SAP rolls out real-time business analytics apps

In a sign of SAP's stepped up attention to the business analytics market, the company released a set of real-time analytics products on Tuesday that are customised for use in various industry sectors and business functions.

The products are based on technologies from the company's 2007 purchase of Business Objects and include new tools designed to let enterprises enable mobile access to business intelligence (BI) applications.

The initial set of products in SAP's new BusinessObjects analytics application family have been customised for companies in the healthcare, consumer products, public sector, financial services, retail and telecommunication sectors.

SAP's new applications are designed to deliver real-time analytics capabilities for line of business functions, such as finance, sales, marketing, planning, risk assessment and customer satisfaction, at companies within these vertical segments.

The products were developed in collaboration with major SAP customers and are designed to work with structured or unstructured data from any SAP or non-SAP systems.

Driving the company's efforts in the real-time analytics market is the growing demand from enterprises for better decision support tools, SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott told Computerworld on Tuesday.

Increasingly, companies are looking for tools that can help them access, analyse and use real-time data to drive improved efficiencies across their sales, customer service, marketing and other business functions, he said. A growing number of companies are looking to push such functionality out to front-line employees to give them the insight and the context they need to make better decisions, he said.

One significant differentiator though could be SAPs growing focus on enabling mobile access to business analytics applications, Smith said. "SAP has been pushing hard to provide mobile access," he said. "It's something that is becoming very important for businesses."

Because SAP's newly released applications are standalone products that can operate in both SAP and non-SAP environments, the company's commitment to heterogeneous environments is driven home to customers, said James Kobielus, an analyst with Forrester Research.

"They are also very much built for rapid deployment and rapid customisation," Kobielus said.

"These products incorporate a lot of content built in an agile collaborative way by SAP and its customers."

Source: Computer world

IIS get SAP social media mention!

Our social media efforts are paying off and SAP having given us some recognition! We were mentioned in the last months social media webinar, and now the case study on us has been completed and is now available on the SAP social media portal!

Regular assessment of business IT needs necessary for SMEs to achieve continued success

Many businesses across the UK continue to use outdated hardware and software – often still running systems that have been in place since the organisation first started.

There are more advantages to having updated IT systems than simply faster start-up or a prettier interface. Business-focused software and hardware is developed with specific reasons in mind, each suitable for new challenges and demands. The key is to consider new technology, what the potential benefits are and what the long term efficiency and cost implications could be rather than buying.

By investing in relevant and business specific technology, organisations can benefit in a number of ways:

Achieving operational efficiencies

Older IT systems often become incompatible with newer ones and as a result perform at a much slower speed. This will inevitably impact a business internally, as systems begin to run at a very slow rate or become unusable, but also externally as sharing information becomes very difficult with those using more current systems.

Improving visibility of information available for decision-making

At one stage or another, most businesses will have relied on storing some of their information in a basic spreadsheet. However, as the size of this information grows, and the level of detail increases, it becomes impractical to continue with such tools. When decision makers are looking to extract vital information they can no longer rely on simple spreadsheets and instead must utilise such tools as databases and automated systems that will collate relevant data on an ongoing basis and allow live updates at any time.

Staying competitive

Just as businesses should not fall into the habit of buying any new tool or technology made available to them, equally it’s important to realise that if many of your competitors and industry peers are working with a certain system, it’s probably with good reason. By failing to keep up with others’ investments and ways of working, organisations can run the risk of becoming a non-competitor.

Improving customer engagement

The more detail that a business can get on their customers the more they will be able to accurately engage and target them for future business opportunities. The key to doing this successfully is to extract relevant information in order to target the appropriate customers. As such, it’s essential that all information is easily accessible, clear and easy to refine in order to extract the relevant customer groups as they’re needed. Businesses that do this well are likely to improve customer retention as they can offer a more tailored and personal service.

Scaling for the future

Investing in IT can be an expensive business, so it’s important that any significant purchases are well thought out and match not only your current needs, but the future needs of your business. If IT systems are scalable and have limits well above current requirements, then this will inevitably lengthen the time that they can be in service and as such, negate the need for unnecessary re-investment in the short-term. Although it can be difficult to predict exactly how a business will perform in the near future, it’s essential that those in charge of IT are not short-sighted in their purchasing and instead consider how the business is likely to change over time.

Organisations should evaluate the IT systems they have in place in order to make sure that they are offering staff all that they need in order to remain productive and competitive.
By assessing these common business needs at regular intervals, business owners can be confident that their IT systems put them in an ideal position to grow and be profitable.

SAP Business One is a business management solution designed specifically to meet the needs of small to medium sized companies. To find out more visit www.beabetterbusiness.com today; finding out what is available can do no harm, make sure you stay informed!

Original Source: SME Web, Tony Speakman, FileMaker’s Regional Manager in Northern Europe

Liberate your staff and grow your business with a good business management solution

Liberate your staff and grow your business with a good business management solution
It’s time to shake hands with and introduce yourself to business management software solution when your business is being held back by limited disparate systems.
As businesses grow, so the processes develop. Numbers of forms needed to be completed and filed grow, spreadsheets used to track customer details come under increasing strain, stock needs grow, and manpower becomes stretched which could potentially hinder your growth or even tarnish customer relationships as service standards begin to dwindle.
The business grows, the more the systems start to creak. Bits of paper go missing, the person who understands how the formula in the spreadsheet works is off sick, and an order gets lost.

The people who have made the business the success whether it is through their fantastic sales acumen, or their vigour in chasing up overdue invoices, are sidelined into spending hours each day just making sure the systems are ticking over in order for the business to keep running. And what happens if god forbid something happens to that person? The system in place is likely to fall apart.
A small business may at this stage start thinking about making an investment in dedicated admin staff, which to all extensive purposes doesn’t solve the problem which is really a communication issue. Information and processes need to flow between and across people and repetition needs to be avoided.

Alternatively a small business could invest into a business management solution that has been designed specifically to meet their needs, overcome current difficulties that have been recognised and that they may not even be aware of, improve overall efficiency and productivity and in long term support growth and reduce costs.

Business management solutions that have been designed specifically for your business by software experts who have studied the way you work from the bottom up and know exactly what you want it to do – liberate your staff from mundane, labour intensive tasks.

Those people who were beginning to flag, who were complaining that they didn't have time to do their job properly, who had stopped thriving in the workplace, suddenly find that those dull aspects of their job - tasks that, in fact, weren’t really part of their job - have gone. They have hours in the day to do the role they were hired to do.

And, with the right system, as your business grows your systems grow with it, enabling you to add or amend functionality according to your business needs.

The potential savings from business management solutions are huge. But they won’t replace your staff, they’ll just help you to get the best from them.

Original Article: Fenner Pearson, managing director, Meantime IT, SME Web

SAP focused on innovation; improving communication flow and cutting costs

“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”
Steve Jobs, Apple founder

Innovation is widely seen as the key source to gaining and sustaining competitive advantage, continually striving to better meet customers’ needs. SAP continue to remain focused and are committed to providing software innovations rather than being tempted by the acquisition opportunities which their rivals such as Oracle have been quick to take up.

“All in one is nice for the vendors. They control the relationship more and can pitch the ideal of an optimized technology stack. But they’re really sub-optimising innovation. Customers don’t buy stacks. They buy innovation, and that’s all in the software,” say Bill McDermott, SAP co-chief executive.

But there’s a problem with this. SAP isn’t known for innovation.

McDermott had an answer for that too. Today at the DEMO conference in Santa Clara he’ll unveil a series of analytics tools that he calls “a game changer”. In a recent interview with Victoria Barrett for Forbes, she said he whipped out his iPad (promising that everyone at SAP would have one soon) and showed her the full view of a company’s sales, with drill downs to regions, with details on inventory levels.

“The head of company has the same view, instantly, as a guy on the factory floor,” McDermott explained.

If it catches on, it will shift how companies operate. Being a middle manager no longer means simply sending news up the chain, and priorities down. That news is already at the top of the change, the second it happens. McDermott is clear here: “We’re disintermediating middle management. Their jobs have to change.”
He figures using data better will contribute to a 50% cost savings in IT organisations.

The Importance of Planning…largely neglected by SMEs

“It's not the plan that is important, it's the planning”.
Dr. Graeme Edwards

Over the last two days the IIS team have come together and all in all the event has been a success and most objectives have been achieved in terms of the discussions, meetings and presentations that needed to be had.

Everyone is now familiar with the numerous new faces that have joined the team in the last 6 months, ideas have been shared, plans have begun to be formulated, processes for each functional area are being developed and improving efficiency and effectiveness overall is the collective goal!

A great emphasis has been placed on the need for more planning, not that it has been entirely neglected but the need to document it from a company, team and individual perspective has become increasingly apparent.

New research shows that a large number of SME’s have no written business plan.
Research by business insurance comparator SimplyBusiness.co.uk of 400 British entrepreneurs shows that 54 per cent of firms have no written business plan.
Jason Stockwood, CEO of SimplyBusiness.co.uk, says: ‘Limited time and resources are characteristic of growing businesses, and the recession will have stretched UK entrepreneurs further than ever before. Understandably, many have become so focused on working in their business that their time working on their business may have suffered as a result.’

At IIS we all understand the importance and value of planning and endeavour to make it an habitual practice across all departments. That is not to say that it is not something we haven’t considered or invested within in the past, but as we continue to grow the need for a more formal approach becomes increasingly imperative.

“If you are failing to plan, you are planning to fail.”
Tariq Siddique

SAP highest ranked software company in sustainability indexes

SAP NEWSBYTE - September 09, 2010 - For the fourth consecutive year SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) has been named as the leader of the software sector of the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes (DJSI), comprising the Dow Jones Sustainability Index World and Dow Jones STOXX Sustainability Index.

The DJSI follow a best-in-class approach and include sustainability leaders from each industry on a global and regional level respectively. The annual review of the DJSI family is based on a thorough analysis of corporate economic, environmental and social performance, assessing issues such as corporate governance, risk management, branding, climate change mitigation, supply chain standards and labor practices.

For the software sector, DJSI reviewed a total of 30 companies. SAP had sector-leading scores in 11 of the 20 key dimensions, including customer relationship management, risk and crisis management, innovation management, human capital development, corporate citizenship and labor practice indicators. SAP obtained sector-leading scores for its environmental and social reporting through its interactive sustainability report. Moreover, the company achieved the best score for the software sector in the social dimension.

In recent years, SAP has been recognized consistently for its sustainable business practices by the leading global sustainability rankings, including the Global 100 list of the most sustainable corporations in the world, the FTSE4Good index and the Global Challenges Index. In addition, SAP China was recently named as one of the “Top 50 Green Companies in China” by Business Watch magazine. In Germany, the company is nominated for the 2010 German Sustainability Award in the category “most sustainable strategy.”

In the past year, SAP has continued the execution of its sustainability strategy, which includes both managing its internal operations in a sustainable way and delivering solutions that support its customers’ sustainable business practices. The company introduced a SAP Supplier Code of Conduct to directly address sustainability issues within its own global network of suppliers. SAP also engaged with the Sustainability Consortium as the organization’s first global technology steering committee member.

In addition to issuing an annual sustainability report, in early 2010 SAP started providing quarterly sustainability updates. These quarterly reports offer updates on SAP’s performance and track the company’s progress toward meeting its aggressive carbon footprint reduction goals. In 2009 SAP announced its commitment to reduce the company’s total carbon emissions to the year-2000 emissions level of approximately 275 kilotonnes by the year 2020. This represents an overall reduction of about half compared to SAP’s year-2007 peak levels of 540 kilotonnes.

Source: SAP AG