In many companies, especially manufacturing companies, the biggest impact area of a BPM Software implementation is normally around the edges of the company's enterprise resource planning. To many managers, this may seem counterintuitive. After all, isn't the purpose of the ERP to solve the company's process problems? Unfortunately, it is not that simple. The ERP represents a goliath piece of software in most manufacturing firms. As such, the ERP almost always represents the biggest part of annual software spend for large manufacturing firms (see this analysis of a typical ERP spend). Unfortunately for these companies, the ERP does not end up solving the entire problem. In fact, due to the complexity of the ERP software itself, it often creates a need for more software to automate tasks in and around the ERP. This is certainly not the news that CFOs and CEOs want to hear, but it is true. It is not too difficult to guess who the biggest culprit is. That’s right...SAP. It is not that Oracle and others don't cause the same problems (Here is a report comparing ERPs, including SaaS ERP). Nor is it that SAP does not do a good job at what it does. SAP is the ERP market leader for a reason. It is extremely stable, highly secure, and used throughout the world. However, on the flip side, SAP is extremely complex (we are talking about SAP ERP and not SAP Business One). This complexity is also very costly. Making changes and modifications in SAP almost always requires a team of very expensive SAP consultants. This is where a powerful yet nimble BPM system like ProcessMaker BPM Software can solve a lot of problems. After spending many millions of dollars and several years on an ERP implementation, be it SAP or another, CFOs are understandably reluctant to embark on the installation of more unnecessarily complex software. BPM does not have to be complex nor does it have to be expensive. However, there are a few key things that buyers need to look at carefully when looking at closely integrating a BPM system with an existing ERP:
