By Marcus Leach
The big hitters in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) are failing to meet the needs of medium-sized firms, according to new research published today by Intact Software, conducted by YouGov.
The research shows that business management software is now widespread in medium-sized firms with 61 per cent using at least one of the three most well known brands, SAGE, SAP and Microsoft Dynamics.
However, 75% of these respondents are experiencing problems and many want to replace their systems, citing maintenance costs (33%), inflexibility (19%) and underperformance (23%) as some of the main issues.
Only 6% of the (18) SAP users and 8%of the (26) Microsoft Dynamics users surveyed like their system and don’t want to replace it. Upgrade costs may be driving this with 56% of SAP users and 38% of Microsoft Dynamics users citing problems in this area.
More than half (58%) of respondents said that a main reason ERP implementations fail is because the software fails to match the business processes and 37% said the software is not fit for purpose.
“ERP systems should fit a business — not the other way around. It is very worrying to see that for many medium-sized companies, the solutions currently available are by and large failing to deliver,” said Paul Marry, CEO Intact Software.
“We respect that customers want to run their business the way they want it to be run."
The survey found that the top three problems encountered with business management software or ERP systems are:
1. Costly to upgrade (30% of respondents)
2. Costly to maintain (22% of respondents)
3. It is inflexible and cannot adapt to meet changing business needs (20%)
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