That’s are story. With are more recent analysis, we’re sticking to that story.
FreeBalance to ERP Price Comparison
Many government tenders for financial management, procurement and human resources systems are open. Prices are often announced as tenders are opened. There are some cases where we discover what the winning prices was – sometimes though publicity from the winning bidder. The graph shown above compares the FreeBalance bid price with Tier 1 Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) competitors chronologically.
FreeBalance and partners had a lower bid price than Tier 1 ERP and partners 93% of the time where we have pricing information.
The tenders in the analysis were for “turnkey” solutions that required software, middleware, implementation, training and support services usually for 5 years. Additional computer hardware is often part of requirements. This comparison is instructive because it shows the approximate difference in the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) among vendor solutions. The graph shows a significant TCO advantage for FreeBalance. We believe that the TCO advantage improves over time because of the complexities in managing ERP customization, forced upgrades and increased IT resources.
The mean of Tier 1 ERP price is 222% of the FreeBalance price (the total amount of all Tier 1 ERP bids compared to the total amount of all FreeBalance bids). The average Tier 1 ERP price is 185% of the FreeBalance price (the average of comparing the ratio of each bid). The difference can be explained by scope where there were the price gap tends to be wider for projects with a smaller scope.
FreeBalance to all Vendors Price Comparison
We also compare all prices against all bidders.
FreeBalance has succeeded in having the lowest price in 54% of the bids for which we know the prices. The average price from multiple vendors is about 50% higher than the average price from FreeBalance. Many of the tenders in the analysis were of smaller scope and involved smaller vendors. this explains why there is the opposite pattern in this analysis compared to looking at Tier 1 ERP.
Making Government Software More Sustainable
I suppose that we could pat ourselves on the back for such a good job.
No. We’re looking for better ways to improve the financial sustainability of FreeBalance GRP implementations. Our latest work has been to bring in more agile processes for needs analysis. There are many antiquated processes in GRP implementations designed at the time when the choice was custom-developed software or customizing ERP. This has introduced a number of practices that delay projects significantly, and reduce success rates.