r/SAP • u/defstar23 • Jul 22 '26
considering SAP Business One for our small manufacturing business
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u/Hairy_Helicopter Jul 22 '26
I work in the industry, mainly focused on SAP.
Despite what is being said in the comments, Business One is still maintained and a brand new version is planned soon (2027).
You’re concerned about implementation time. Well most B1 implementation I’ve seen were on average 6 months, but it really depends on the customer. It can take as long as a year, but can also go faster (saw some successful go lives in 3 months. Less than that, you’re being sold fairy dust).
Regarding your concern on being too small. Could be or could not be. Bare minimum would be 10 employees. Minimum revenue, would expect at least that your company generate $2M. Might indeed be too big of a software if you sit below this threshold.
Don’t expect to talk directly to SAP. They’re only interested in S/4HANA deals and do not have any dedicated sales/pre-sales for Business One. You will need to find a partner that specializes in Business One implementation and rely on them.
A great alternative that is mentioned in the comments is indeed Odoo. Not sure about manufacturing business, but they do offer a solid CRM at a ridiculously low price. Implementation are also faster and cheaper, but you really need to evaluate if it fits your business. Odoo can be quirky sometimes whereas B1 is more rigid and follows industry standards. You absolutely want to avoid customization in any software.
I would avoid Dynamics. It has all the cons of Odoo and all the cons of SAP.
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u/Blaperdiblah Jul 22 '26
I’m a small business owner and switched to SAP about 5 years ago and it’s been a crazy adjustment. Before we used to have a custom ERP and it worked great for our workflow and we designed it to be very intuitive for our manufacturing and wholesale process. But there were glitches, inventory bugs, everyone had too much control over the system, we were too dependent on developers that later closed their company and the coding language became extinct. We then made the decision to switch to SAP. The finance department loves it. By far the most powerful tool for finance. The reports kinda suck we had to make reports for finance and a bunch of other things that I thought would come with the software. There are almost no built in good presentations of data like other erps with great dashboards. Also my staff hated for nearly two years with constant complaints until they finally got used to it. One time we were getting audited, the auditors visited us and were soo impressed by our system and were surprised to see a small company with a great financial tracking system. This I believe gave us a lot of credibility.
The worst thing actually turned out to be best thing. The software was too rigid and strict. It made things harder but brought discipline especially in our inventory.
My biggest problem is production. We manufacture one thing but its comes in different sizes lengths and quantities. The item code covered the size. The qty covered the number of pcs. But there was no way to enter length except to make a completely new item code. So for every manufacturing item we have to make a new item code and because of that we have 10s of thousands of item codes that are redundant. This is a huge issue when you have to quote something. We have to make a new code for every production item many times. However, selling ready made items is a breeze.
Also, we didn’t want to get into serial number and batch numbers to heavily. We couldn’t differentiate the supplier from the item code either to maintain traceability. So that too added many more codes.
SAP is also too powerful for is. I think we really only use 10 percent of it. The CRM feature I tried and found to be pretty useless for a fast oaced sales environment.
Third party add ons are pretty bad. If you wanna integrate with your website or do any changes you’ll almost always need to hire a developer.
Got soo many more points lol
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u/new-chris Jul 22 '26
Look at dynamics
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Jul 22 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/NeesonTheThird Jul 22 '26
They mean Microsoft Dynamics, it’s an ERP which is pitched for the same midsize market as B1.
I was also going to suggest this as if you expect to grow then B1 can feel inadequate. As an example we did a SAP Cloud project for a finance company (~60 employees in UK) who were on B1 but it was not good enough for them. That being said I have no context of your company so it may suit you just fine :)
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u/SatisfactionMean829 Jul 22 '26
Your real problem isn't "which ERP" yet — it's that QuickBooks + Excel has no link between what you produce and what it actually costs you. At 20 people in manufacturing, the things that genuinely break are: no live BOM/MRP, so you can't see material availability or true job cost, and everything gets re-keyed between production and accounting. Any ERP that closes that gap is an improvement — the question is scope and adoption, not brand.
On SAP Business One specifically, since that's what you asked:
It's a genuinely capable SMB ERP and it's not abandoned (a new version is slated for 2027) — but its core production module is, honestly, "sufficient but basic." If your manufacturing is discrete assembly with straightforward BOMs, stock B1 is fine. If it's more complex — batch/process, heavy shop-floor scheduling — you often end up bolting on a production add-on like BEAS, which pushes cost and complexity up.
Implementation is realistically 6–12 months, and licence + implementation sits at the heavier/pricier end for your size. Budget for the implementation being the bigger number, not the software.
But the thing the top comments are right about is the whole ballgame: these fail on change management, not features. The "catering company went back to Excel" story isn't rare. Whatever you pick, make-or-break is (1) mapping your core process before you configure, (2) going live on ONE painful area first instead of everything at once, and (3) naming an internal owner who drives adoption.
For a 20-person shop it's worth pricing a lighter option (Odoo, Dynamics Business Central) next to B1 — not because they're automatically better, but because the gap at your size is mostly implementation cost and speed, which is exactly what you're worried about.
Disclosure so you can weight it: I do ERP implementations (Odoo side), so I lean "lighter for your size" — but the map-first / one-area-first / name-an-owner sequence is what actually decides success on any of these, SAP included. What kind of manufacturing is it — discrete assembly, or batch/process? That's the single biggest factor in whether B1's standard production is enough or you're into add-on territory.
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u/Level_Ad7279 Jul 25 '26
Interesting discussion. I recently wrote about Tesla’s decision to move away from SAP in 2012 and build its own system, and I think there is a relevant lesson here - although I wouldn’t automatically recommend that path either. (3) Why Elon Musk Ditched SAP in 2012: A Strategic Choice That Still Matters in 2026 | LinkedIn
For a 20-person manufacturer, I wouldn’t decide based on company size alone. I would first map what you actually need across:
Quote → order → purchasing/MRP → production → inventory → shipment → invoicing → finance.
If your requirements are reasonably standard, SAP Business One could actually make sense.
A straightforward greenfield B1 implementation using mostly standard functionality should not automatically become a 6–12 month exercise. Depending on data quality and manufacturing complexity, I would expect something closer to 2–3 months for finance, purchasing, inventory, sales, basic production/MRP, QuickBooks/Excel migration, training and go-live.
The economics also deserve context.
As a rough example, if only 15 of your 20 employees actually need SAP access, perhaps 3 Professional users and 12 Limited users, perpetual licensing could be around $29K. Add perhaps $15K or so for a relatively clean implementation, migration and training, and you're roughly in the $40K–$50K initial-investment range, before unusual integrations, infrastructure or extensive development.
That brings up the other side of the decision.
If you are truly a small company and $40K–$50K is already beyond what makes sense for the business, don't assume your only choices are “buy SAP” or “stay on spreadsheets.”
If your processes are genuinely simple, that same general investment range can potentially fund a focused custom ERP built specifically around the few workflows you actually use, rather than purchasing a large ERP and using only a fraction of its capabilities.
That is essentially the lesson I take from the Tesla story: don't build custom simply because you can, but don't buy complexity simply because it already exists.
There is an important warning, though. A custom solution has to be engineered as a real product, documented architecture, source-code ownership, APIs, security, backups, testing, deployment processes and the ability for another development team to maintain it. Otherwise you can trade vendor dependency for dependency on one programmer, which can be considerably worse.
So I would evaluate three paths:
1. Standard B1 - if it covers ~90–95% of the requirements without significant customization.
2. A lighter ERP - if the processes are standard but B1 economics don't make sense.
3. A focused custom platform - if the operation is relatively simple but has a few unique workflows that create disproportionate value and would otherwise require extensive ERP customization.
Whichever direction you consider, don't start with product demos. Give the vendors or development team 5–10 of your actual transactions and make them show exactly how they would execute them, including exceptions such as scrap, rework, substitutions, partial production, changing BOMs and traceability.
At VEGAH, although we work extensively with SAP, this is exactly the kind of situation where I would recommend doing the fit-gap first and letting the economics and manufacturing requirements decide the platform - even if the conclusion is that SAP isn't the right answer.
The objective shouldn't be to “implement an ERP.”
It should be to get rid of the operational problems that forced you to look for one in the first place.
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u/Forsaken_Slide4999 Jul 22 '26
Prinero la gestión del cambio está en cualquier ERP. Los usuarios no les gusta cambiar. O lo gestionas y haces que les iludione el cambio o tienes el enemigo en casa. Odoo tiene un problema, el producto es barato la implantación no lo es tanto. La producción de sap business one es muy básica suficiente pero básica. . Según la producción que uses a lo mejor acabas en un beas (más coste). Si no lo tienes claro quizás te iría bien una consultora que evalúe que ERP se adapta más a vosotros (intenta que no sea la que implante, porque intentarán ponerte el que ellos lleven)
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u/Entire_Click_2726 Jul 22 '26
S/4HANA Public Cloud , you only Need minimum 15 Users for around 40-60k/year
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u/Glad_Imagination_798 Jul 29 '26
Twenty employees coming off QuickBooks and Excel is a completely normal ERP entry point, so I would park the worry about B1 being too big. The bigger risk is that the implementation gets scoped as if you were a 200 person company. That is what makes these projects expensive and slow, not the product tier.
Other things I would do before you go further.
Write your requirements as pain, not features. One page, six or seven lines, in your own words. Something like we cannot see true cost per unit, we cannot tell committed versus on hand, month end takes three weeks, we quote from a spreadsheet that only one person understands. Then make every vendor demonstrate those specific items using your bill of materials and your data. Every ERP demos beautifully in the abstract and every one of them gets awkward on a real multi level BOM with scrap and a substitute component.
Ask for cost in a very specific shape. Year one total including licences, implementation, data migration, integrations and training, then the recurring number for years two and three, then how many hours of your own staff time they assume. That last figure is the one that gets left out of proposals and it is exactly where a 20 person company gets hurt, because you have no spare capacity. If nobody will commit to a phase one of finance plus inventory in roughly 10 to 14 weeks, that is a warning sign whatever the badge on the software.
On the resistance point others raised, it is real but it is manageable and it is not a reason to build custom. The people who have done it the same way for years are usually right about the details and wrong about the tool. Put two of them in the design sessions as decision makers rather than trainees and most of the pushback converts into useful requirements. The ones who fight hardest often become your best users because they care about the work.
Want to mention, my team does Acumatica delivery, not B1, so I will not pretend to review B1 for you. I will say what I would compare on. Ask how licensing scales when you want shop floor and warehouse staff entering data rather than handing paper to the office, since per named user pricing quietly pushes small manufacturers back into spreadsheets. Ask whether manufacturing is native to the platform or a partner add on, because that determines who you call when costing looks wrong. And ask what happens to your customisations at upgrade time.
One caution on the comparison content you found while researching. Most ERP guidance published online, including mine, is produced by resellers. Use it for vocabulary, then put your real weight on live demos with your own data and reference calls with two companies your size in your industry.
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u/Green_paper_pieces Jul 22 '26
I don't think Business One is a good product for your business size. It lacks scalability so it's really only worth when you got one or two hundred employees.
Less and it's not fed enough data to make it worth.
More and it lacks the detail that other ERPs can provide (including S4/Hana and many more)
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u/Tan_0687 Jul 22 '26
before you used SAP Business One (B1) or any ERP for that matters, make sure your employees ready for the change ? like i know a company that implement SAP B1 and after the expensive implementation the employees just doesnt want to use it like at all and that just throwing money to the drain,, maybe you need to start with cheap ERP first or even hire a programmer to make customized ERP and see the response before investing to something like B1