ASW Engineering, leading suppliers of process and water filtration systems and related services and support to the chemical, petrochemical, and paper industries in Africa, Central America and Asia, has implemented SAP Business One to optimise its growth into new fields.
"Initially we simply supplied world-class equipment to customers, and the accounting software package we had was adequate," says ASW managing director, Uwe Wischnewski. "In the past few years, however, progressively more of our business has become project-based, with customers asking us for entire systems on a turnkey basis.
"So as our business evolved into consulting and designing and installing entire systems, we realised we needed a business rather than a financial solution.
"We tried to get the developers of the financial package to adjust their software for us, but they simply referred us to their agent here in South Africa, who wasn't particularly interested.
"That made me reluctant to go with any solution that wasn't extensively supported locally. We therefore looked at a number of South African accounting packages as well as SAP options and discovered that SAP had a system that was affordable for companies of our size.
"In fact, SAP Business One was extremely competitive because it gave us more options for managing growth than any of its competitors."
Wischnewski wanted more than just the vanilla version of SAP Business One, though. For a company of its size, ASW has unusually sophisticated foreign exchange requirements. It also quotes rather differently. "We don't simply install the equipment or systems that our customers ask for because they're not necessarily specialists in our field and might be asking for inappropriate systems. So we often go through an iterative quoting process as we help customers understand what is the most sensible solution for their needs.
"SAP Business One requires that each quote be given a new number, which doesn't suit us. But SAP Germany is writing a different option for us - and is also rewriting the Business One foreign exchange module to meet our needs. That's precisely the kind of commitment to support that I want from my suppliers."
SAP South Africa's Business One Manager, Paul Vermaak, says while SAP Business One is designed to be flexible enough to meet the needs of most small enterprise organisations without customisation, "there's often something company or industry-specific that can be added to the benefit of the customer. The great advantage of SAP Business One's flexibility is that changes can be made without changing any of the source code. So adding functionality and applying upgrades is easy and we already have a huge community of independent software vendors worldwide building up a portfolio of add-ons."
"Even without the add-ons, SAP Business One is a brilliant product," Wischnewski says. "While we're waiting for the changes SAP is making for us, we're already getting greater insight into the business, because everyone who needs to can see in real-time what's going on. Also, using the CRM module, we can see what leads we've got and what follow up is being done. We're better able to control the business, too, because SAP's automated authorisation and audit trail processes prevent unofficial data changes.
"The remarkable thing is we're still only using about 5% of the solution."
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