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I’ve just got the news about Part III of Panorama’s ERP Report in my inbox. If you missed my analysis of the report, please read it first: part three builds on findings of the first two. I know that I am biased when writing about this, but how can I not be? Microsoft Dynamics is the best choice ERP and the report (as a whole) clearly shows why exactly.

The third round of this report focuses on ERP implementations in SMB segment, and has been conducted over a fairly large participant base in the US, Europe, Asia and Australia.

The results are broken down by organization size (SMB and Large) which is good, because there’s been some criticism of the results of the second report regarding organization size.

The report analyzes the following areas:

• ERP vendor market share
• Implementation duration and cost
• Implementation budget vs. actual costs
• Other variables (resources, implementation type, etc.)

While it is interesting to learn about implementation cost structure and approaches, this report won’t help you decide which product you should go for if you are an SMB. Overall averages delivered in this report don’t do specific products right, because you can’t benchmark an SAP implementation or Sage implementation against the same average figures. This is so especially because SMB is more inclined to Microsoft and Tier II vendors than Large segment, and high share of expensive ERP products distorts the picture that most SMBs are looking for.

IMHO, breakdown by vendors would add a lot of weight to this report, because, as a commenter on this blog pointed out, an implementation of SAP is ruled by different metrics than that of Microsoft Dynamics, and putting all of the figures in the same bucket adds little value in understanding the forces behind a specific production implementation process.

For me, this report to has a pure statistical value (as compared to previous two which revealed important facts and demystified a lot of misconceptions about ERP implementations).

But nevertheless, I invite you to check out the report at Panorama’s website.