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Comment by nocubicles | Hacker News Reader

How long does implementing Salesforce takes usually, lets say in a company with 10 users(salespeople?)?

I have implemented 10-13 SAP Saas ERP systems in last couple of years and the projects are around 2-4 months with 1-2 consultants working on the project for a company of ~50 users. But ERP is much wider then just CRM, it includes all business processes.

Can Salesforce be self implemented by the company or is consulting needed? ERP cannot be self implemented, definitly needs consulting both on configurating the system and also changing companies business processes.

Its still amazing how Saas EPR can be implemented in this short time given it used to take atleast 1 year due to the need of setting up infrastructure and all over more complexity.

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I've done 20+ implementations over the last 6 years for small (8 person non-profit) to large ($2B revenue, 5000+ users) organizations.

I still find it hard to estimate implementation times, and I think most people greatly underestimate the time and resources required.

In your hypothetical sales organization with 10 users, I would estimate 2-4 months depending on how completely you want to migrate your business to the platform. You need time to work with leadership to outline broad strategic goals for the new CRM and to sit with end users to actually translate their existing processes onto the platform. This might take 1 or 2 consultants working 20-30 hours/week.

I understand my bias here, but I cannot recommend finding an implementation partner (consultant) enough. Half of my work is fixing terrible half-implementations done internally by the "tech guy" that no one wants to use.

If it covers just sales and there's no complex requirements,you'd be up and going in a couple of weeks,maybe in 3 if there's lots of back and forth. However,if there are plans to implement CPQ or some integrations,then it'd be much longer. CRM can be self implemented, however if the company doesn't have a dedicated resource I would not recommend it, especially if there's any potential for growth,as it's very yeasy to make a spaghetti crm as well..

I do a lot of SF community implementations in the range of 10-20k users. My projects are typically 4-6 weeks with a team of maybe 5 on average. Granted, we're a small company with very very good talent. There's no way an Accenture or PWC could do what we do in the same timeframe.

What would you say makes it faster to implement a SaaS ERP compared to an on premise one?

Well for starters the product is smaller and not that extendable. So it means when typically with on-prem you start developing and customizing the software to fit it into company procedures then with Saas ERP company needs to fit into ERP processes.

The UI is based on HTML and therefore users like it more and are not that hesitant to start using it and less training is needed.

Public API-s that you can just take and make integrations, no need for allowing access through firewall etc.

There are many more but these are just some that I can think of right now.

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