SAP Business One Differentiators

You will find that many systems cover the basics fairly well but there are differences between them that can be crucial. Our analysis was conducted a few years ago for a seminar presented at the Financial Technology Show. We will endavour to provide an update to our analysis in the near future.

Target Market

Most people have considered SAP as a solution for the Fortune 500 type of company. However SAP claim 38% of their customers have revenues less than $250 million. SAP now has two offerings for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) 1) MySAP All-in-One is targeted at companies with revenue of $100 million to $250 million. It’s the mySAP Business Suite scaled down and preconfigured for specific industries. 2) SAP Business One is meant for companies with revenue of $5 million to $100 million. SAP Business One is not mySAP light it is a completely different solution acquired from an Israeli software company called TopManage Financial Solutions Ltd. in 2002.

Extensive functionality

SAP Business One is more than an accounting system. It has all the basics, including financials, distribution and light manufacturing. It distinguishes itself by also including customer relationship management, work flow and human resources.

SAP

SAP is the biggest ERP software vendor in the world and is committed to making SAP Business One a success. It has 60 developers – mostly out of Israel, where the system was first created – enhancing and maintaining the system. It has 40 product managers in different countries ensuring that local requirements are understood and built into the system. SAP Business One is integrated with its big brother and if you outgrow SAP Business One, the company claims you can easily upgrade.

CRM

Business One’s CRM system includes contact management, salesforce automation and a very impressive service management system that includes dispatching, contract management, warranty tracking, knowledge management (track problem resolution) and billing for services. SAP Business One.

Financials

You get up to 10 segments, each with up to 20 characters. The system also offers analysis codes (project base and cost centre) that can be attached either to account segments or transactions. Other financial features include allocations and unlimited budgets.

Distribution

Business One includes quotes, returns, flexible pricing (multiple price lists, contract pricing, quantity breaks, group pricing, etc.), multiple warehouses, serial number tracking, landed cost, alternative items, vendor and customer item number cross-referencing.

User interface

It looks good and relatively easy to use. Features such as drag and relate make it easy to find additional information about anything.

Work flow

With work flow you are able to route transactions such as requisitions to the appropriate person for approval. You can also create alerts for cases where, for example, inventory falls below a threshold.

Light Manufacturing

MRP, Demand Planning based on history and manual entry. For more complex planning – can use 3rd party program. Order recommendations. Create PO or Production Order automatically. Update Bill of Material on the fly for Engineer to Order. Track work in progress. For more complex manufacturing, use 3rd party product from n’ware.