After a two-year break, we attended the SAP SMB Innovation Summit, which took place from 14 to 16 June in Dublin. The SAP event covers the most important topics in the industry, identifying the challenges that the market is currently going through and proposing new solutions based on technology and innovation. At the same time, the event was a good opportunity for SAP to announce what news it is preparing for SAP Business One and when they will be available to customers. The central element of the presentations was how the cloud allows small and medium-sized companies to remain competitive in the long run and which are business processes specific to the ”intelligent enterprise”.

Last but not least, the event brought intense networking sessions with other SAP partners and customers to share best practices in working with ERP systems and the most inspired solutions to common business problems.

What was the main news discussed at the event:

  • SAP Business One’s footprint in the global market has grown significantly in recent years. SAP Business One is now the most purchased ERP solution for SMBs, by the number of users. There are +75,000 companies and 1.2 million users in over 170 countries.
  • SAP Business One will receive multiple core enhancements. It is about optimizing the approval and authorization processes, change log, query manager, extracting information from documents, refreshing the reporting module, improving the way of mapping relationships, and service layer coverage.
  • In the coming months, there will be multiple news regarding localisations, for EU countries mainly aligning with the One Stop Shop system and electronic documents framework. For Romania, however, the most relevant is the addon for SAF-T, developed by us.
  • SAP Sales and Service Mobile App will be optimized and will receive new functionalities for managing commercial documents, timekeeping, payment journal, approval flows, and data analysis. In addition, the mobile application will be better integrated with Microsoft 365 and will allow export to OnedDrive for Excel and Word files, and collaboration through Teams will be optimized.
  • SAP also announced its promise to keep an intense pace in updating and maintaining the solution for the next 2-3 years. There will be quarterly updates for both versions (SQL and HANA), continuous developments of mobile applications and the cloud version, and support services remain unchanged regardless of the type of solution held by customers. Several major innovations will be announced in the coming years for all products associated with ERP systems.
  • The SAP Business One web client receives an infusion of new features for business process coverage and integration: sales and purchasing documents, CRM, Service and TimeSheet, payments and journal entries, documents draft and approval, and sophisticated analytics capabilities. The “views” can be exported/imported between the entities of a group or can be shared by email. It will include new modules (Purchasing, for example) and will be integrated with Office 365 and Teams, which will improve collaborative work. At the same time, SAP will support a flexible way of implementing cloud or on-premises, to offer customers freedom of choice.
  • Smart automation is becoming more and more relevant to business. SAP has strengthened its support for the use of software robots to free employees from repetitive manual tasks. The set of six software robots launched in the first part of the year has an important role in this process, and best practice models will be increasingly promoted among partners and customers, to increase work efficiency.
      •       Business Document Extraction from E-Mail ​(2X1)
      •       Proof of Delivery Note Upload in the Outbound Delivery and the Invoice (2S1)
      •       Supplier Invoice Upload for Intelligent Invoice Scanning​ (2R1)
      •       Sales Order Creation from a Local Purchase Order ​(2C1)
      •       Master Data Enrichment for Business Partner Identification (3C1)
      •       Activity Creation for Business Partners (2B1)

 

On the” intelligent automation” topic please also read the following article:

SAP decides to integrate 6 software robots in SAP Business One

 

For System Innovation Romania it was a good time to take the pulse of the market and to understand how partners from other regions approached topics that are now current in Romania (SAF-T for example). It was equally important to find out what SAP’s plans are and what innovations they will want to integrate into solutions in the near future.

 

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