SAP Software
hrokie
4 Posts
We are considering using SAP software for "all our business needs". If you have experience with SAP, I would appriciate it if you would give me the pros and cons. Thanks.
Comments
I know many companies who have implemented it. From an HR/payroll standpoint, you need to remember that it was a program written by Germans. They weren't thinking of the American way of doing things when it was written. For example, we had the hardest time getting a date of death to flow out of the system correctly from the client to the pension TPA, because the German-way was "the first day the person was fully dead" ...i.e. the day after death. And this was just one small example.
I know payroll people who have had other issues with it such as this....
It took a lot of time,effort and cost to customize the system to our needs. But I think that same comment could be made for a lot of business software and once it was setup, it ran well.
You may want SAP for operations/logistics, but I wouldn't weigh down HR with their unwieldy HRIS/payroll systems for 120 employees.
I have recently started a new job, and this company uses SAP. We are actually in the process of upgrading to v 6.0.
What I have found so far: Like all of these kinds of systems - if there is garbage data in there, all you get is garbage data out. (If you can get it out at all.) It is neither intuitive nor is it user friendly. We used Ceridien and haven't been able to easily upload the data from that program to SAP. So, we have to have both programs open and available to us to get all the information about our employees from an HRIS standpoint.
It is extremely robust and a powerful tool if you know how to use it and maintain controls, and continually drive updates. If we are succesful in this 6.0 implementation and train our people how to use SAP, our business managers will have most of their employee data at a push of a button. That allows us to focus on more important work than generating reports. Further, there is no time lag between when the managers need the information and when they get it. (They just get it themselves.)
Good luck with whatever you choose. These things always are a huge headache, but they can also yeild great rewards.
Out of curiosity, why did you switch over from Ceridian? We went from paper and pen to Ceridian.
The only thing we're really having any problems with is determining, prior to charging, what exactly is going to come out of our account.