We looked recently at what 2014 holds for Blue Ocean Systems but this also needs to be reviewed in line with SAP and their plans for the year ahead. In this post, we will take a look at some recently released predictions for 2014 within enterprise resource planning as well as what’s planned this year for SAP Business One and SAP HANA.
For SAP and its global partners, 2013 was all about in-memory technology , HANA and the positive changes it brought about for organisations looking to gain traction with their analytics. It created the wow factor and provided many examples of where such technology can take global business.
So how can 2014 be just as impactful for SAP and HANA?
Moving away from its business applications company status to a more multi-tiered architecture, SAP will further embed itself across the business analytics, database software and mobile functions, according to Christian Rodatus, senior vice-president and general manager, analytics, at SAP.
It’s expected that SAP will continue to build support platforms and development tools for SAP HANA to gather, monitor and analyse increasing data sources for organisations. This demand comes from wider business trends set to hit 2014 including the proliferation of cloud computing (as more people are becoming familiar with it), Big Data (with more proactive detection measures for fraud and crime) and an increase enterprise mobility usage (more flexible working options, more demand from employees for personalised devices, global travel and business demands).
Companies are also now dipping their toes back into investing again following the double-dip recession across much of Europe and America; and when they invest, they want to spend their money wisely, on sustainable solutions that will be around for years to come.
4 key directions for SAP Business One in 2014:
- Core:
- More global, extensible solution for small enterprises
- Functional and localisation efforts will be ramped up
- Most importantly, with a focus on ease of use and access
- Total Customer Experience and Simplicity will be the direction of SAP Business One moving forward
- SAP HANA:
- Available both on premise and in the cloud
- Scalability and throughput, real-time analytics with new business scenarios for a smooth transition from standard SAP Business One to SAP Business One HANA.
- Cloud and Mobile availability
- Ease of consumption of information
- Integration
- Easy, robust integration for small enterprises.
SAP Business One – New Version Release in 2014
SAP Business One Version 9.1 is set for release, most likely in June and the focus will be on providing enhancements that support the subsidiaries of large enterprises. The integration connectivity means the organisation’s HQ can run SAP Business Suite (R/3) while the more cost effective SAP Business One can be rolled out within the subsidiaries.
- Future releases of SAP Business One Core will be scheduled to have SAP HANA and SQL version simultaneously released.
- There will also be an enhancement for the Android and iPhone apps, improving the Android version to that of the iPhone, with simultaneous releases planned once both apps have reached the same level.
- SAP will also be focusing on continuous enhancements to the SAP B1 Cloud, targeting a drop in the cost of ownership.
What to expect in SAP Business One 9.1(Initial Summary of Potential Enhancements in SAP Business One 9.1)
Business Logic & Localisation:
- Enhanced Production Module
- Inventory item costs valuation based on Serial/Batch number (Actual Costing, new feature in Business One)
- Multi branch splits transactions according to Business Units, able to have control to allow different business units to share and split information from a common database
- Project Enhancements (new feature)
- Localisation Enhancements and legal compliance
SAP HANA:
- New semantic layer for financial module
- Service layer exposes business objects by web service
- Pervasive analytics: KPI and action to insight (KPI Function a new feature in 9.1)
- Enhancements to all four out-of-the-box innovations
Lifecycle Management & Support:
- Quick implementation and express configuration
- Combined wizard for installation and update
- Smaller product and patch upgrades
- Improved company DB migration from MSSQL to SAP HANA
Infrastructure & Architecture:
- User group authorisations (simple authorisation for a group, add and remove members from the group. A user can be part of multiple groups at the same time)
- On/off switch for complex business functions (new feature)
- Import from Excel
- Simplification
SAP Business One Analytics powered by SAP HANA (B1A)
Key Features:
- Enterprise Search
- Dashboards
- Ad-hoc interactive reporting
Planned for 9.1:
- Semantic Layer (Financial)
SAP Business One version for SAP HANA (B1H)
Key Features:
- All B1A Features
- Pervasive Analytics
- Extreme Apps (Advanced ATP and Cash Flow Forecasting)
Planned for 9.1:
- Semantic Layer (Financial), KPI, Insights to Action (new features)
- Service Layer
SAP Analytics for SAP Business OneOverview
- Analytics aims to translate the vision and mission of a company into meaningful and useful figures and KPIs
- Business Intelligence (BI), or analytics, helps the company track performance, understand business drivers and manage the business
- Business intelligence can be split into two different needs; operational and strategic. Operational needs are basic needs, allowing the company to find out what happened, and why it happened through a drilldown of data.Strategic needs cater to the management, answering the questions -what will happen? What is the best or worst scenario than could happen?
- The current trend that BI is moving to self-service, empowering the end users, allowing them to have the right information when they need it, discovering trends, outliers and areas of interest that is functional to their improvement and performance.
- Another function that SAP is looking into will be the dispersion of information; high productivity design for report designers can be expected. This will mean users can quickly build professionally formatted reports on any data source, securely distribute reports both internally and externally using SAP Crystal Reports.
SAP Business One HANA 2014 Updates:
The Analytics capabilities from SAP Business One HANA will be available on mobile versions as well, leading to availability of analytics in the right form, at the right time, in the right place.
Pervasive Analytics in SAP Business One HANA 9.0
Dashboard:
- Single Chart
- Visualisation by consuming HANA views
- Including predictive analysis
- Embed into sidebar of B1 forms
- Mobile access
KPI:
- Consuming HANA views
- Support composite KPI
- Predefined 20+ Financials KPI
Enhancements in Pervasive Analytics, SAP Business One HANA 9.1:
Advanced Dashboard
- Multi pages
- Dynamic filters
- Multi-dashboard interactions
- Slice and dice in real time
- Translate insight to action
Future Enhancement & Innovation
- Support parameter of semantic layer
- Publish & share & annotation
- More predictive functions
SAP Business One Analytics Portal SAP Business One HANA 9.0
Features:
- Contain dashboard & enterprise search
- Mobile Ready
Future Enhancement & Innovation
- KPI/Dashboard published through Pervasive Analytics
- Configurable in runtime
- Multi-dashboard interaction
- Sharing, annotation, actionable
New cockpit in SAP Business One HANA 9.1
Features
- HTML5 based, Fiori like and reusable on mobile
- Role based, availability of predefined cockpits based on your role in the company
- Widgets
- KPI
- Dashboard
- My Workbench
- Message & Alert
- Business Objects
SAP Business One on HANA Semantic Layer
Provides HANA views of SAP Business One data for business users to easily analyse data, open for a wide variety of front-end tools
- Query View: Consume Directly
- Reuse View: Well Structured, reuse by other views
- Semantic layer for financials – easy and efficient to use
Certified Hardware:
- New Ivy Bridge CPU Architecture being certified (only Fujitsu has a new server family, S8 on Ivy Bridge)
- HP and IBM in discussion on providing a 512 GB Configuration
SAP has built an impressive roadmap to rollout out various upgrades and updates to its entire product range. In this post we have highlighted the key changes to SAP Business One and SAP HANA. These updates will help growing businesses do more to improve their productivity and innovate to develop new business models. Please contact Blue Ocean Systems to discuss with us how these changes can be exploited to amplify your businesses into 2014. Call us today at +65 6259 9738(Singapore).