Customisation. Is it always a good thing? Most of us expect it at some point when doing business. It’s not just the Gen Y’ers who like to have their preferences remembered, their previous orders stored on their profile and their favourite items recommended to them as soon as they enter a store (although mainly online, we are fast approaching this reality offline too!)
But can customisation be the only way in which to impress an increasingly sophisticated and demanding customer base? We don’t necessarily think so. But we recognise it’s always great to have options. So what does all this have to do with SAP?
SAP Business One is an out-of-the-box solution which has been refined, tweaked, tried and tested for almost a decade to ensure that your workflows are streamlined and your processes are optimised – whichever industry you are in, from retail and agriculture to pharmaceutical and manufacturing.
Over the past few weeks, we have been introducing you to the latest enhancements of SAP Business One Version 9.0 including the localization, supportability & technology and business logic. In this post, we look at how the changes in Version 9.0 can positively impact our customers – and our customers’ customers.
With the latest version of SAP, certified Business One partners (like us) can work with clients to optimise their SAP Business One application according to exactly how they want to see it, use it and grow their business with it. Should any industry or process-specific functionality be needed which deviates from the out-of-the-box application, we can work with you to provide an SAP certified Add-on Partner Solution – or an App, as we call them. This enhances the application’s functionality and, because we understand SAP Business One, and we dedicate our resources to fully understand your business processes, we are able to offer you a solution which is perfectly tailored to you and your organisation.
Wherever possible, we prefer our customers to adopt the out-of-the-box solution for a few reasons:
- More cost effective – little or no additional ongoing consulting fees
- More time effective – be up and running in just weeks
- More flexible approach for our clients whose requirements might change
- Grows with your organisation
- More robust
- Leverages global best practices
In some situations, an out-of-the-box application, even with an Add-on or app just doesn’t suffice for certain industries or business sectors. In such cases, we are then able to use the newly updated SAP B1 Studio for individual customisation requirements.
Previously, customisation was a (cumbersome) bore for companies to deliver. It would take hours of consulting and often delivered mediocre results. Today, the visual aspects of customisation are possible – for those companies who need it – often within just a few clicks, even the more sophisticated requirements can be met with ease.
A customer’s IT department can even leverage these changes and use the enhanced B1 Studio to design, test and implement specific features they want within Add-ons and specific modules. SAP Business One Studio allows you (and us) to design the layout of Add-ons so that they seamlessly integrate with your SAP application across your business.
The B1 Studio also creates an open platform for Workflow Designer so you can define, design and deploy new business processes or just give a much needed upgrade to your existing ones. The Workflow Designer sits in an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) meaning that you can access the visual controls and allow end users to test and create processes and Add-ons within their own department, for their own requirements – whilst still maintaining the overall functionality of your business management software.
We can also use the B1 Studio to help you develop new business content, services and user interfaces so that the end product looks and feels like it has always been part of your organisation. You can also generate XML to import into your SAP Business One application once you and the team are happy with the prototype.
The visual aspects of the B1 Studio are reliable because the IDE is based on Microsoft Visual Studio. In fact, the SAP Business One Studio is so tightly integrated with Microsoft Visual Studio (2010 version) that they share the same project file format enabling SAP partners, like Blue Ocean Systems, to develop and extend Add-on capabilities such as UI design, code generate, debug, build and deployment.
We hope you can now see why we are so excited about the enhanced features SAP Business One Version 9.0 is bringing – a new era for us and our customers in designing products that help businesses grow and succeed.
Learn more about how SAP Business One Version 9.0 can help your organisation – contact the Blue Ocean Systems team of experts today.