In our new series of posts, members of the Blue Ocean Systems team share their favourite SAP B1 features – and let’s face it, there are so many!
In this post, Arun introduces the Drag & Relate feature of SAP Business One version SAP HANA that is such a simple, yet useful tool, you’ll soon wish everything you worked on could have it!
What is Drag & Relate?
The Drag & Relate feature provides a quick way for SAP users to display linked information about your business. It reduces or eliminates the need for formal, lengthy reporting when simple data can be quickly and easily generated across all areas of your business platform.
It can also be particularly useful when trying to assist a customer or a colleague to answer a query they may have about an order, an invoice, a purchase order or anything else within your business data.
How does Drag & Relate work?
By accessing a mixture of transactional as well as master data, including business partners, you are able to easily generate ad hoc views of real time information and compare any two objects within your SAP Business One platform.
For example, a customer might contact you following up on their order. Entering their customer code and dragging the code across to the sales order icon will show all their sales orders. You can then filter the information further by selecting only open orders, or only orders within a specific timeframe, or for a certain product, etc.
From an internal perspective, you can also drag master data objects across to the list of transaction types within the Drag & Relate tab to display a wide variety of business data. This helps you to quickly and easily view real time business performance, monitor KPIs, view cash flow and inbound/outbound orders and A/P and A/R information.
Using Drag & Relate to find A/P invoices for a particular item
How could my business benefit from the Drag & Relate feature?
- Quicker and more comprehensive customer service – enabling contact centre agents to locate any key customer information while on the phone provides a more efficient service and an enhanced customer experience
- Easy access to management information – without the need to generate complex reports, supervisors and managers can quickly display relevant information that would otherwise be difficult to locate without the support of IT or the reporting team
- Employee self-service – internal teams can complete their work tasks with minimal queries to other colleagues. For example, the finance team can access all documents related to invoices if they have a query when completing month-end or year-end procedures.
- Better equipped sales representatives – before or during a sales discussion, the sales team can generate a range of information that could help them to upsell to existing customers based on past information, or use data from a similar customer to close a new deal
- Free up reporting team – the Drag & Relate feature requires no writing of query reports or generating of Crystal Reports – smaller, ad hoc queries can be easily handled by all SAP Business One users to enable your reporting team to focus on more in-depth and strategic reporting
Watch the Drag & Relate feature in action