There was a time, many years ago, when the future of SunSystems was uncertain, though everything looked wonderfully rosy at the time. Systems Union, the British company who developed the product, was still in friendly private hands, and sales were booming. SunSystems was the best (as it still is) international financial software system on the planet. Those of us whose lives depended on the product were prospering. Actually, Systems Union’s  P&L looked good. The problem, the company’s balance sheet, was probably one of inattention. The sails were billowing, the sun was shining. They just didn’t notice the rocks beneath the surface.

Resellers such as our company (LLP Group) enjoyed unusually comfortable payment terms and Systems Union’s dunning style was gentle and ineffective. It was a cosy, successful, touchy-feely company and we were all one happy family. They even took all of their employees on expensive foreign holidays, and, on one occasion, some of us resellers too.

They had also embarked on huge enhancements to SunSystems, both functional and technical. GUIs were new and improving rapidly (yes, we’re talking about many, many, years ago) and COBOL, which they were using them, was an impediment to some of this. All these development projects were late and ever more expensive programmers were being thrown into the development den.

And then there came huge devaluations in Asian currencies and debtor and cash values at Systems Union’s successful Hong Kong offshoot had to be revalued down. All in all, the balance sheet didn’t look good, however bright the operating profit.

So, many resellers looked for lifelines, just in case. We looked at SAP R3. As it turned out, this was an expensive and very instructive mistake.

It would be wrong to suggest that I had thought of SunSystems as a toy. Its simple and elegant building blocks come in a relatively small kit, but, just as with Lego, you can build nearly everything with them. But I had certainly thought of SAP R3 as a ‘grown up’ product, and just as when we’re young we dream (foolishly) of getting ‘grown-up’ versions of toy cars, toy guns and Barbie dolls (or Ken), so I had assumed that our consultants would enjoy the upgrade to SAP R3, a chance to become adult in the ERP consulting world.

SAP was then trying (it still is, perhaps) to come down in the world by selling to mid-sized companies rather than only to the largest ones, so they leapt at the opportunity to work with a company such as ours who knew how do deliver projects in under hundreds and thousands of days.

So we sent out best SunSystems consultants on SAP R3 courses. This one would learn about the inventory control module, this one about the sales module, that one about the asset register, and so on. And therein lay the problem and the reason why our consultants, unexpectedly, hated the whole experience.

Their worlds shrank, and their horizons shortened.

The wonderful thing about working with SunSystems is that you can know the whole product, understand the whole of the company you’re working for, and design a complete solution. You can see from one end of an organisation to the other, from sales discount policy to the resulting debits and credits, and the management reports that international managers need. This wasn’t the case with SAP R3. You just couldn’t know everything.

And the style of the product turned out to be different too. It may be an imprecise analogy, but if SunSystems is like Lego, a small number of small components from which you can build just about anything, SAP R3 is more like a vast array of very large fixed-purpose machines that you have to put together, joining up all the wires and cogs and panels, unsure if they really fit together. The consultant who knows this machine, doesn’t know the others.

Those of us who work with SunSystems love its simplicity and the infinite possibilities that follow from it. Consultants can use their imagination to configure what the customer needs, albeit sometimes with workarounds (equally necessary in SAP R3 I believe). There’s no coding to do, unlike with SAP R3, and in any case coding isn’t possible.

Customers love it too. In some cases they’ve even ‘downgraded’ from SAP to SunSystems. In other cases, when they’ve grown and ‘grown up’ into SAP R3 they express nostalgia for the flexibility and relatively low cost of ownership of SunSystems.

SunSystems is an ideal consulting product. If you’re proficient in it it’s like a musical instrument on which you can play any tune. I’m happy to say that all of those SAP R3 consultants we thrust into adulthood are back in the SunSystems world, and all the happier for it.

See LLP International.

And when I came to design our own products – time@work for professional services management, and expense@work for expense management – I took inspiration from SunSystems and not SAP. I designed it as a set of building blocks, like Lego.