In last week’s blog post, we introduced some of the key enhancements SAP Business One Version 9.0 will bring. Now we take a deep dive into each of those enhancements to bring you more information about what the benefits mean for you and your organisation. This week, we begin by taking a look at Business Logic.
Bin Locations
What are the enhancements?
Currently, you are limited on how you can define your warehouse structure and inventory categories. This means that you might need to adjust your inventory activities according to the system. With SAP Business One Version 9.0 you will have much more freedom to assign multiple bin locations including ‘per item, per group and per warehouse.’ You will also be able to set up your bin locations with up to 10 user-defined attributes (e.g. weight, frozen, fragile etc).
You will also have more capabilities to manage your reserved products and to improve your ‘available to promise’ responses.
Reporting on your bin locations will also be possible to support bin location data within your warehouse locations.
What are the benefits?
-> Optimise your stock movements (increase delivery capabilities and reduce waste)
-> Enhanced visibility over your entire stock levels
-> Split warehouse activation down to zone, area, shelf and even row!
-> Uniquely defined inventory bin locations according to your business requirements
-> View screens for bin location receipt and manually issue transactions
-> Pick & Pack Manager supports bin locations
-> Minimise risk to your inventory
-> Improved reporting abilities to support lean inventory processing methods (provides benchmark information for KPI setting)
Inventory Counting
What are the enhancements?
SAP Business One Version 9.0 will enable you to define more flexible count frequencies and allow you to set reoccurrences for these frequencies. The new end-to-end process for stock counting links your cycle count processing to your stock taking activities allowing you greater customisation over the inventory items which cause you the most pain.
For larger warehouses, two stock takers will also be able to count items at the same time and you will have the ability to freeze stock while the counting takes place.
What are the benefits?
-> Improved documentation to support your inventory taking process
-> Ability to count exact number of serial and batch managed items
-> Analyse the quantities and differences while inventory process is taking place
-> Ability to compare stock levels between two stock takers
Multiple Units of Measure
What are the enhancements?
Currently businesses cannot group together single units of measure; with SAP Business One Version 9.0 this will be possible based on conversion rules. Additionally a default UoM can be converted automatically to an alternative UoM during the transaction process.
What are the benefits?
-> Ability to sell and purchase in any unit measure required for your business
-> Unlimited global and product UoM conversion factors can be incorporated
Purchase Requests
What are the enhancements?
Significant improvements have been made to the Purchase Quotations Generation Wizard resulting in the ability for businesses to create purchase requests as a preliminary step of the purchasing process. You will also be able to create purchase quotations or orders directly from the Purchase Request form or report.
What are the benefits?
-> Improved visibility for your purchasing department over goods sold and required
-> A tangible control over purchasing goods means your expenses and budget are optimised
Price Lists and Discount Groups
What are the enhancements?
With the improvements SAP Business One Version 9.0 brings your business, you will be able to assign multiple currencies to your price lists as well as assign price lists per client or vendor. You will also be able to set active and validity period for price lists and discount groups and be able to quickly analyse pricing and discounts in transactions.
What are the benefits?
-> Improved flexibility and greater management control over pricing and discount groups
-> Better reporting provides you with greater visibility over pricing and discount activities
Payment and Deposit Cancellation
What are the enhancements?
A challenge for any organisation can be the efficient management of payments and deposits and tracking each transaction. With SAP Business One Version 9.0, this will be made easier for you with improved system support including the cancellation of payments with deposited cheques, the automatic cancellation of non-deposited cheques and its related payment and the return of the cheque to the issuer when required.
What are the benefits?
-> More sophisticated and flexible approach to payment handling
Marketing Document Cancellation
What are the enhancements?
A cancellation document is created with each cancellation procedure (for compliance purposes) and all reversals are automatically and fully reconciled within the system.
What are the benefits?
-> This supports countries where it is not legally compliant to create a Credit Memo document for incorrectly added invoices
-> Increase productivity with a one step process
GL Account Determination
What are the enhancements?
A centralised matrix to determine GL accounts supports most settings for items, item groups, warehouses, business partner groups, federal tax ID and many more.
What are the benefits?
-> A much more simple and effective way to track and view your GL account log
Fixed Assets Integration
What are the enhancements?
The new improvements with SAP Business One Version 9.0 includes an integrated, fixed asset solution for end-to-end processing as well as the ability to handle various accounting areas more efficiently.
What are the benefits?
-> Ability to add customer specific enhancements
-> Meets cross-localisation accounting standards
Drop Ship
What are the enhancements?
The drop ship process in SAP Business One Version 9.0 will support serial and batch managed items as well as allocating serial numbers within the warehouse function.
What are the benefits?
-> Ability to provide improved customer service with tighter drop ship process capability
Landed Costs
What are the enhancements?
Landed costs will be better managed with the ability to create them directly from the AP invoice using the ‘Copy From’ function. This can also be done without the need for a Goods Receipt.
What are the benefits?
-> More streamlined procurement process significantly increasing the efficiency of your team
Item Costs on A/R Returns & A/R Credit Memos
What are the enhancements?
This small, yet significant enhancement means that the item cost for any goods returned via an A/R Credit Memo or A/R Returns can be updated if it has no base document.
What are the benefits?
-> More sophisticated approach to inventory management
-> Less manual time spent on calculating item costs for goods returned
System Currency Reconciliation
What are the enhancements?
The existing SAP internal reconciliation functionality has been enhanced with Version 9.0 to support SC management. New posting accounts have been added which result in automatic SC postings with any internal reconciliation.
What are the benefits?
-> Improved internal financial processing
View SAP 9.0 in action in these informative videos.
Watch out for next week’s post on the SAP Business One Version 9.0 enhancements where we will be looking at the sustainability and technology improvements.
Have SAP Business One 9.0 questions? Contact the Blue Ocean Systems team of specialists.
About Arun Devan, Managing Director
I lead a team of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) experts to provide tailored SAP Business One solutions for a wide variety of industry sectors with specialised functions and accessibility tools.
My proven track record of zero defect implementations, leveraging 25 years of expertise in SAP R/2, R/3 and B1 deployments ensures each and every client benefits from an efficient implementation of their SAP Business One solution to enhance their operational capacity and growth immediately. Blue Ocean Systems Singapore implements and integrates customised SAP Business One Solutions to help our clients increase profitability and improve operational efficiencies.
Specialising in the implementation and support of SAP enterprise applications for small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs), we combine extensive experience and an unblemished history to deploy the right solution quickly for immediate improvements.
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