Mark Lamson | VTUG Fall Forward 2014
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 28/10/2014

Mark Lamson, Westerly Public Schools,at VTUG Fall Forward (2014) with Stu Miniman
One thing that makes Wickham happy is that SAP has proven responsive to Pinkberry’s feature requests. “It is unusual for large ERP vendors to listen to SMB customers like that, but SAP has implementing things that we have requested,” says the former PoepleSoft system admin.

Also, he says, the Business ByDesign platform has proven easy and relatively inexpensive both to implement and to customize. For instance, Pinkberry was the first user to implement the third-party payroll interface, and Wickham said they were able to do that without help from SAP or outside consultants.

Another refreshing difference between the SAP cloud service an traditional ERP systems – hidden charges have been conspicuously absent. Actually, he said, “we have been able to decrease our expense by decreasing the number of users.” And it did that while expanding its business.

And service levels are generally better than he has seen with in-house ERP systems. “There are too many single points of failure with in-house systems,” he says. “With Business ByDesign you don’t have to go through four interfaces to connect to your financials.”

 

The only complaint he has is that the update cycle has been a little slow at times. SAP has told him that this was connected to complexities in testing involved in the latest version of the platform.

Also, he says, he hopes that SAP and the other large service vendors will open their systems to support more third-party innovation. “The cloud provides a big opportunity for individuals to innovate. The more open the platforms are, the more innovation an happen. And individuals are often able to innovate much faster than large vendors.”

 
Overall, he says, the cloud is the place to be. “Companies like ours are going to the cloud partly because the services there are providing what we need rather than loads of features that do us no good.”