Having a 360-degree view of business operations has become increasingly important to ensure the smooth functioning of a company, to grow and sustain in competitive marketplaces…Correct?
Okay, let’s imagine that you are having a complete view of your business operations on the cloud where you can access from anywhere and at any time. Besides that, you could also make data-backed decisions to consistently optimize your business operations to increase efficiency, minimize cost margin and improve profitability. That would be amazing right?
SAP Business One and NetSuite are such a business management tool that offers all of those facilities, but are they different in fundamental ways?
Business Management Software – SAP Business One & NetSuite
It’s impossible to separate one business requirement from another to get a complete understanding of business operations. For example, if you want to streamline your accounting analysis, you cannot do so without gaining an in-depth analysis of your company’s financials. Hence, the single integrated platform of SAP Business One will help you evaluate it.
In addition, you can run analytics to identify better methods to understand the goods receivable and the cost of production. The SAP Business One is designed for 15 separate business modules:
- Administration
- CRM
- Financials
- Opportunities
- Sales
- Purchasing
- Business Partners
- Banking
- Inventory
- Resources
- Production
- Project Management
- Material Requirements Planning (MRP)
- Service
- Human Resources
The other player in the market offering similar functions is NetSuite. The primary difference between the NetSuite and the SAP Business One is that it’s not an integrated platform but 3 different custom platforms (financials/ERP, CRM and eCommerce).
Therefore, for NetSuite, you have to evaluate separately based on your business operations. This can be cumbersome in certain circumstances, especially for small and medium-sized businesses that run on integrated operations.
5 key advantages of SAP Business One over NetSuite
1. SAP Business One offers easy accessibility while NetSuite has deployment issues
When it comes to streamlining business operations, it becomes necessary to ensure that all information is easily accessible. For instance, you need information regarding your purchases from vendors, invoices, inventory, and inbound logistics. All of this information decide your operating expenses.
You can easily access this information in SAP Business One as it is a cloud-based solution with multiple data centres. With NetSuite, this might become an issue as the information is separately stored only in three data centres. Accessing the information and then integrating these to identify the exact operational expense can be time-consuming. Moreover, there is no onsite deployment option.
Along with that, SAP Business One will make it easy for you to run analytics as you can do so on the platform itself. But with NetSuite, you need to acquire the information separately and merge the acquired data before running analytics. So you will need to have trained staff in-house who can download the information and integrate these before evaluating the information.
Thus, if you think of accessibility of information and ease of use, SAP Business One solution is better than NetSuite.
2. SAP Business One provides excellent reporting and workflow management compared to NetSuite
Undoubtedly, SAP Business One and NetSuite can be deployed across various industrial sectors.
However, with SAP Business One analytics, you can run predefined crystal reports on the SAP HANA database that can be published in a variety of formats such as Microsoft Word and Excel. Also, you can customize the created reports using the SAP Crystal Reports software.
SAP HANA database?
“SAP HANA is a column-oriented in-memory database that runs advanced analytics alongside high-speed transactions – in a single system. Why is this so important? Because it lets companies process massive amounts of data with near-zero latency, query data in an instant, and become truly data-driven. By storing data in column-based tables in main memory and bringing online analytical processing (OLAP) and online transactional processing (OLTP) together, SAP HANA is unique – and significantly faster than other database management systems (DBMS) on the market today.” – Source: SAP
SAP Business One analytics gathers data from multiple points of your company to generate a report regarding pricing, operational expenses and helps you identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). With SAP Business One, you can get real-time dashboard reporting to help you make informed business decisions. Additionally, empowering employees to identify issues that can arise during business operations is necessary to help improve their proficiency.
NetSuite provides real-time access and visibility of data, as well as reporting functions too. However, the reporting functions of NetSuite are limited and the customization requires technical expertise to be used.
3. SAP Business One is less expensive compared to NetSuite
It is a mistaken notion that SAP Business One is expensive. The SAP Business One is an integrated solution that can offer at an SME price. As an SME owner, you can quickly deploy SAP Business One and being a fully integrated platform, you will get a complete ERP solution.
Nevertheless, NetSuite is an expensive option as you need to purchase the additional features as add-ons separately. Initially, it might seem that NetSuite is effective, but the basic features will not help you to achieve your required business purview. As you continue to purchase the add-ons, this will increase the price of your complete business solution. Consequently, it proves to be expensive.
Notably, SAP Business One is flexible – offering deployment and scalability options to the customers. That enables you to choose based on your budget and requirements.
4. SAP Business One is a robust ERP compared to NetSuite
The most significant advantage of SAP Business One is that it offers industry-specific solutions, and these are customized based on the industry’s requirements. SAP Business One has 50 country-specific versions, supports 28 languages, and has more than 800 partners as of 2020.
The version of the solution is built based on the requirements of each country. For example, if your company is located in a country in South Asia, then the business solution offered and the analytics carried out will be based on the region’s demographics. Hence, it is designed to meet the expectations of the customers in your region.
Moreover, customization is necessary to allow scalability. Compared to SAP Business One, NetSuite is less customizable because it comes with pre-configured editions. These editions are also developed based on the particular industry. When you deploy the NetSuite, you will have to check whether your company corresponds to the special editions of the NetSuite and if it is built for the particular industrial sector. You cannot change the configuration to suit your company’s requirements. Thus, unlike SAP Business One, you cannot customize NetSuite as per your company’s requirement to get the most out of the ERP solution.
5. SAP Business One upgrades are done as per the license
This has always been an issue with Business management solutions which SAP Business One has handled perfectly. As per the licensing agreement, any change to the code or upgrades of the SAP Business One has to be planned. Similarly, as a customer, you can make changes to the code on the system deployed at your end. This makes it easier for you to evaluate the data and run analytics. Besides that, retrofitted codes won’t come as a bombshell that would completely change the data, and your analytics produce a completely different result.
For NetSuite, the upgrades are done automatically. Which can prove problematic when all the reports change in a business cycle because of a system upgrade. You will have to analyze the data once again and probably change many of your business decisions. This can often seem unnecessary and time-consuming.
In case the NetSuite upgrades are carried out across the system, all of your customers who have deployed the solution would face a similar problem. Moreover, if you have made any particular changes to the system, it can render the integration unusable for the upcoming business cycle. Thus, when you think of ease of use – SAP Business One is usually better than NetSuite.
Comparison Infographic
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Bottom line
When you compare SAP Business One and NetSuite, the first thing that will cross your mind is that both are business management solutions and you need to choose the ideal one for your company. So, when you evaluate the features of both solutions closely, it won’t be wrong to say that the SAP Business One is ideal for small and medium-sized businesses.