Bringing it to the masses

Having launched back in December as a spin-off of Milner Browne, Enterpryze is a cloud-based solution built on SAP Business One, one of the most popular ERP solutions out there, and gives small businesses the tools that were once only accessible to large corporations.

It’s something that its chief executive, Morgan Browne, believes is a “complete game changer” for these companies.

“If you recognise that systems are an enabler of growth for organisations, those systems have been very much reserved for large organisations and if we can bring those systems down to very small organisations, it removes that one barrier for them and enables them to grow,” he said.

“Now they’re able to take advantage of systems that were effectively reserved for the larger organisations and leverage those to grow their businesses . . . it’s a complete game changer.”

Bringing these products to smaller companies is Enterpryze’s primary aim. As flexibility is one major development in the ERP space, the solution it brings – which Browne describes as a “mini-ERP system powered by SAP” – allows the smallest of businesses to really take advantage of its services.

“What we’re trying to bring to market is the ability for very small companies who were traditionally not able to take advantage of ERP, to be able to do it now at a very disruptive price point,” said Browne.

“The concept with Enterpryze is you can set yourself up effectively with no services, and you can run your business for €149 for five users up.

You start there with the solution, but you can grow into the full SAP solution as your business expands. So you can go from effectively five users to 300 users on the same system, but you can start at a price point that everyone can afford.

“We’re looking to change the market in terms of being able to provide these small service-based companies with a mini-ERP system.”

What that kind of system takes away is the chopping and changing that happens once you begin to grow.

As well as offering SAP Business One solutions, Enterpryze offers apps which cover areas like distribution, delivery, expense, pipeline and credit control.

The ability to pick and choose which ones you need is particularly important as different companies have different needs.

Before that, you would have purchased a solution that was designed for a start-up, then another as you reached a certain size and so on.

A flexible solution removes that criteria and means you only really need one solution that develops as the business develops.

“When a small business is starting out, their processes are mostly the same,” he said. “Then as they grow, they start to push themselves into verticals like manufacturing or distribution where the processes become a little more complex.

“The beauty of that is you can bolt that [vertical] onto your ERP solutions so you start with standardised processes and you move from there to more vertically aligned processes . . . The bigger the business becomes, the more transactions you’re processing, and you have to factor all of these different demands and understand them.”

And understanding them is backed up by another component of its SAP Business One solution. An intelligent analytics appliance, SAP HANA helps business make sense of their data and is included with every solution Enterpryze offers, no matter how big or small the company.

Data is important but understanding it is key. While some businesses might not see the reason why they would need to track all their data, over time it accumulates and being able to spot patterns, find old invoices and files from previous business transactions and building up a better idea of the business in the long run is essential.

Browne said: “A lot of people say ‘Why do you need that?’ and ‘We don’t have vast amounts of data that need to be analysed.’

“What you have with HANA is the concept of memory data storage so what you can start to do is predictive analysis. You can start to do things you couldn’t do before, and I compare it to the Diskman versus the iPod when that happened.

From a data perspective, you can now search your entire solution for anything, and it will pull that information up for you.

“So having it in memory makes it faster and because it’s easier to access, you can start to search for the data in lots of different ways.”

“It’s much more intuitive and then we can do predictive analysis so it starts to analyse your data for you and then on the back of that, it starts to tell you what you need to know before you needed to know about it.”

That data analysis will lead to better things for businesses in the future, one of which is benchmarking where you can start to compare your own data to other companies in the same sector. It’s hard to say where the industry will go, but Browne is pretty clear about what it offers: a solution that will be up to date with the latest trends and developments.

“We don’t know where it’s going to go, but there’s no point buying technology that’s out of date,” he said. “Why buy a Discman when the iPod is on the market?”