IDC confirms that businesses stand to lose 20% of their revenue every year due to process inefficiencies. In order to avoid losses resulting from inefficient business processes, business leaders turn to enterprise resource planning (ERP). Recently, ERP giant, SAP, has made the latest version of its flagship solution, Business One 9.3 or B1 9.3, available for early adopters.
Overall, the new version makes key changes in the core areas such as Analytics, boosts functionalities in key modules such as Project Management and Production and simplifies the use of the application enabling organizations to boost performance and stability.
Here are some of the major highlights from one of the most anticipated releases of the year – Business One 9.3:
1. Simplified In-Memory Analytics:
The key highlight is the upgradation on the analytics portal. SAP has leveraged its SAP HANA platform for the same, providing an overview of scheduled reports and historical data with clear insights. Additionally, it is now easier to access the portal as users can review reports without logging onto the SAP portal all together, reports can be downloaded in excel format and can be accessed on different devices including mobile or web clients. The reports can also be downloaded directly from the portal or scheduled on a daily, weekly, monthly basis and shared via emails. This enhanced simplicity enables business leaders to make smarter, faster and better decisions, which, in turn, leads to refined performance and improved sales and revenue.
2. Brand New Production Routing:
The routing segment of production process has been simplified in this update, enabling greater control over production related item and resource component management. You can now drive production processing through a sequence of customizable stages, add Route Stages to bills of materials (BOMs), provision production orders to be sequentially worked upon, schedule and manage different stages of manufacturing. Businesses that depend on light production will benefit from this feature by having more control over resource compose management and production-related item.
3. Comprehensive Return Merchandise Authorization Management (RMA)
Return merchandise management accounts for a significant part of inventory management and production processes. The latest version of Business One provides support for Return Merchandise authorization (RMA), helping users authorize return of materials, track the status of the goods and even handle returned materials easily. Ultimately, RMA helps in reducing costs of processing returns by minimizing the risks of errors in inventory and financial management.
4. Advanced Financial Management
Apart from a centralized payment engine, the current platform also features general ledger account determination matrix updates, new IFRS 15 revenue recognition standard, electronic file layout templates and chart of accounts alignment & usability. It also supports internal cost accounting transactions, multi-branch filtering and transactions and scheduled batch transactions for payments. The updates make adopting the best practices even simpler, there is better control over account balances and better management of costs to cost centers, and there is increased productivity and flexibility in the system.
5. Smoother CRM Processes
Realizing the criticality of a CRM in an organization, the new version of SAP Business One has an entire module dedicated to it, providing an overview of all business objects that are related to customer relationship management. This enhances employee productivity. Additionally, you can now assign an activity to multiple users unlike previously where one needed to create an activity per user. This makes the system even simpler to operate.
6. Holistic Project Management:
The updated Project Management module centralizes all project related transactions, documents, resources, and activities making it easier to streamline processes. You can monitor the progress of tasks, stages, sub-projects and analyze budget costs. Now it is much easier to generate reports on various aspects of the project, such as stage analysis, open issues, and resources. SAP’s video about the upgraded project management features, including generating a pick list as well as setting priorities are explained in detail in this video:
7. Updated Price Lists:
The up-gradation offers a lot to the user in terms of customizing the materials and products price lists. Besides segregating the methods of calculating net and gross prices, the platform has now made it possible to define the price per unit for an item and choose its pricing unit. User can now choose to use the highest, lowest, or the price by default hierarchy as the effective price for a business partner. Among other things, user can also specify volume discounts and special prices for business partners.
Even though it is certain that SAP B1 HANA will go through multiple changes in 2022, it can already be deemed as a practical and important release. It has made enterprise resource planning stronger yet simpler and has opened up multiple possibilities for further enhancements.
Do note, that all the above described enhancements are subject to change from SAP’s side. For further updates, stay tuned to this page.
