InformationWeek

Tyson is one of scores of SAP customers that will upgrade this year, most often from one of the releases of System R/3 version 3.x. Like Tyson, many of these companies will find the work challenging, expensive, and time-consuming, says David Boulanger, service director for the SAP advisory service at AMR Research.

Depending on the complexity of a company's implementation, customers moving from version 3.x to version 4.5 or 4.6 will spend approximately one-fourth to one-third of the amount spent on the initial implementation, according to an AMR report. That can range from $1.4 million to $7.4 million.

Of course, the price tag covers more than the cost of the system, Boulanger says. Some users are using the upgrade to re-evaluate their initial SAP implementations to make sure the platform is well-prepared to support E-commerce when the time comes. Most users will also thoroughly test each piece of the system that changes in the upgrade, analysts say, and the new GUI and altered functions will require SAP customers to retrain virtually all their users.

Despite the cost and time involved in upgrading the system, Michael Sylvester, SAP's product manager for accounting, says new functionality in release 4.6B will unify enterprise information even more than prior releases and make the data accessible to all the people who need it.

"For example, we take certain functionality that had always belonged to someone in accounts receivable and make it available to anyone in the company who deals with a customer," Sylvester says. "Salesmen in the field don't need to know everything that goes on in accounting, but they do need to know what a customer's account looks like and whether they owe money."