SAP Business One
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SAP Business One is SAP's business software for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). It is an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software that integrates customer relationship management (CRM) with financial and logistic modules.
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[edit] Structure
Business One is software for real time processing. There is no need to collect overall transactional documents at the end of the month when the system will complete rest of your works, such as your received goods from purchase order and increased warehouse volume, and automatically added journal entry for your debit and credit account.
Business One contains 14 "core modules":
- Administration Module = where configuration is performed
- Financials Module = where various accounting and financial activities are conducted
- Sales Opportunities Module = where existing customers and potential amounts are structured tracking
- Sales Module = where orders are entered, shipped and invoiced
- Purchasing Module = where purchase orders are issued and goods received into inventory
- Business Partners Module = where Business Partners (customers, vendors, and leads) are contacted and maintained
- Banking Module = where cash is received and paid out
- Inventory Module = where Inventory is valued and managed
- Production Module = where bill of materials is defined and manufacturing is tracked
- MRP Module = where purchase and production planning takes place
- Service Module = where after-service product are managed
- Human Resources Module = where employee information is kept
- Reports Module = where user-defined reports are generated (as printouts or Excel files)
- E-commerce= allowing customers to buy and sell online to consumers or other businesses.
[edit] History
Rather than developing a new package or making their R/3 product more accessible to smaller organisations, SAP bought an existing Israeli software house called TopManage Financial Solutions Ltd. in 2002 and branded their system as SAP Business One.
SAP also brought most of the management team for Business One from outside the company, including Shai Agassi who has risen to the role of Chief Technology Officer at SAP for all of its products and technologies. The management team are experienced with the unique requirements of the Small and Medium sized businesses that Business One targets.
The company also began reporting revenues from the SME space separately from revenues for the larger customers, as a way of showing dedication to the SME market.
[edit] Integration
Low level APIs are available in the SAP Business One SDK. Integration can be achieved using the SDK component called DIAPI. The DIAPI provides COM based interface to the business objects & business logic of SAP Business One. As those are APIs, using them require software development skills. More simple way to achieve an integration is using the SAP Business One integration platform (a.k.a. B1i) the integration platform enables simple (XML based) definition of integration scenarios. the B1i platform is being used for integration with SAP's large enterprise systems R/3 Integration needs are present even for small business users. For example, SAP Business One offers a client/server and Microsoft Windows GUI only. It is also limited to a single chart of accounts. Obviously, many of the potential users of SAP Business One need integration of their existing websites, consolidation of multiple ERP systems and other integration solutions. The Business One SDK provides some other components that allow development of addons to the Business One Application. Developers that use the SDK can share their knowledge and experience on the SAP Development Network (SDN).
[edit] Competitors
SAP Business One competes with Microsoft Business Solutions globally, and with a variety of national packages such as those sold by Sage in many countries around the world.
Recently new competitors with online offerings have emerged in the marketplace. Companies such as NetSuite (CRM & ERP) and Salesforce.com (CRM only) offer similar functionality in web based applications.
