Summary of Research Findings

Yano Research Institute has conducted a questionnaire to domestic private enterprises in July to November, 2018, regarding use of enterprise software, and has accepted responses from 528 enterprises. The questionnaire included the question of whether SaaS has been implemented or not to the enterprises that had already introduced ERP (for finance & accounting, HR & wages, sales administration, production management & SCM), CRM or SFA.

The implementation ratio of SaaS was 2.8% at 495 enterprises using finance & accounting systems, whereas the ratio was 5.0% at 483 enterprises using HR and wages systems.  Adoption rate of ERP has not largely changed since the first survey carried out in 2012. There is no tendency for the implementation rate of SaaS to largely rise in the short period of time, but it is expected to gradually rise in the long-term perspectives, as a number of enterprises have shown intention to adopt SaaS in the future, according to the responses in the questionnaire. Nevertheless, rather than SaaS, adoption of IaaS and PaaS, i.e., the cloud computing in infrastructure and platform respectively, seems to be expanding more proactively. 

On the other hand, the adoption rate of SaaS was 28.0% at 132 enterprises that had already introduced CRM/SFA, showing steady growth from the past survey results.  It indicates that CRM and SFA are likely to grow further on the SaaS environment. Note that the implementation ratio of SaaS does not include that of IaaS and PaaS. 

Noteworthy Topics

When asked to the companies planning for implementation or upgrading of the systems (165 enterprises for finance & accounting systems, 89 f HR & wages systems, and 146 for sales administration systems) about which kind of solutions they were considering, those which answered “SaaS” accounted for 9.1% at enterprises considering for finance & accounting system, 9.0% at those for HR & wages, and 4.1% for sales administration. Although the respective rates are not high, when considering that there are about 10% of SaaS demands for finance & accounting as well as HR & wages, the opportunity for SaaS to be considered for adoption is likely to increase.

While the tasks for the systems of sales administration, production management and SCM largely differ at each company, the tasks for finance & accounting systems and HR & wages systems do not largely differ by company, which makes the companies easier to use SaaS for the respective systems. In addition, vendors have increased the types of SaaS to provide to the users, so that the SaaS users are expected to gradually grow in the long term.

Research Outline