Procurement - Fits the Bill.

(From Financial Director)

Byline: Ben King.

According to a recent survey of more than 1,000 companies by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, 12% of companies have experienced a 'business critical failure' of their accounting packages over the past two years.

The benefits an integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) system can bring are well known and regularly publicised by the software vendors themselves - greater visibility of financials and inventory, more accurate accounting, faster invoicing and reduced operating costs. The first decision is to choose the right package, as options vary from complex ERP software from vendors such as SAP and Oracle to simpler offerings from Sage.

Accantia Health and Beauty switched from SAP to Sage Line 500 because it offered a more straightforward solution. "Our core business is marketing and selling our products," says Simon Pinks, group financial controller at Accantia. "Financials is just a cost of doing business. We were looking at the simplest installation we could do."

Meanwhile, malt supplier Muntons chose SAP because it was the only solution that could handle the complex task of tracking and grading the different types of barley, a crucial element in the company's commercial success.

Broadly speaking, the simpler accounting packages in the ICAEW survey, such as Sage Line 50 and Exchequer Enterprise, tend to achieve the highest user satisfaction ratings compared with more integrated offerings such as Oracle Financials and SAP R/3.