ERP 2.0? Zoho Open Product Review
Ever had an emerging trend sneak up on you? How about one that snuck up on 45 million users worldwide - what’s it mean to you? Could be big changes in how you Profit From ERP - - I’m Gene Hammons, Practice Director Software Selection and Implementation….
(MFX)
Welcome to ERPodcast, the small business edition – but even huge multinationals need to know – there’s a change in business software deployment – we’ll discuss.
We’re going to be taking a look at Zoho, if you don’t know, they started with a free CRM model and soon developed apps or modules extending functionality into other departments - From a 2001 initial launch into the Japanese market, Zoho has expanded worldwide and
by 2014 – 15 million worldwide users,
20 million two years later
by 2019, a reported 45m worldwide users. That kind of exponential growth means you should probably start paying attention
Not technically ERP, but a Business Operating System – as they refer to it, for predominately small to medium businesses. We’re not replacing SAP ERP with Zoho anytime soon.
But there’s a new approach we’re referring to as the Cloud Deployment Model – not just cloud based software, but how you implement cloud based software - Instead of teams of 200+ dollar onsite software consultants we’re seeing online business coaches, videos, tutorials and implementation exercises. We’ve seen this same model emerging in Project Management with WorkFront, in construction apps with BuilderTrend– and now some of the Microsoft resellers are picking up on it – it’s a huge change in both costs and approach to deploying business software.
So while you’re current ERP system still has a few years of life in it, you need to know that sooner or later, you’re more likely going to be deploying some types of business software using the new Cloud Deployment Model – one way or another the cloud deployment model is coming your way.
We’ll take you out to a recent Zoho Roadshow
But today is not just about entry level business software – it’s about the same theories you’ll follow whether your company just passed the 1million dollar revenue mark, the 10 million or the 100 million dollar signpost.
So no matter what your business size, you can continue to Profit, From ERP.
MFX Out
Sponsor Break
MFX Live room montage
It’s Thursday at the Phoenix road show for a software called Zoho – you may have seen them as a free CRM product a few years back – well, things have developed since then.
Zoho is a worldwide software provider with over 6,000 employees across the globe. Headquartered in India, with US HQ in Pleasanton California, Zoho started out 22 years ago as a free CRM product and they’re now in 180 countries with a reported 45+ million users. I’m always a little suspect of user counts from software companies – but the amazing thing with Zoho is the doubling of total users within a 2 year period. So even if they’re cooking the numbers – the same recipe that cooked up 20 million a couple of years ago is now cooking up 45+ million – and hey, since it’s all cloud based, they may be totally accurate.
The free starter model of CRM was popular with a few software publishers – you start out for free with basic functionality, and slowly as you grow and become more enamored with the software, and especially as you start making more money via better customer contact and service, you graduate to a paid version and become customers for life.
Zoho started with this model, as did Bitrix24, Hubspot,Pipedrive,Agile and several others.
In any case, Zoho developed a pretty nice CRM offering – and they didn’t stop there. They moved into a project module, webpage building, hosting, social media management – and by about 2011 even launched a financials package.
Then we started hearing the references saying “Zoho ERP” – now that’s not Zoho marketing material – they still refer to themselves as ‘The Operating System for Business’ – however the ERP term kept being bandied about in the trade papers. Only here’s the thing about ERP – it’s very powerful, it runs entire companies, has modules for finance, operations, supply chain, purchasing, inventory – on and on – so calling yourself ERP is a large step above a ‘free CRM’ program.
So when the Zoho road show rolled into Phoenix, we showed up here to check it out.
Swoosh
Meanwhile back in the studio - The last time we evaluated Zoho, probably 4 years ago, we knew they had a global presence, we were checking them out for a client Evaluating CRM – and we pretty much focused on the core CRM functionality – yes, there were other modules available, Zoho project seemed interesting but our client needed a bit more in that area. There were also other modules, but the world is full of software companies trying to be all things to all people – and after a while it gets to be background noise.
We’d also set up a demo from Bitrix, remember another free CRM product – we set up a demo on their Project Module – and while it’s hard to judge software on a single demo, this one went so terribly wrong, was not well prepped and the demo team showing it was clearly inexperienced – so we probably made a wrong assumption and lumped every ‘free CRM’ extra module into the same wastebin – not saying that was a fair assessment – but when you’re juggling 7 or 8 software vendors early in a demo, a bad first demo is a quick way to narrow the list. But we learned an incredibly valuable lesson that we’ll get to later when we start talking about implementation.
Back to Zoho –
By 2019, Zoho has released 40 different modules – CRM of course, and Zoho Project, as well as Marketing, Desk, Analytics, Social Media Management, HR and Recruitment, Finance, Estimates, Invoices, Time Tracking, Bank Integration, Customer Portals, Inventory – the list goes on and on
And in the hands of the Zoho direct staff, you can quickly see that Zoho has a very intuitive, logical suite of products that far outstrip anything you can do with QuickBooks or other basic accounting software.
So, is it fair to call it ERP? Well, that starts to become a difference without much of a distinction.
Zoho, from what we can tell so far, is a great option where it fits. And that’s going to be mostly in the smaller offices – a company from 1- 30 people is probably the core demographic for Zoho – not that it couldn’t scale larger.
What it does, it does extremely well. But it doesn’t do everything.
Take for example, Websites – you could, as an end user, without having to be a graphic artist or web designer, set up and publish a relatively nice website with a lot of stock features – yet it wouldn’t look like a templated website, you may have seen Wix,Weebly, SiteBuilderor some of the others that look really nice, but look really like it came from a kit. Zoho goes beyond that.
You can set up your marketing to interact with the Website and capture web leads and feed them into CRM – you can capture web sales and feed directly in to financials. Tie back to social media – use chat – online credit card payments – all these things and more.
Then, as you get better at using the tools, run a heat map to track Analytical behavior of your audience – where do they lose interest in a page, when do they stop scrolling down and move off your site.
So you can use this whole suite of Zoho modules – or you can connect to a WordPress site, feed into QuickBooks instead of ZohoBooks – use marketing tools in Zoho or go to MailChimp.
It’s all up to you.
But really advanced features? Well, Zoho Inventory tracks basic inventory levels really well. Does it forecast future sales, production orders, PO’s, sales commitments to tell me I have 650 widgets to sell next August? Likely not without some serious configuration but given the Custom Apps development environment, who knows?
Now is this a big recommendation that you ditch QuickBooks and run out and jump on the Zoho bandwagon?
No – no way – not at all.
As we always say, Business Requirements dictate the decision.
But what we would say is, that QuickBooks, even with it’s majority marketshare among US small businesses is not the defacto default anymore.
Remember how we talked about Zoho interfacing with QuickBooks, and WordPress, as well as MailChimp – and the list goes on – today’s small business has to operate in a lot of different technologies – and a modern, cloud based back office software needs to know how to operate in all these areas.
What we are saying is that there is a step between buying QuickBooks on Amazon.com for $200 and spending $100,000 on ERP – not to say there’s not lesser ERP offerings out there for $20 or $30 thousand. But Zoho One, the entire suite of products is $30 per user per month or $75 a seat for the flex user plan.
Now let’s take a step back before we cut that check to Zoho.
There are a lot of software offerings out there. Our consulting practice helps our client companies go through the selection process and the implementation process – getting everything configured and up and running. We’re not the software consultants who work on the technology – we’re the business consultants who help your internal team thorough the project.
As we mentioned before, how do you know when is the right time to invest in new technology to use efficiency and productivity to keep a lean staff with tight operations?
To us, it’s all driven by the business requirements.
We’ve told the story before of the client who told us they couldn’t spend more than $10 thousand on software – until we showed them how to cut back on a $10 thousand a month phone room labor by switching to online order entry.
