Think big. Start small. After step one, nailing down an upfront cost for an ERP solution based on Software as a Service (SaaS), you may be feeling like you are going to have money left over in your IT budget when this project is done. Still, let’s assume that you are still looking for ways to economize, to get the soup-to-nuts project implementation cost down to a point that will have the board of directors nodding vigorously in the affirmative. To accomplish this, you’ll need to leverage another fundamental difference between on-premise ERP and SaaS ERP. With traditional ERP it is typical to map out all the business processes you want to automate in the planning stage and integrate them all as part of one grand deployment. This ensures that the various applications—customer relationship management, warehouse management, manufacturing execution systems, etc.—are fully integrated and working well together. The problem with that, of course, is that you wind up buying more software and paying more for implementation.

ERP Software

Think you can’t afford an ERP system? (Part 2)

ERP as part of SaaS gives you other options. Consider starting small, limiting you initial investment, with fewer applications. Because SaaS is completely modular, you can virtually “switch on” additional applications down the road. Perhaps you start with the full financial suite and customer relationship management (CRM) integrated into the ERP backbone. Many companies find that CRM gives them the most bang for the buck, so that’s an application that’s likely to demonstrate to the entire organization that the move to ERP has real benefits. Starting slow saves you money and it also is less stressful on already stretched-thin IT resources.

To give yourself maximum flexibility as the company grows, look for a SaaS vendor with highly configurable and comprehensive product offerings that can adapt to the changing needs of your business. For example, if your supply chain extends to other countries, you’ll want a system that accommodates multiple currencies and fluctuating exchange rates.

Move quickly. A third way SaaS-based ERP solutions can save you considerable cash is in time spent on implementation. Major traditional ERP implementations can get you mired down in planning stages that can take up to a year before implementation begins. That kind of disruption can bring an organization to its knees—and cost a fortune. It also pushes out ROI too far. You can actually implement a sophisticated ERP system in a matter of weeks with SaaS. Rather than spend months mapping out business process reengineering, SaaS solutions let you choose from a menu of best practices, in many cases developed over years and years of refining ERP applications in a traditional software setting. Ask vendors you are considering to fully demonstrate their best practices methodologies to streamline the process and save time and money. Depending on your size, number of users and the number of applications you are including in the initial stage, you could be up and running in just a month or two. And since the system your ERP is actually running on already has the vendor’s full suite of applications full integrated and already running, adding new applications down the line has similar fast implementation capabilities as well.