ERP Packages Feature Comparison

ERP Packages Feature Comparison

Elisabeth Rainier (Sr. Consultant)

CIOs have expressed growing concerns over the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of enterprise software and have highlighted costs as a contributing factor in the decline of IT investments. As a result, software vendors are trying to develop more structured "Ownership Experience" strategies and, in some cases, have focused R&D efforts and resources on improving the ownership experience for customers. In response to these executive concerns, PeopleSoft launched its Total Ownership Experience (TOE) initiative 16 months ago, followed by other major application vendors with varying kinds of programs for, and degrees of success in, controlling costs and improving the overall ownership experience.
A team of consultants each with over 15 years of expertise in enterprise application software and every phase of the ownership lifecycle, has reviewed and evaluated key software features that directly impact the ownership experience of enterprise applications. Some of these feature sets included: advanced data loading and moving during the implementation phase, task-oriented navigation for the usability phase, and user-centric performance testing for the maintenance phase. This research offered an objective assessment of these detailed features, validated through in-depth interviews with the panel of consulting experts distinguished by multi-vendor and multi-lifecycle experience.

The resulting study provides a comparative, multi-vendor assessment across the three major phases of the application lifecycle: implementation, application usage, and ongoing support and maintenance. The players and software versions evaluated in the study included:

• Microsoft Great Plains version 7.5 and previews of Microsoft Great Plains version 8.0
• Oracle E-Business Suite 11.5.9
• PeopleSoft Enterprise 8.8 and 8.9 and EnterpriseOne 8.11
• SAP mySAP Business Suite R/3 4.6 and SAP R/3 Enterprise 4.7
• Siebel 7.5 and Siebel 7.7.

From a summary perspective across the ownership lifecycle, PeopleSoft demonstrates consistent advantages for the key features evaluated in this study. The research validates PeopleSoft's leadership for key ownership features in three categories:

Implementation:

PeopleSoft features for implementation rated higher than Microsoft's, SAP's, and Siebel's in enabling implementation teams to install, implement, and deploy enterprise applications through comprehensive configuration wizards and pre-packaged integration packs for all major enterprise application vendors. Oracle also rates consistently high in the areas of configuration, data loading, pre-packaged integrations, and web services. PeopleSoft has made more progress than other vendors in enabling and streamlining its configuration and integration tools.

Usability:

Across the features evaluated, PeopleSoft and Siebel rated highest in terms of the usability features evaluated. The task-oriented organization of application screens and the consistency of screen layouts across all modules in PeopleSoft applications improve end user productivity and enables end users to complete tasks faster and with fewer errors.

Microsoft Business Solutions usability is limited due to a continued reliance on a "thick client" architecture for most of the applications, and SAP was found lacking in task-oriented dashboards.

Maintenance, Support, and Upgrades:

PeopleSoft rated consistently high across the maintenance feature set primarily due to the ability to proactively and rapidly isolate and resolve application issues through embedded diagnostics scripts, thorough test scenarios and scripts, and streamlined upgrade process. Specifically in relation to Microsoft Business Solutions, PeopleSoft's complete web enablement streamlines the upgrade process compared to an offering like Microsoft Great Plains, which operates in a client-server environment and requires the client to be upgraded as well.

The results of this evaluation by this consulting team can provide guidance to decision makers on how to evaluate the major enterprise application vendors relative to the ownership experience, which impacts both the cost of ownership and the value derived from the applications.

Key Research Findings

Each phase of the enterprise application lifecycle has potential pitfalls that can affect the ultimate success or failure of the ownership experience. For example, if an enterprise software application is not installed completely or correctly, then the rest of the implementation will have problems. Maintenance costs often reflect repetitive tasks, such as upgrades performed many times over the lifecycle of an enterprise application, while poor diagnostics tools lead to unpredictable downtimes and business disruption. Finally, usability features affect end user adoption, and poor usability can lead to increased costs due to lost productivity.

The experts looked at these potential outcomes and identified the key feature sets that enabled implementers, IT, or end users to successfully implement, maintain, or use the applications of the five vendors.

Then, based on its primary and secondary research, the team rated each vendor as to whether it offered the feature and then rated how successfully each implementation, usability, and maintenance feature set contributed to the ownership experience. Vendors received either a full circle for a full offering, a half circle for less than a full offering, and an empty circle for no offering. The following analysis represents a compilation of a detailed vendor-to-vendor comparison by application.

Implementation

The implementation phase includes the initial installation of the software, its configuration, the initial load of data into the new application, and any work that might be required for the application to interface properly with the IT environment of the customer, such as integration with other applications, and whether the integration is batch or real time.

The implementation phase is typically broken into three major steps:

1. Software installation
2. Configuration
3. Integration.

The installation step is important since an incomplete or incorrect initial installation of the software can lead to significant lost time in further steps of the implementation.

Streamlined configuration tools are critical in keeping an application implementation project on time, since, during configuration, all the specifics of customer business requirements are captured and shared across implementation staff.

Finally, the integration step is typically one of the most challenging - with many hidden and unanticipated costs. Three factors - the complexity of the applications to interface with, the complexity of the business processes between applications, and the complexity of the integration tools that may require multiple experts and multiple types of expertise - make it difficult to establish detailed project plans and thus to accurately estimate project costs. For
the analysis and comparison of vendor approaches to implementation, the experts utilized seven criteria:

1. Application installation wizard
2. Advanced configuration
3. Process modeler
4. Advanced data loading and moving
5. Process-oriented integration
6. Pre-packaged integration between vendor applications
7. Built-in web services integrations.

PeopleSoft and Oracle emerge with the most comprehensive feature set for the
implementation phase. PeopleSoft excels in the areas of application installation wizard, advanced configuration, advanced data loading and moving, pre-packaged integration between vendor applications, and built-in web services integration. Oracle shows strength in advanced configuration, the process modeler, advanced data loading and moving, and builtin web services integration, but not in pre-packaged integration between vendor applications. SAP and Siebel slightly address all seven criteria, while Microsoft is clearly
lacking in four areas - advanced configuration, process modeler, advanced data loading and moving, and process-oriented integration repository.

Let's examine each of the seven feature sets in the installation category.

• Application installation wizard

Both Microsoft and Siebel offer a streamlined installation wizard that is comprehensive and well packaged. PeopleSoft offers an application installation wizard that removes manual steps and automates key installation processes, including the configuration of the underlying database. By contrast, while SAP also uses wizards, its installation procedure and wizards are proprietary and more complex and very often require the implementers to step out of the automated process to handle tasks that were omitted during the planning phase. Oracle has improved its installation wizard tremendously over previous releases, but still the wizard is inconsistent across modules and requires additional manual steps to be accomplished outside the wizard.

• Advanced configuration

PeopleSoft has gone further than any vendor in enabling the application to be configured by product or by business processes. For example, the PeopleSoft Setup Manager configuration tool enables implementation staff to connect to
documentation online and navigate through the documentation by selecting product and features directly from the configuration screen. Both Siebel and Oracle provide advanced tools to support the definition of business processes and data flows. SAP provides tools that are more complex and require more technical expertise. Microsoft limits end user ability to fully configure applications.

• Process modeler

PeopleSoft provides 1,200 pre-defined models that cover PeopleSoft best practices business process flows. Oracle Workflow allows for business processes
to be modeled using a drag-and-drop designer and produces a visual diagram of the business process. With Siebel, customers can add pre-defined or custom business processes, branching, and sub-processes to create a workflow process tailored to their unique business requirements. SAP offers functionality in process modeling only within the context of its own applications. The ability to manipulate existing business processes within Microsoft Great Plains is limited and requires customization work. Process modeling is independent from integration but is a critical step for developing processoriented integration (see below).

• Advanced data loading and moving

Microsoft simply does not allow advanced data loading and moving. Oracle iSetup automates and simplifies the initial setup of data. Oracle iSetup is a question-driven wizard that automatically generates applicationrelated parameters and flows such as chart of accounts, expense policies, and rules.
PeopleSoft provides advanced data-loading and moving capabilities, including the ability to load data online from Excel spreadsheets into PeopleSoft applications through component interfaces. SAP provides a free set of tools and procedures that make it possible to transfer data from a variety of sources without any programming. Siebel has a set of proprietary tools for the data load; the tools can be used as batch loading for information that must be reloaded on a regular basis, once the mapping of data is done.

• Pre-packaged integration between vendor applications

PeopleSoft Process Integration Packs deliver all levels of required integration: data transformation, routing, cross-reference maps, and standard-based connectors/adapters for a complete end-toend integration. PeopleSoft currently provides five pre-packaged integrations for key SAP and Oracle business processes out of the box. These pre-packaged integrations replace the need for custom integrations, thereby saving customers up to 60% off the cost of custom integration. While not offering pre-packaged integration packs, Oracle
maintains adapters to most commonly used applications. Its adapters do help reduce the effort for custom integration. SAP encapsulates integration tasks within its NetWeaver platform, but still requires deep technology expertise to complete the integration. Siebel Universal Application Network provides a common interface layer for Siebel Application to interface with non-Siebel applications but requires third-party components. Microsoft introduced a toolbox for integration to replace Great Plains integration tools (Integration Manager). It is reported to be a great improvement over the previous proprietary tools but has not yet reached a level of usability and completeness comparable to other vendors.

• Process-oriented integration

Within Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Workflow supports basic process-oriented integration and the modeling of it. Siebel's approach to process-oriented integration is to publish all its process-oriented business services as
web services. PeopleSoft's new interactive integration repository enables customers to display integration points from a business process point of view and generate integration process plans. SAP's integration approach has been very focused on business processes, but it relies heavily on proprietary technologies. Microsoft Integration Manager includes a set of templates that allow the control of the underlying business logic.

• Built-in web services integrations

PeopleSoft provides built-in web services and fully supports industry standards for web services. In addition, Oracle supports web services integration at every layer of its application framework (database, middle-tier, and application layer) using open connector standards such as SOAP, WSDL and UDDI. Siebel's strategy is to expose all its business processes as web services to deliver
business services-driven integration. SAP provides integration based on web services through its SAP NetWeaver platform.

Usability

The usability phase includes all key functionality that is related to the application ease of use. Usability covers topics such as ability to perform tasks with the minimum amount of errors, intuitive use of the application, end user productivity, ability to learn how to use the application effectively with the minimum amount of training, number of screens or clicks required to perform a specific task, support for novice as well as advanced users, alignment with industry standard interfaces, response times, and ease of adapting application
terminology to customer business cases. With this kind of scope to the issue of usability, it does provide value to evaluate and build an objective comparison on the usability of various applications.

Usability, in fact, can impact positively or negatively the total ownership experience. First and foremost, usability has a direct impact on end user adoption, which can make or break a deployment. Poor usability can lead to on going hidden costs through lower end user productivity, error-prone applications, or applications that are misaligned with a company's business processes.

Five criteria were involved in the analysis assessment of usability:

1. Task-oriented navigation
2. Navigation configurability
3. Task-oriented dashboards
4. Web client
5. Integrated office productivity.

Both PeopleSoft and Siebel have obviously made usability a key deliverable to customers and, among the five vendors, provide the fullest feature set for usability, including taskoriented navigation, the ability to configure navigation, task-oriented dashboards, and web clients. Only SAP provides no task-oriented dashboards, and Microsoft provides no web clients.

Let's examine each of the five feature sets in the usability category.

• Task-oriented navigation

A task-oriented navigation is designed to allow users to use business process based navigation to complete tasks. PeopleSoft delivers an easy-toread
graphical layout that displays task-based terminology and icons representing the
portal registry content. Navigation pages not only have a consistent layout throughout the application, but users can more easily and quickly locate navigation items by scanning the new 2-level navigation shortcut collection. This process based flow for the application is consistent from the top level portal page down to the specific application pages, where application pages have process driven recommended actions and selectively show only the fields that are relevant to the current stage of a specific business process. To ensure optimal design of this task based navigation metaphor, PeopleSoft performs usability tests with at least 100 customers per application per release. This continuous investment in customer driven solution design enables PeopleSoft to continually improve usability and explains the high degree of usability
compared to other vendors. Oracle's screens can be rearranged slightly to align better with the customer's business processes and tasks, but this ability is not systematic across all modules and requires a high level of expertise in Oracle. Within SAP, navigation can be customized but requires custom development on top of the SAP Portal, which is part of SAP NetWeaver and is not currently used by most customers.

Both Microsoft and Siebel have focused much development effort on usability and both deliver a simplified user interface, leading to applications that are relatively easy to navigate.

• Navigation configurability

Most vendors provide tools to the technical staff and the implementation team to customize the application interface in order to better fit the business needs and business processes of the customer. Microsoft provides only limited
tools to customize the application interface. All modifications made to Microsoft Great Plains' interface and navigation are done through custom coding rather than configuration and wizard-driven, point-and-click tools. With PeopleSoft, Oracle, and Siebel, it is easy to create customized and personalized navigation pages and choose to use these pages in addition to, or instead of, the default navigation pages that are provided out of the box. SAP requires advanced programming to achieve a level of configuration and customization of the interface that might be fit for the average user.

• Task-oriented dashboards

Microsoft and Oracle offer only limited functionality with task-oriented dashboards. Through task-oriented, pre-built dashboards that organize key tasks, such as applicant job tracking and reporting, PeopleSoft delivers greater
productivity to end users. PeopleSoft is so focused on usability and end user productivity that new releases can ship only when a majority of new users tested can complete key tasks without any assistance in a timed usability exercise. Siebel also supports taskoriented dashboards that are end user-oriented. By comparison, vendors such as SAP have not fully migrated their interface toward a more task-oriented navigation and still require users to click back and forth between multiple screens to complete the various steps necessary for a specific business task.

• Web client

All PeopleSoft modules and applications, including PeopleSoft Enterprise One, are fully web-enabled and do not require the download of any application code on the end user workstation. This feature facilitates upgrades that are very transparent to the end users and that do not require the attention of either the end user or the technical staff regarding client side issues. Siebel has added 100% web deployment in the most recent version of its software. Previously with Siebel, some code had to be downloaded to the client. While Oracle claims to be 100% web enabled, some code components are still downloaded to the client. And unfortunately, Oracle's web architecture is not consistent across all Oracle modules. SAP is not yet fully web-enabled. By contrast, Microsoft's applications are still mostly client-server, and release upgrades can trigger
significant disruption to business operations through additional downtime and
unnecessary incremental costs to upgrade each end user workstation.

• Integrated office productivity

Microsoft has developed the most integration points between its business applications and its desktop applications, such as Microsoft Office and Outlook. Siebel provides basic integration between its sales force automation modules and email. Meanwhile, PeopleSoft CRM provides integration to standard
desktop software tools like Microsoft Office Suite and Lotus Notes as well as mobile devices including laptops, Pocket PC and Blackberry devices to ensure user adoption and enable new levels of user effectiveness. Integration with personal productivity tools is an area that remains underdeveloped for Oracle and SAP, but each vendor does offer some capabilities in this area.

Maintenance, Support, and Upgrades

The maintenance includes all post-implementation activities that are required to keep the application operational under normal and stressed conditions. It includes on going support, upgrades (patches and minor and major upgrades), all diagnostics and tuning activities managed by administrators to maintain the application running in optimal conditions, and the archiving of historical data.
Maintenance costs have an important impact on the overall ownership experience, due to the traditionally labor-intensive and repetitive nature of these activities. Diagnostics and tuning facilitate the upgrade process by staying current on releases, while poor diagnostics tools lead to unpredictable downtimes and business disruption. Seven criteria were involved in the expertise assessment of the maintenance phase:

1. Diagnostic and technical support
2. Remote and online support
3. Performance diagnostics and tuning
4. Patch management
5. Automated upgrade process and toolsets
6. User-centric performance testing
7. Data archiving.

In this phase, PeopleSoft offers the fullest feature sets covering diagnostic and technical support, performance diagnostics, patch management, user centric performance testing, and data archiving. PeopleSoft, Oracle, and SAP all offer full performance diagnostics and tuning. And PeopleSoft, Microsoft, and Siebel fully address patch management, while only PeopleSoft and Siebel fully address the issue of user-centric performance testing. All vendors have basic automated upgrade tools, and all have shown progress in addressing maintenance improvements to the ownership experience.

Let's examine each of the seven feature sets in the maintenance, support and upgrade category.

• Diagnostic and technical support

Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, and Siebel support is delivered the "traditional" way: a knowledge base on the web and phone calls with technical support. PeopleSoft is the only vendor to provide a built-in diagnostic framework through embedded diagnostics scripts that let customers send secure, realtime production system snapshots to PeopleSoft's support center. This unique capability ensures faster issue diagnosis and resolution. With SAP, Oracle, and Siebel, diagnostics and resolution information is exchanged between the customer and the vendor through tailored emails that depend on the availability, the responsiveness, and
the knowledge of the vendor's support staff. In some cases, support requires extensive communication and exchange of files such as log files that contain the exact configuration of the customer implementation.

• Remote and online support

All vendors provide some form of a remote support and online capabilities to help customers self-diagnose issues. Both PeopleSoft's and Oracle's online support databases are rich in content but can be time consuming to navigate. Siebel provides some support content over the web but, once a problem has
been logged online, always promotes interaction with the customers over web self service support. SAP has recently introduced multiple web sites to provide better post implementation information to its customers, but the efforts remain fragmented across various interaction points with customers.

• Performance diagnostics and tuning

Oracle, PeopleSoft, and SAP provide a built-in, instrumented performance monitoring tool that tracks the application performance in real time as well as by component. The tool provides comparisons to average performance levels to proactively identify and troubleshoot non-performing components. Siebel supports industry-standard application response-time management that implifies
performance tuning across all tiers of the Siebel Smart Web Architecture and supports proactive performance monitoring by a third-party ARM-compliant monitoring application. Because it requires third-party software, Siebel is not rated as highly. With Microsoft, performance monitoring is done at the platform level (Windows/NT); no specific application performing tools are available.

• Patch management

Applying patches to enterprise applications can be a very time consuming and disruptive activity. SAP, Oracle, and Siebel make their list of patches fully available on the web but provide limited guidance and automated tools to select
which patches are relevant to a specific configuration. PeopleSoft has streamlined this task by offering a Change Assistant toolset that supports the automatic checking of pre and post- requisites and by automatically selecting which patch should be applied for the customer to be current. Microsoft releases new versions of patches for its applications very infrequently (less than once a year), so the features with respect to patch management are well suited.

• Automated upgrade process and toolsets

SAP offers tools to identify pre-requisites and guide technical staff through the various steps of an upgrade. The SAP upgrade process is only partially automated, with many complex tasks to be performed manually. PeopleSoft provides Upgrade Assistant, an automated upgrade tool with well tested and
complete upgrade scripts. Starting with Enterprise Human Capital Management 8.9 customers, PeopleSoft has re-engineered the upgrade process from eight steps to five with Accelerated Upgrades. Now customers can use a visual compare tool to identify customizations and an ETL-based data migration tool to ensure downtime is less than a day. Oracle offers upgrade scripts and tools but with a lesser degree of automation. Microsoft provides basic upgrade automation tools that are adequate for Microsoft's low frequency of releases.

• User-centric performance testing

PeopleSoft allows customers to submit test cases, which are used as part of the application testing and release process. PeopleSoft is the only vendor to test functionality and performance using real customer data on volume database systems. Oracle relies mostly on its database performance test to validate the
performance of its application. SAP offers test services reported to be so expensive that very few customers opt to use them. Siebel has been focused on usability since it released its first CRM application, and user-centric testing is an integral part of its product development cycle. Microsoft delivers good usability but the functionality delivered is less sophisticated.

• Data archiving

Oracle only provides purge capabilities and does not allow customers to archive or restore/reinstate archived data into production. Both SAP and PeopleSoft
provide archive, purge, and restore capabilities natively. In addition, PeopleSoft provides rules-based archiving templates enabling administrators to set up different archiving rules for different regions for better global compliance support. Siebel and Microsoft do not directly offer archive, purge or restore capabilities.

Vendor Approaches to Ownership Experience

Microsoft

Microsoft has no formal ownership experience program defined. Microsoft has developed its cost management strategy based on a very low software price point and close to 100% out-of-the-box deployments with little ability to customize the software. As a result, Microsoft offers basic functionality that does not require extensive training, but it also does not necessarily deliver the full value expected by the customer in view of the ownership experience.

Oracle

Addressing cost of ownership is at the heart of Oracle's philosophy for Enterprise Applications. Based on the Oracle eBusiness Suite, an integrated suite of applications, Oracle claims that it can lower implementation costs by avoiding unnecessary costs, such as those associated with costly custom integration between applications. Although Oracle's approach has some merit - some measurable benefits have been highlighted through ROI case studies, serious concerns are still being raised regarding what Oracle has delivered to date.

PeopleSoft

Structured in a formal program, PeopleSoft dedicated over 1,000 developers and $800 million to improve the Total Ownership Experience for customers. Rather than focusing simply on best practices that improve the ownership experience, PeopleSoft has rethought its entire set of applications to ensure that they are built from the ground up to minimize deployment and maintenance costs.

SAP

Many users of SAP applications have, over the years, noted the complexity of SAP applications, the resulting high implementation costs, and consequent budget overruns. In response to these issues, SAP today highlights SAP NetWeaver as the centerpiece to SAP's product strategy for decreasing the complexity and cost of ownership for SAP applications. Currently, the impact of SAP NetWeaver on the overall SAP cost of ownership remains to be proven. SAP has not yet provided proof points validating that its customers benefit from
improved ownership experience through the implementation of SAP's latest technology.

Siebel

Siebel's customer experience initiative was first focused on customer satisfaction and high-level ROI measurements. It is only recently (12+months) that Siebel has focused more specifically on cost-of-ownership issues (mainly in response to customers' complaints). Siebel's improvements to its software development process are guided by the experience and insight gained from close examination of 200 Siebel 7.x deployments.

Research Methodology

For this study, the research was organized along key ownership experience criteria that allowed the research to capture quantitative and qualitative information across the major components of enterprise applications. The list of criteria was thoroughly defined to take into account the experience of not only the technical staff, but also end users who must accomplish specific business tasks with the application. The software versions that were compared included:

• Microsoft Great Plains version 7.5 and previews of Microsoft Great Plains version 8.0
• Oracle E-Business Suite 11.5.9
• PeopleSoft Enterprise 8.8 and 8.9 and EnterpriseOne 8.11
• SAP: mySAP Business Suite R/3 4.6 and SAP R/3 Enterprise 4.7
• Siebel 7.5 and Siebel 7.7.

The research also included functional areas such as Financial and Human Capital
Management Systems (FMS & HCM), Supply Chain Management (SCM), Customer Relationship Management (CRM); and application lifecycle phases such as installation, implementation, configuration, usage, maintenance, support, and upgrades. The team broke the entire process down into five steps:

1. Reviewed vendors' web sites and their positioning documents, as well as their online and hard copy documentation.
2. Utilized analyst reports, press articles, and technical reviews that are available to the general public.
3. Validated, using the defined criteria, the information collected in steps 1 and 2 through in-depth interviews with the consulting panel of experts. For the interview process, preference was given to respondents with multi-year experience and experience with the latest version of the application to ensure that the entire application lifecycle was properly covered.
4. Compared and analyzed findings from this primary and secondary research to generate a rating for each vendor on specific criteria. In this comparison and analysis, the respondent's experience with multiple vendors was leveraged as well.
5. Aggregated comparisons and ratings along three major phases of the enterprise application ownership lifecycle.

This research study was funded by PeopleSoft but designed and executed by this consulting team group as an independent, analytical evaluation of the key features important to the ownership experience of enterprise applications. The feature ratings contained in this report provide a summary level comparison among vendors and there may be minor variances based on specific vendor product modules.