As one of the UK’s leading SAP Business One partners, we are often asked; how can SAP Business One (SAP B1) improve my business?
This question generally comes from companies who are looking to review or replace their current ERP or accounting software and is often followed with the question “isn’t SAP too big for my business?”
There is a common misconception that SAP is only suitable for the larger enterprise businesses however what most people don’t know is that SAP B1 was specifically designed for the SME market and over 70% of SAP’s customers are small businesses.
So now we have put that myth to bed, let’s have a look at the benefits of SAP Business One for your SME business.
Let’s start with the basics… what is SAP Business One?
Often known as business management software. SAP Business One or SAP B1 as some people know it, is an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solution specifically designed for the small and medium enterprises. A powerful and scalable solution, SAP Business One (SAP B1) offers you an affordable way to manage your entire business processes from accounting and financials to purchasing and inventory.
SAP Business One allows you to handle all our department needs with one solution giving you greater insight into your business and therefore enabling you to make more informed decisions and drive profitable growth.
SAP Business One (SAP B1) can help you to boost your business in several key areas. These include:
- Financial management
- Sales and Customer management
- Purchasing and Inventory Control
- Business intelligence
- Manufacturing planning
- Analytics and reporting
You can also take advantage of extensive industry specific features built around the SAP Business One solution. With more than 500 pre-packaged, fully integrated industry specific solutions available worldwide, there isn’t much SAP Business One can’t do for your business.
Let’s now touch on some of the functionality available for Financial management in SAP Business One.
SAP Business One provides a complete set of tools for Financial Management, these cover key areas such as:
- Accounting – SAP Business One gives you the ability to automate the handling of all key accounting processes including accounts payable and receivable and journal entries.
- Banking –This module handles a full range of monetary transactions including processing reconciliations, bank statements and the ability to quickly process payments from various methods including cash, credit card and bank transfers.
- Controlling – You can manage project costs, budget and cash flow with greater accuracy and efficiency
- Reporting and Analysis – You can create standard or customised reports using real time data to aid you in your decision-making process and any audit review processes.
- Fixed Assets – This feature allows you to simplify the management of your fixed assets with a virtual function, eliminating the need for repetitive manual data entry
Acquiring new customers is important for business success, but maximising customer relationships is crucial to survival. The SAP Business One Sales and Customer Management functions provides you with the tools to turn prospects into customers, grow customer sales and profitability and increase customer satisfaction. These tools include:
- Sales and Opportunity Management – From first lead to closing the deal, SAP Business One (SAP Business 1) can track all your activities throughout the sales
- Service Management – This module gives you the ability to respond to service calls quickly as well as manage warranty, contracts and service agreements more effectively.
- Marketing Campaign Management – Turn prospects into customers and grow your sales and profitability with the campaign management feature. You can create, manage and analyse marketing activity effectively with this module.
- Reporting and Analysis – Use templates to design detailed reports, from forecasting to pipeline tracking. With this function from SAP Business One you can monitor all aspects of the sales process.
- Customer Management – Synchronise contacts stored in Microsoft Outlook and manage all your customer data in the one place with this module within SAP Business One (SAP B1)
- Mobile Sales – This feature gives you the ability to empower your sales function so they can manage information anywhere at any time on a mobile device.
The SAP Business One Purchasing and Inventory module benefits you by streamlining the complete procurement process from purchase order creation to vendor invoice payment.
As well as achieving cost savings by automating this process, with SAP Business One you gain full transparency into purchasing activities, suppliers and their performance. This module offers:
- Procurement – SAP Business One allows you to optimise your procurement processes such as requisition requests, purchase order and good receipt creation. You can also manage returns and handle multiple currencies.
- Master Data Management – Centralise purchasing processes by managing detailed data in a user-friendly interface. View account balance and purchase analyses while maintaining detailed item purchasing information with price lists and tax information.
- Warehouse and Accounting Integration – Benefit from real-time synchronisation of goods receipts and inventory levels in the warehouse to perform purchase planning with ease and create an accounts payable invoice automatically from a purchase order or goods receipt.
- Accounts Payable – This powerful module from SAP Business 1 gives you the power to plan materials needed and schedule your purchasing. You can also process accounts payable invoices, cancellation and credit memos. All this gives you the ability to lower costs and strengthen your supply chain relationships.
- Reporting – SAP Business One allows you to gain an overview of what matters most. You can generate integrated reports from real-time data to that display in various formats or dashboards.
To aid you in making decisions faster and better, SAP B1 includes a powerful Business Intelligence module that can create reports based on company wide data.
- Report creation and Customisation – With SAP B1 you can access data from multiple sources, create new reports, and customise existing ones in a variety of layouts with minimal IT overhead.
- Interactive Analysis – SAP B1 allows you to see your business from a variety of perspectives by integrating with standard Microsoft Excel functionalities.
- Intuitive tools – Get insights faster with the ability to drag and relate and drill down data and use search assistance and workflow-based alerts.
- Powerful data visualisations – Make better decisions by enhancing your reports with powerful visualisations.
- Analytics with predefined metrics – Improve your cash balance visibility and sales performance dramatically with analytics and predefined key performance indicators.
SAP Business One (SAP B1) can also support the business requirements of a modern manufacturer. It offers the ability to accurately and effectively manage your bills of materials (BOM’s) along with production orders and material requirements, all in one centralised ERP system.
- Bills of Materials (BOM’s) – SAP Business 1 makes it easier for you to store the details relating to how your products are built and sold, and they can be created to cover standard, sales and template types of products.
- Production orders – With SAP Business 1 it is easier to capture the usage of materials required to build your finished products. Production orders can be raised to cover standard and reword production activities.
- Forecasting and Planning – Forecasts allow users to predict demand based on potential future requirements and scenarios, instead of relying solely on received orders. Forecast calculations can often help users foresee future demand for the product and adjust material planning accordingly. These demand forecasts can be used in the MRP software wizard.
- Order Recommendations – SAP Business One offers a recommendation report that the planner can use to automatically select and recommended purchase orders or production orders for automatic creation. For this process, SAP Business One considers several supply and demand sources including stock levels, production orders, sales orders amongst others and if the item is outsourced, SAP Business One easily allows you to convert a production order into a purchase order. You can even consolidate purchase orders to the same supplier into one order, this streamlines your process and saves you time.
SAP Business One can be used whether you are a small, or midsized company. As you expand your business, this cleverly crafted ERP solution, can grow with your business.
Leading technology companies across the world have created “add-ons” for SAP B1, to help tailor it specifically to your needs. Some vendor’s, like Signum Solutions, can provide you with specific versions already tailored to your exact kind of company. We offer the following industry specific SAP Business One versions:
Signum’s SAP Business One (SAP Business 1) Industry Edition for Food and Beverage manufacturing is a complete food MRP/ERP system that encompasses management of manufacturing business alongside specific food manufacturing business processes.
Rising raw material costs, extended supply chains and increasing regulatory controls, put ever increasing demands on food and beverage manufacturers. With SAP Business One Industry Edition – Food and Beverage, Signum can work with you to deliver an integrated business platform.
Using the SAP Business One from Signum gives you complete visibility across all systems in real time and gives accurate and consistent data on sales, inventory, financials, and more to help you make smart decisions and power your business forward.
SAP Business One software enables you to build long term relationships with customers by tracking their buying patterns and prompting you when up-sell and cross-sell opportunities arise. More importantly, it enables your sales and customer service teams to have meaningful conversations with customers during and after the sales process.
With SAP B1 from Signum, you can manage critical business processes, including supply chain planning and execution, manufacturing planning and execution, as well as sales and marketing. Plus, you can manage assets, analyse customer and supplier data, and manage regulatory compliance and other value-added processes.
Conclusion: SAP B1 is that single-point solution which combines all your business functions and streamlines all your business processes. The result is improved business efficiency, increased profit margins, better decision making, reduction in costs, happy customers and greater command over your business.
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