Putting all of Your Eggs in One Basket; Meeting Your Business’ Growth Expectations with SAP Business One

It is said that anything growing, grows exponentially. While this is true for small to midsized enterprises (SMEs) that are successful in the marketplace, the same is not true for the accounting software they use to run their business. While using multiple out-of-the-box business software may enable SMEs to support their business operations early on, these applications lack the scalability and essential features necessary to support businesses’ continued growth. As an SAP gold channel partner, Vision33 has helped hundreds of businesses achieve their goals for growth with a single enterprise resource planning solution; such as SAP Business One. In looking at recent recipients of the Vision33 Visionary Customer Awards 2013, it is possible to see the exemplary ways in which businesses have achieved their goals for growth by leveraging the powerful business intelligence gathered from SAP Business One.

For instance, one of the many challenges facing SMEs comes amidst expanding operations to new markets, or countries. During this process, businesses often lack operational transparency when each new office is managed from a central database at head office. In this circumstance, simple inquires such as stock position, outstanding sales and purchase orders are not readily available to the employees who need them. By association, use of spreadsheets, to manually determine manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP) decisions increases the probability of inaccurate current and projected stock positions.

By adopting SAP Business One, SMEs can overcome these challenges by supporting the creation of multiple localized databases that are connected to allow for intercompany transactions between companies, customers and vendors. This decentralized approach provides an accurate picture of a business’s current and future stock needs for each individual office, based on outstanding sales and purchase orders resulting in accurate MRP forecasting.

Another challenge SMEs can overcome with an ERP solution like SAP Business One relates to inventory management. Without an integrated business management solution, forecasting minimum stock levels for key customers and order fulfillment requirements are often based in inaccurate estimates. Without the appropriate business management solution some businesses resort to physically setting aside inventory in the warehouse to ensure that they are able to meet their orders.

With SAP Business One, businesses can use multiple warehouses for key customers, both minimum stock levels and stock needed for order fulfillment, managing them outside of the general warehouse in SAP Business One. This provides more accurate ‘available to promise’ dates for non-key customers and ensuring the ability to deliver to key customers as previously promised.

What these two examples illustrate is that challenges faced by SMEs as they grow can be addressed by real-time access to information gathered through SAP Business One reporting features. Discussed in greater detail in the article Mastering the Art of Reporting, SMEs that implement SAP Business One in their organization have access to powerful reports that provide access to information that meets the needs of a multitude of different decision makers in your organization.

To learn more about how other Vision33 award winners are leveraging SAP Business One to overcome business challenges and achieve continued business growth read the full Visionary Awards announcement.