On the heels of strong SAP Business ByDesign customer and partner momentum, SAP today announced the U.S. launch of SAP Business ByDesign enabled for the public sector.

Developed for cities, counties, school boards as well as education and research organizations, SAP Business ByDesign enabled for the public sector combines SAP’s core ERP capabilities with features specific to public sector interests, and helps streamline daily operations as well as facilitate encumbrance accounting, GASB reporting, budgeting and fund enablement.

“Our public sector customers have shared that they need solutions that will empower them to receive accurate, timely and overall better business information, so they can improve their decision making and agility, and best serve the community,” said Elizabeth McGowan, Global Cloud Strategy Lead of Public Services, SAP. “However, because they typically work with such scarce funding and limited resources, many have delayed modernizing their IT environments. This presents significant challenges when it comes to obtaining the business intelligence they need, and we want to help.”

With SAP Business ByDesign enabled for the public sector, public sector companies get to enjoy the inherent benefits of cloud: continuous innovation, less IT overhead, and lower total cost of ownership. Specifically, SAP Business ByDesign enabled for the public sector will offer the following benefits:

• Simplification : the ability to consolidate disparate and non-integrated legacy IT systems, reduce complexity and lower total cost of ownership
• Security: a comprehensive approach to protecting data across data storage, the application and database, data center facilities and the network
• Standardization : improve delivery of government services with pre-built best practices finetuned from years of SAP’s business process expertise
• Accountability : unprecedented transparency to meet stakeholder reporting requirements through robust built-in analytics and dashboards with metrics for easy access on any device
• Visibility : the ability to share and see data across functions and departments and make timely, in-the-moment decisions via analytics that have been built into every process
• Employee Engagement : enable an increasingly mobile workforce with strong usability for day to day activities

“SAP Business ByDesign has been instrumental in helping our organization run better. Since we started using the solution, we have seen significant gains in efficiency,” said Roxanne Mongeau, IT director, Ponts Jacques Cartier & Champlain Bridges. “For example, SAP Business ByDesign helped us reduce our approval timeframes for large volumes of purchase orders from days to just a few hours. Now with functionality enabled for the public sector, we are looking forward to even more productivity gains.”

The launch of this new functionality also marks SAP Business ByDesign’s first entry into the public sector in the U.S. – a market opportunity estimated at approximately $1 billion with more than 89,000 public sector organizations in the country.

“The public sector should be empowered to focus on what matters most: helping communities thrive. While it is an important new industry for SAP Business ByDesign, serving this sector also extends the impact of our innovation to the community,” said Darren Koch, chief product officer, SMB, SAP. “As we double down on the product development of SAP Business ByDesign, we want to continue to deliver integrated out of the box, vertical-specific experiences for our customers.”

To demonstrate the new functionality and share details on SAP Business ByDesign enabled for the public sector, SAP – together with strategic partners Navigator, Seidor, ERP Logic, Phoenix Consulting – will be exhibiting (Booth #425) at the Government Finance Officer Association (GFOA) Annual Conference in Denver, Colorado from May 21-24th.