SAP Business One “is a great management tool”

Delivering innovative services that allow disabled clients to have a meaningful life is the Bea Fisher Organisation’s mission. Yet when legacy software could not keep pace with the demands of entrepreneurial business entities, the organisation turned to SAP Business One.

“As we developed more sophisticated service delivery methods, we needed to better understand the true cost of our operations. SAP Business One provides the power and visibility that meet our needs.”

George Zaychkowsky, CEO, Bea Fisher Organisation

Bea Fisher needed to improve visibility into service delivery performance and their ability to serve clientele by increasing process efficiency. They wanted to replace their old manual record keeping systems, enhance the efficiency of data entry and report generation in relation to their financials. When choosing software to support their needs a key criterion was that the solution would be scalable so as to support business growth.

SAP Business One was selected due to its robust functionality to support finance, manufacturing and HR process, intuitive report generation and decision support feature. SAP Business was identified as being affordable scalable software that would meet their current and future needs.

The Bea Fisher organisation now has an enhanced ability to generate business intelligent which supports decision making, and the now have increased accuracy when it comes to accounting data and cost estimates for operations. Less effort is now required to produce financial reports and they have the improved visibility into staff performance and service delivery which they sought out to achieve.

“Our management team can use the software to learn exactly what staff members are doing and what care clients are receiving,” Zaychkowsky adds.
“In time, we’ll be able to document the performance of our care providers and use that data to improve client outcomes. The added visibility and insight we have gained makes SAP Business One a great management tool.”

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Many businesses across the UK continue to use outdated hardware and software – often still running systems that have been in place since the organisation first started.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