The Ultimate SAP Business ByDesign Licensing Guide (with examples)

SAP Business ByDesign license pricing can be a tricky topic, as can all all enterprise resource planning licensing, pricing and cost estimations which is why we have created this guide to help you evaluate the cost of SAP Business ByDesign in 2021.

As a leading ERP comparison and consultancy service, people always ask us the questions about SAP Business ByDesign license pricing and costs:

• How much does Business ByDesign cost to implement?
• What is the pricing of SAP Business ByDesign licenses?
• Are there hidden costs to SAP Business ByDesign?

So we wanted to create this article to set the world to rights and help business leaders who are evaluating the pricing and costs of licenses and benefits of SAP Business ByDesign.

If you're interested in learning more about the real life strengths and weaknesses of ByDesign,  make sure you download our solution overview.

If you need to get quick, accurate hassle free SAP Business ByDesign license costs and pricing or implementation costs, then we can provide this in less than 24 hours below:

Table of Contents

1. SAP Business ByDesign Licensing Explained

2. How much does SAP Business ByDesign cost to implement?

3. The Hidden Costs of SAP Business ByDesign

SAP Business ByDesign Licensing Explained

How does SAP Business ByDesign license pricing work?

SAP ByDesign licences are primarily priced on a user basis. Simply put, if your employees are accessing the SAP Business ByDesign system, they will need to be licensed. If they don't access ERP, they won't need to pay for a license.

There are three types of SAP Business ByDesign user licenses which we'll explain below:

1. SAP Business ByDesign Advanced User License

This is the most powerful user license and has access to every capability that ByDesign has. It is primarily used for heavy supply chain management focussed users and therefore doesn't tend to be necessary in professional services or people centric organizations. As it is the most powerful user, it is also the most expensive SAP Business ByDesign license type.

2. SAP Business ByDesign Standard User License

This user is a jack of all trades, providing access to most areas of the system outside of some advanced supply chain functionality. You'll need these Business ByDesign users for your finance team, executives, project managers and sales people primarily. But they only need these licenses if they are viewing analytics from different work centres, administering projects or approving purchase orders or using the inbuilt CRM functionality within the ERP solution.

3. SAP Business ByDesign Self Service User License

For the employees in your business that will use SAP Business ByDesign for requesting holidays, purchasing items from the systems catalogues or simply logging time, you will most likely need ByD Self Service licenses. As the name suggests, these user licenses allow your employees to input data into the system, saving you time and the heartache of using spreadsheets. They are the cheapest SAP Business ByDesign user type as a result.

To work out which users you need for your business, go to our pricing estimation page by clicking the image below:

What's included in SAP Business ByDesign license pricing:

The first thing to note is that SAP Business ByDesign is a Cloud ERP solution. That means that the license pricing includes the following components as default:

• Software licensing: the right to use the software and any updates to the software.
• Software hosting: the physical infrastructure the software is hosted on plus maintenance and upgrades.
• Product Support: if the software has a fault, you can call SAP (or log a ticket) to fix it. 

What's not included in SAP Business ByDesign license costs:

What is important to note is that level one & two support is not included within the SAP Business ByDesign license costs. That means if your employees have day to day problems or haven't been trained correctly, you'll need an additional support contract in place with an SAP Business ByDesign partner or systems integrator to help them solve these problems on the fly. 

Typically you can buy this additional support in blocks of yearly hours, and typically you'll need anywhere from 250 hours and beyond per year, charged at a rate set by your SAP Business ByDesign partner or ERP systems integrator.

Ballpark SAP Business ByDesign License Costs

It's hard to give ballpark costs of SAP Business ByDesign license pricing, but we'll have a go. At ERP Research we have worked with over 250+ businesses during our careers that have evaluated SAP Business ByDesign as a potential ERP solution. 

During this time, we have seen costs range from $30,000 - $250,000 per annum. The pricing of your subscription will depend on the mixture of users and of course industries of scale.

If you'd like to get a more accurate sense of the SAP Business ByDesign licensing costs, click here.

How much does SAP Business ByDesign cost to implement?

Ask any SAP Business ByDesign or ERP implementation veteran this question and they will laugh at you scoldingly before saying the stock answer, 'how long is a piece of string?'.

At ERP Research we're not so cruel.

However, calculating the cost of any ERP implementation, including SAP ByDesign depends on many factors including:

• How many legal entities and localizations you need to accommodate in SAP Business ByDesign ERP. The more legal entities and charts of accounts plus local accounting jurisdictions that need to be conformed to, the higher the cost of implementation.
  
  
• The scope of your project or how many modules you need to implement in ByDesign i.e. finance, project management, inventory management, supply chain management, human resources, CRM. The more modules you have in scope, the more expensive the project will be.
  
  
• Your organizations role in the project: will you dedicate some people to help do some of the grunt work, prepare data and so on? Or will you need heavy support from your SAP Business ByDesign partner? More support = more money spent.
  
  
• Your ability to change: if you can't adapt your processes to the SAP ByD system, you will need to adapt the system and that costs $$$. By far the cheapest way to implement an ERP system, including SAP Business ByDesign is to adapt to the way the system works. It is far more expensive (and painful in the long run) to adapt the system to the way your business works. 
  
  
• Onshore or offshore resources: many SAP Business ByDesign ERP implementation partners will use a mixture of implementation consultants that are based in country, as well as in locations where labour is cheaper. Using the maximum amount of resources in offshore centres can be the cheapest way to implement, but having a local presence also tends to increase quality and decrease risk, so choose wisely.
  
  
• Integrations: the cost of integrating SAP Business ByDesign Cloud ERP with any of your other internal business applications is a large variable in the implementation cost and is dependent on the quantity of those interfaces as well as the quality. SAP Business ByDesign has hundreds of APIs which allow for bidirectional communication with other applications, but that's not to say that your other applications play nicely with others. Also, when considering the price of integration, consider that the costs are not just at the initial setup - you will need your ByDesign partner to maintain those integrations which also bears annual or recurring fees.

Really, how much does it cost to implement SAP Business ByDesign?

The right answer is, it depends. But if you really insist, we'll tell you. At ERP Research we have seen SAP Business ByDesign implementations range from $30,000 - $450,000.

The lower end of the scale is typically for simple financial management only implementations for one or two legal entities in one or two countries. Remember, less complexity = less cost. 

The more requirements that are added to the implementation, the closer you get to the higher end of the scale and the more costs will increase. At the higher end, we typically see multi-country rollouts - 5+ countries with a large functional scope - i.e. finance & accounting, project management, manufacturing, supply chain management and lots of integration.

That said, the overwhelming majority of SAP Business ByDesign ERP implementations cost somewhere between $30,000 - $100,000.

If you need to get an accurate, hassle free implementation cost estimate for SAP Business ByDesign, click the link below to get started:

The Hidden Costs of SAP Business ByDesign

In the world of enterprise software and ERP, hidden costs are a plague. It's not uncommon for ERP vendors to use a variety of tactics that increase the price of your licensing or implementation after you have committed to a contract. 

So, lets review some of the hidden costs for SAP Business ByDesign Cloud ERP below:

• Third party software: it's rare that any enterprise resource planning solution will provide 100% functional coverage and often you will need to buy additional software, either from your SAP Business ByDesign systems integrator or from another third party. Sometimes these costs are provided up front, sometimes organizations only work out they need additional software during the implementation process. Always check this with your chosen SAP Business ByDesign implementation partner.
  
  
• Other SAP products: similiar to the point above, sometimes you may need software from SAP which is not part of the core SAP Business ByDesign licensing model. For example, if you need more complex reporting than the out of the box ByDesign solution provides, you may need one of SAP's reporting solutions to compliment it. Otherwise, if you're doing complex integration work between multiple software systems, you may need SAP middleware technology. However, in most cases you can use third party technology if you wish as well.
  
  
• Renewal price hikes: it takes a long time and a lot of money to implement an ERP solution, so much so that you're probably not going to want to cancel your contract after a few years and implement a new one. Although we haven't heard any reports of this happening with SAP Business ByDesign, some ERP vendors are notorious for increasing your annual costs after the initial contract period is over. 
  
  
• Additional software license costs: it's common for ERP vendors to provide pricing incentives to get you to commit to an ERP solution whilst you're still comparing and evaluating. That discounted pricing is often valid and applicable to the users you purchased in the initial contract, but is sometimes not applicable to additional users you purchase.

These are just some of the hidden costs of SAP Business ByDesign and of ERP projects as a whole. If you need more information on pricing or help in understanding this topic, or anything else related to your upcoming ERP project, schedule a consultation for free.

Need more SAP Business ByDesign information?

At ERP Research we have worked with hundreds of clients who have evaluated SAP Business ByDesign during their ERP evaluation and comparison process. 

If you'd like more information on SAP Business ByDesign pricing, functionality, modules, third party extensions, integration and much more, check out our solution overview.

We can also help you to crystallise your ERP needs as an organization and get accurate pricing estimates for SAP Business ByDesign, plus organize personalized ByDesign product demonstrations suited to your needs.