SAP® Business One 8.8

SAP Business Oneis built for small to medium sized businesses that have outgrown their accounting only-systems and are looking for a single, integrated solution to manage their entire business. SAP Business One provides you with instant access to your critical business information so you can confidently make informed business decisions. This comprehensive application covers virtually all aspects of your business including finance, logistics/operations and customer relationship management.

Accounting and Financials

• Financial accounting – Handle all your financial transactions, including general ledger, journal entries, budgeting, and account setup and maintenance in one system, with comprehensive tools and reports.
• Cost Centres and Project Costing – Comprehensive cost accounting and/or project and job costing.
  
• Budgeting – Manage budget creation, allocation, and distribution. Provide budget tracking, reporting, and alerts that notify the responsible users whenever a transaction exceeds a monthly or annual budget limit.
  
• Banking – Track all banking processes such as cash receipts, cheque writing, deposits, advance payments, credit card payments, and account reconciliation.
  
• Financial reporting – Provide easy-to-use financial reports, including balance sheets, profit and loss statements, cash flow analysis, transaction reports, multi-period comparisons, and budget reports.
  Download the Financials Management fact sheet (303 KB)

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

• Sales opportunity management – Manage the entire sales process through different sales stages. Track sales opportunities and activities, analyze their outcome, and forecast revenue potential. You can monitor and analyze sales opportunities using dashboards and sales reports.
  Download the CRM fact sheet (1.4 MB)

• Web-based customer management – Give your sales team secure access to customer data over the Web wherever they are. Provide a Web-based interface to your customers so they can log inquiries and check order status – all in real-time.
  Download the Web CRM fact sheet (525 KB)

• Microsoft Outlook integration – Import customer data from SAP Business One into your Microsoft Outlook contacts list. Activities and tasks entered into your calendar in SAP Business One can be synchronized with your schedule in Microsoft Outlook.
  
• Customer service and support – Allow your customer service and support team to administer customer warranty, service contracts, manage service calls, and track all customer interaction activities.
  Read the Service Management fact sheet (1.8MB)

• Business partner management – MManage master data for your resellers and channel partners to track sales leads and opportunities, including profiles, contact summaries, account balances, and sales pipeline analyses.

Operations and Distribution

• Sales and delivery – Generate price quotes, enter customer orders, set up deliveries, update stock levels, report on customers' current balances, and manage all billing and accounts receivables.
  
• E-commerce – Set up your own online store that is fully integrated with inventory and financials, including online catalog, shopping cart, order processing and notification, customer configuration tools, and online customer services.
  Download the E-Commerce fact sheet (217 KB)

• Purchasing – MManage and maintain your vendor contracts and transactions, including the issue of purchase orders, updates to stock quantities, calculations for the value of imported items, returns and credits, and payment processing.
  Download the Purchasing Management fact sheet (279 KB)

• Inventory management – Handle inventory levels, item management, price lists, special price agreements, transfers between warehouses, and stock transactions – all via integration with other processes like sales and purchasing.
  
• Production planning – Manage your production material requirements through a wizard-based process that enables users to define a planning scenario in five easy steps, and predict demand based on forecasts.
  Download the Warehouse and Production Management fact sheet (316 KB)

Administration and Reporting

• Human resources – Capture pertinent information about each employee so you have one place to maintain and manage your employee records and data.
  
• Automatic alerts – Define your own alerts and unique workflow processes by establishing approvals, procedures, and steps that are to be automatically initiated when a specific event occurs.
  
• Dashboards and reports – Create intuitive reports and dashboards for every aspect of your business, including customers and suppliers, sales, cash flow, bookkeeping, warehouse stock, financial statements, pricing, and customer activities.
  Download the Crystal Reports fact sheet (254 KB)
  Download the Excel Reporter fact sheet (444 KB)

• Drag and relate – View important relationships between data – and instantly gain a complete understanding of any business transaction – by dragging the data you want more information on, positioning it on top of other data, and then drilling down for more details.
  
• Customization and integration – Enable users to easily add fields, change forms, and personalize queries and reports. A standard software development kit (SDK) consisting of reusable business objects and user interface customization tools is available to customize and integrate SAP Business One to meet your specific industry and business needs.

With SAP Business One you:

• Designed for SME’s - SAP Business One is an affordable business management solution that is quick to install, easy to use and simple to maintain. It supports a high-level of configuration and customisation to meet the needs of more complex businesses.
• Implemented by Partners - In Africa, SAP Gold partner Bluekey Software Solutions has the expertise to design and implement your SAP Business One solution. We provide a number of pre-built verticals market solutions covering Wholesale & Distribution, Retail, Manufacturing, Professional Services and more.
• Adaptable to unique business and industry-specific needs - With a published software development kit (SDK) and industry-specific solutions provided by software solution partners, SAP Business One can be easily tailored to meet your changing business needs.

Is SAP Business One right for you?

Through the experience gained from 120+ SAP Business One implementations over the last 5 years, Bluekey is well qualified to help you decide whether SAP Business One is the right solution for you.  If your business is considering implementing SAP Business One then broadly speaking you would:

• Have 10–200 employees and typically fewer than 30 professional users (up to 200 users in total).
• Have up to €50/ZAR600 million in annual turnover.
• Have outgrown your accounting-only system and would like to see all of their business information (accounts, spreadsheets, other business data) in one integrated system.
• Have typically 1 – 8 physical warehouses.
• Have relatively straightforward business processes.
• Be in a service, wholesale, retail, or manufacturing industry.
• Or be an independent business, or autonomous subsidiary, trading division or satellite operation needing to integrate with an SAP enterprise system.
• Have limited IT capability, with a preference for an on-premise system.

Note that this is a typical profile and Bluekey would need to assess your unique situation to determine if SAP Business One is a good for your business.

SAP Business One market success

From 900 customers in 2002 to over 22,500 by the end of 2008, SAP Business One has seen tremendous growth during the past few years, significantly surpassing what the ERP category has seen overall. That success can be attributed to having a clear focus on delivering value for our customers. With SAP Business One release 8.8, SAP aims to continue that tradition by providing a product that exceeds customer expectations.

SAP Business One 8.8 Enhancements at a glance

New Reporting Capabilities – Crystal Reports Basic 2008 for SAP Business One is a powerful and dynamic reporting solution that helps you to design, explore, visualize, and deliver reports via the Web or embedded in enterprise applications.

Enhanced User Experience – A redesigned graphical user interface makes it easier for you to use and navigate the application. Hundreds of error messages have been rewritten for greater clarity and links included to more detailed documentation.

Streamlined Business Processes – Enhanced business management features include the pick and pack process, ATP (available-to-promise), multiple units of measure, the document generation wizard, gross profit, data archiving and so on.

Support for local requirements – SAP Business One 8.8 enables continued fulfilment and implementation of country-specific requirements and best practices, such as tax deduction at source (TDS) and negative totals in A/R and A/P documents.

Reduced Complexity – A unified SAP Business One 8.8 includes all localizations, making it much easier for to synchronize between subsidiaries in different countries that were previously served by different SAP Business One releases. The upgrade process has been dramatically simplified.

Security – SAP Business One 8.8 offers a sophisticated centralized authentication framework as well as data security protection, enabling better protection and security of customer data in both the core SAP Business One application as well as other third-party solutions.

Infrastructure – Significant improvements include data archiving, transaction management, memory governance, cache mechanisms, and error tolerance.

Preventive Support – Enhanced tracing and logging greatly improve the diagnostic capabilities of SAP Business One installations.

Industry-Focused Solutions – A new tool, Solution Packager, helps SAP partners to deploy pre-packaged industry-specific solutions that can cater to your company’s specific needs.

Click here for SAP Business One Release 8.8 – Features and Enhancements