I want to follow up on my post from last week on “Choice” where I promised to come back and talk to some of the business benefits of hosted ERP. Hosted ERP solutions provide a wealth of compelling financial and technical business advantages to today’s organizations. These benefits include:
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Minimized initial investment. Unlike conventional onsite ERP solutions, a hosted ERP solution does not require upfront investment. A typical onsite ERP implementation involves purchasing and maintaining servers, housing them securely, then deploying, configuring, and maintaining the software. In addition to a sizeable upfront capital outlay, this also requires the time, effort, and associated costs of hiring and maintaining a staff of experienced IT personnel. By comparison, with a hosted ERP solution the process of implementing, maintaining, and keeping the application up to date is shifted from the customer to the solution provider. This approach eliminates the costs and complexities of installing and integrating additional hardware to support the software and hiring additional staff to support the application on an ongoing basis. As a result, a hosted ERP solution is particularly advantageous for small to midsize organizations with tight capital budgets and limited IT resources.
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Accelerate and Increase Return on Investment of the Application. In keeping with the business model of SaaS applications, hosted ERP solutions can be implemented with relative ease and integrated faster into the organization’s day-to-day business than their onsite ERP counterparts. In fact, most typical hosted ERP solutions can be up and running in mere weeks, rather than months or even years, as may be the case with traditional onsite ERP software. This enables organizations to begin realizing the business benefits earlier, which, in turn, results in a more rapid payback, a greater return on investment (ROI), and a reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) over the course of the investment.
Stay tuned for more benefits on hosted ERP next week.
Jesper Termansen
Sr. Marketing Manager
Microsoft Dynamics ERP