Hosted enterprise applications vendor NetLedger on Wednesday unveiled NetERP, the latest addition to its family of ASP solutions for small to mid-sized businesses.
NetLedger is targeting the midmarket, what it defines as companies or corporate divisions with under 500 employees. It is positioning itself against existing back-office software providers like Microsoft Great Plains and MAS 90. In other words, somewhere between Peachtree and QuickBooks at one end and Oracle, SAP, PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards at the other.
NetLedger sees the midmarket as having the same complex business processes as larger enterprises, but without the resources available to implement a client-server ERP solution. As a Web-based solution, NetERP can offer the same kind of functionality at a price more suited to the midmarket — NetERP is priced at $4,800 for the first user, per year, with each additional user priced at $75 per user, per month.
“This can make you easier to do business with, and establish your place in the value chain ,” Sean Rollings, NetLedger’s Senior Director of Marketing, told ASPnews. “If you’re not easy to do business with, you’ll lose your place as a preferred partner.”
NetERP is a back-office application integrating order, inventory, and procurement business process automation with financials. NetERP also includes automatic website generation, website hosting, and e-commerce capabilities, enabling mid-sized enterprises to bring to the Web back-office data, including inventory availability and customer-specific pricing terms, and processes like order-to-cash and procure-to-pay.
“Larger vendors are forcing mid-sized suppliers to transact business on-line, and businesses are struggling to find a cost-effective way to meet this requirement quickly,” said Helen Chan, SMB analyst at the Yankee Group. “NetERP’s integration of an ERP-class solution with complete Web hosting and e-commerce capabilities is an innovative offering that allows mid-sized suppliers to move their business processes to the Web quickly and rapidly, without the expensive upfront licensing and integration costs of higher end solutions.”
A major feature of NetERP, as in its NetSuite, NetCRM and Oracle Small Business Suite products, is the “dashboard” approach of role-based, customizable views. NetERP provides users with customizable real-time dashboards with up-to-the moment information which that particular user needs to complete his job or interact with your company.
“The dashboards are a fundamental part of the product, not an afterthought,” Rollings said. “With the old ERP packages, it’s something found at the end of the list.”
NetERP offers features currently available in NetSuite, its integrated ERP/CRM solution, including multi-company consolidation and multi-currency, multi-location inventory and financials. NetERP adds advanced capabilities such as serialized inventory, multiple units of measure, matrix option items, and quantity-based pricing.
NetERP includes B2B/B2C e-commerce capabilities, including Web store, customer, vendor and employee portals. These portals can include customer-specific pricing levels, terms-based purchasing, and catalog item availability based on inventory status at the moment of order.
It also offers UPS integration, to associate shipping information from UPS WorldShip with orders in NetERP.
NetERP is customizable to specific business needs and business processes. And customization is automatically carried forward across product releases, so there’s no need to re-implement them at every upgrade.
NetERP can be implemented as a point solution for managing the back-office business processes only, or as an element of NetSuite. When included in NetSuite, NetERP is integrated with front-office functionality to provide complete business process automation. As a result of NetLedger’s single application architecture philosophy, NetERP can be easily upgraded to the NetSuite product, offering ERP integration with CRM and financials.
“All the transactions in ERP are what make CRM usable. With NetSuite, you can make promises with confidence and deliver with conviction,” Rollings said.
NetERP will be delivered to current subscribers of NetSuite during August and September for no additional charge. It will be made generally available in September both as a stand-alone offering, and as part of NetSuite.
