The highly anticipated major version release of SAP Business One version 9.2 promises to extend the functionality of SAP Business One in many exciting ways! Unfortunately, we can’t cover every new feature in this short blog, but we will highlight four of the major enhancements that will surely increase efficiencies within your business, upsurge profits and help reduce company costs. Now are you interested? Well keep reading to find out how we can help you leverage these new features in SAP Business One 9.2!
1. Browser Access
Does your company have remote users? Do you need to quickly and securely access SAP Business One while traveling? Do you want to avoid the upkeep of SAP Business One client installations on local desktops at your office? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you can surely take advantage of the new browser access feature available in SAP Business One version 9.2! Aside from the obvious benefit to users – working on the go, in a secure environment – browser access also offers the following advantages at an organizational level:
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No need to install or upgrade SAP Business One client software.
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Simpler lifecycle management with minimized eco-system effort (i.e. no effort required to upgrade the SAP client which saves you time and money on upgrade costs).
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Lower overall total cost of ownership (TCO) – save money by not having to purchase MS Remote Desktop software licensing or Citrix licensing. Also, eliminate costly hardware upgrades to ensure that your desktops meet the recommended hardware requirements to run the SAP client.
2. Project Management
Prior to version 9.2 project information was limited to financial data. With additional project management functionality, you can now centralize all your project-related transactions, documents, resources and activities, making it easier to track and manage the different tasks and stages/phases of a project from start to finish. Furthermore, centralization of project data allows you to easily analyze budgets and costs, and generate reports relating to all aspects of your project, providing greater transparency and allowing you to make more informed decisions. Here’s a deeper look at some of the project management functionality:
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Combine both financial and project management data in one solution. For example, you can define the budgeted/planned cost of a particular task and measure actual costs incurred against that particular task. You can also drill down into the respective A/R or A/P invoices associated with that particular task to see what specific items or labour were billed against that particular stage of the project.
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Depending on the size and scope of a project, it can be split into different Sub-projects or Phases, which may represent a functional area. As an example, you might define project stages specific to your business, like process analysis & design, implementation, user acceptance testing, go-live and post-implementation. If you’re familiar with using stages in the Sales Opportunities module, this is very similar.
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You can create stage dependencies, so, using our example from above, the system will prevent you from moving to go-live if the user acceptance testing stage has not been marked as completed.
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Create Activities directly from within the Project Management module. You can see an overview of every activity your team has created against a particular stage. Furthermore, you can view the SAP Business One calendar in group view to see all the scheduled project activities by all staff working on this project.
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The Summary tab within the Project Management module displays an overview of budget vs. actuals, and breaks it down by A/P vs. A/R so that you can easily what your costs and profit values are against a given project.
3. MRP – Intelligent Forecasts
A good forecasting process delivers value to its users by enabling them to sell more product. It provides visibility into demand history that helps them prioritize opportunities and position channels to face growing demand. Predicting future demand is critical for business planning and also serves as an invaluable input for material resource planning. With SAP Business One version 9.2 for HANA you can predict future demand for products with the help of statistical methods, incorporating trends and seasonal factors. Intelligent Forecasts uses two predictive methods from the SAP HANA database. Once you have finalized your prediction you can leverage your results in a forecast which can be later used for MRP. You also have the ability to view historical sales data and predicted sales data in a graphical view that you can modify by dragging historical data points to dynamically adjust the expected forecast results.
4. Prices Update Wizard
Maintaining price lists has become much simpler with the new Prices Update Wizard! It allows you to update item prices and price lists systematically en masse. You can convert prices into other currencies, and restrict updates to only apply to selected items, price lists, currencies and units of measure. And a new simulation mode shows you all of the suggested changes before you decide to commit and execute the update. The new Prices Update Wizard can save a lot of time if your company needs frequent pricing updates across a large number of items and price lists. Implementing price updates is now simpler, faster and more intuitive.
This is just a snapshot of the major enhancements in SAP Business One version 9.2, but you can see that the new version offers great potential to increase efficiencies, decrease operational costs and boost profits making SAP Business One the best ERP for small and mid-size businesses.
