Warehouse Wednesday: What Does an ERP Cost?

Editor's Note: This is a prologue to a supplement to Murph's Blue Paper Comparison of ERPs.

The Blue Paper was published as part of Insightful Accountant's "Be Insightful" Premium content.

The introduction of this feature is published below; however, to continue reading you must be registered for "Be Insightful" Premium content.

A couple of weeks ago I presented a Blue Paper on ERPs with a comparison between nine of the top ERPs on the market. I also included Intuit's new 'Intuit Enterprise Suite' in that comparison, although it was impossible to actually evaluate it since I had no access to determine things like 'Ease of Use,' 'Ease of Implementation,' and 'Configurability,' just to name three of the nine evaluation criteria used for evaluating the other products.

Price comparison was based on relative valuation, not exact pricing since most ERPs are quoted and retail pricing is not routinely available.

But a lot of the comments during the hour-long webinar revolved around pricing, so after a little more checking with some of my buddies, I have some very rough comparative pricing for the ERPs I evaluated.

In all of these cases we have developed pricing based on a number of users being twelve (12) full-access licensed users; although that doesn't not prevent an ERP Administrator from limiting access to specific functionality. While many ERPs offer user licenses based on various access, like 'view only' or 'report only', we have not configured this price comparison based on such limitations.