often go with S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition—although S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition also can meet the needs of the largest enterprises.
Because all of the offerings align with SAP’s Grow methodology, both ByDesign and S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition also both take advantage of the company’s clean core concept and the SAP Business Technology Platform.
SAP Grow is an approach where the ERP solution relies on a small core of basic functionality, the foundation that makes the offering unique, and then additional functionality is accessed through modules that live in the SAP Business Technology Platform, a marketplace for ERP functionality that SAP, third-party developers and even a company’s employees can develop on. This Grow methodology makes upgrades easier, and greatly simplifies customization and integrations so all of SAP’s solutions are more flexible and innovation can roll out to businesses faster. SAP Grow and the Business Technology Platform definitely benefit nimble, fast-growing businesses.
Finally, both Business ByDesign and S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition roll out fast, in as little as 30 days, and they both come with best practices baked in. Instead of getting bogged down in ERP implementation or reinventing the wheel with bespoke internal processes, growth-focused companies can start with industry-standard practices and a standard ERP implementation that then can be configured for more bespoke processes later on where they make sense.
The Differences Between Business ByDesign and S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition
There are differences between the two offerings, however. Chiefly these differences center around the complexity of a business and the expected pace of growth. SAP Business ByDesign is a mile wide and half a mile deep. S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, on the other hand, is half a mile wide but a mile deep.
Business ByDesign is essentially a suite-in-a-box for fast-growing companies. A business that chooses ByDesign gets everything from CRM and marketing automation, through order to cash processes, procure to pay, standard financial management and full supply chain support. Business ByDesign does this at a level of complexity that addresses the needs of growth-focused businesses that are not overly complex.
For more complex businesses, such as those in the life sciences, S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition natively brings an additional level of functionality above and beyond what ByDesign provides. An example of this is warehouse management. Business ByDesign has plugins for warehouse management, while S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition has extended warehouse management functionality already embedded in the system.
Another example is expense management. SAP makes an expense management product called Concur, which is best of breed. Business ByDesign comes with basic expense management functionality that fits the needs of many businesses, but a fast-growing company that wants all the bells and whistles of Concur might consider S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition instead. Concur can be integrated into ByDesign, but it comes out-of-the-box with S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.
So the major difference between the two cloud ERP offerings is that the more advanced functionality that a fast-growing company might need is already there with S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, whereas ByDesign must tie into these advanced solutions through integration.
S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition comes standard with about 90 percent of the functionality of SAP’s largest ERP offerings, while ByDesign is more tailored for smaller businesses that are growing fast—although this advanced functionality can always be added to ByDesign, and fast-growing businesses can start with ByDesign and then migrate relatively seamlessly to S/4HANA Cloud later as they need it.
Learn More About S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition
Both Business ByDesign and S/4HANA Cloud are well-established cloud ERP solutions that have been helping businesses run efficiently for more than a decade. The public edition of S/4HANA Cloud that caters to smaller, fast-growing businesses is relatively new, however; previously S/4HANA Cloud was only available to large enterprises that were able to invest the considerable time and cost to maintain their own private cloud instance of S/4HANA Cloud. With the Public Cloud Edition, however, fast-growing businesses now can also take advantage of the deep functionality inherent in S/4HANA but without the cost and hassle of the Private Cloud Edition.
With that in mind, we’ve created a short video that looks at S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition in more depth, and that talks about how this newer offering fits within the overall ERP landscape.
Watch the video here: What is S4HANA Cloud Public Edition?
For more information about SAP’s offerings and how they might help your business, you also can contact one of our experienced consultants at (801) 642-0123 or by writing us at info@nbs-us.com.
