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METANEXT customer testimonial
Metanext: the SAP ByDesign pioneer confirms and signs!
By opting for SAP ByDesign in 2012, Metanext has played a winning game. Not only has the solution accompanied its strong growth, but it also meets its expectations more than ever after it tripled its number of employees.
As a service company with multiple consultants in the field, Metanext needed a solution that would allow it to consolidate the activities of all its employees. With 120 employees and a turnover of €12 million, the business is still growing strongly. But this growth began in 2012, when the company had barely 50 employees.
At that time, a telephone prospecting by SAP led to a discussion that prompted the company to upgrade its existing solutions: accounting managed by Ciel software, which was becoming lightweight in the face of its growth, and eventually its CRM under Salesforce. In fact, faced with strong growth, it needed to move towards greater performance and capacity.
“In addition to accounting, the solution had to be able to offer project profitability measurement and financial management integrated with project management,” explains Tristan Monroe, co-founder and president of the company. “However, we didn’t know if this existed yet. In addition, we chose to use a SaaS-based solution so that we wouldn’t have to manage hardware infrastructure that our 50-person SME budget couldn’t afford.”
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SAP ByDesign: a natural fit for Metanext
“We selected SAP ByDesign because it met our requirements,” explains Tristan Monroe. “It was an innovative and functionally complete cloud solution that covered our needs and offered integrated end-to-end functionality. In addition, SAP offered us a service management-oriented solution that was totally suited to our situation. Indeed, Metanext is one of the pioneers of SAP ByDesign in France.
For the configuration of SAP ByDesign, Metanext calls on CEREALOG, which also assists with the transfer of existing data. This integrator knows the solution and is familiar with the configuration of its modules.
The migration to SAP ByDesign is carried out in two stages: first, invoicing (essential for an SME), then the management of employee activities.
The management of service activities requires an adapted application. In SAP ByDesign for Metanext, every service is a new project in the activities assumed by several employees. It is up to each of them to monitor and report on the activities online. This is essential, as they are mostly located at the customer’s premises. All this, of course, in compliance with the collective agreement.
A positive assessment for all!
After five years of use, the manager has a positive assessment: “The solution has already taken on the management of 700 projects, 50 of which are active projects. And each employee can manage his or her activities, time, expenses and holidays. All the modules of the solution are activated. We’re looking at deploying payroll management in the near future, with pay slips to be produced by a service provider.”
The database in Salesforce was migrated to SAP without any problems, and it is now the CRM that draws its information from SAP.
“We wanted to take full advantage of the power and in-memory performance offered by SAP,” says Edouard Berriot. “The financial director (myself) and management control can easily monitor the business with dashboards showing profitability by project, by division, but also efficiency rates by consultant, by department, or globally. All this data is easily usable in SAP ByDesign. It even gives us the ability to display and format the results in an Excel spreadsheet.”
Remaining autonomous for parameterisation
Like most SMEs, Metanext appreciates the possibility of having some autonomy over its ERP. “We have control over the main parameters. So I can modify or change certain important parameters without assistance,“ explains Édouard Berriot. “For more complex interventions, we have an evolutionary maintenance service contract with CEREALOG (which is perfectly adapted to SMEs). SAP ByDesign meets our needs perfectly and can even do much more. In addition, its HTML5 ergonomics make it fluid and very pleasant to use on a daily basis.”
For his part, Tristan Monroe notes that the performance is up to his expectations: “I hear that there is a HANA engine that works in memory… In any case, it is all transparent for us. We have no technical constraints or performance problems, even for the most complex queries. And above all, we don’t have to worry about the infrastructure.”
