Small to Midsize companies continue to invest in IT

A global study of over 3,000 SME IT professionals has revealed that many plan to increase IT spending in the second half of this year. Virtualisation technology and investments that optimise existing resources are their top IT priorities.

The survey, from IT management software supplier Spiceworks had a number of significant findings in relation to future software purchase plans of small to midsize companies.

37% of small to midsize companies plan to invest in database software prior to year-end. Planned purchases are primarily via upgrades, continuing the trend we noted during the first six months of 2010 that IT pros are shifting away from filling gaps through new software purchases and toward upgrading existing software and renewing existing IT contracts/licenses.

Planned IT spending in customer relationship management (CRM) software remains consistent with that of the first half of 2010 as 23% of small and medium businesses plan to purchase new, upgrade or renew by the end of 2010.

Other key findings of the survey:

•68% of SME IT professionals plan to use virtualisation technology by the end of 2010
•65% of SME IT professionals plan to keep IT staff levels the same between now and the end of the year
•20% plan to add full-time IT staff before the end of the year
•42% of IT budgets for the rest of the year are allocated to hardware
•35% of IT budgets for the rest of the year are allocated to software
•48% of IT professionals plan to buy new, upgrade or renew at least one IT service

Investment in IT has become critical to small business success. The rate of technology development is driving SMB investment in IT as they recognise that in order to subsist competitively they must take advantage of all the benefits of increased efficiency, productivity, visibility and management that IT can bring them.

The SAP Business One application offers a single, affordable way for small to midsize companies to manage their entire business, from sales and customer relationships to financials and operations. It helps you streamline processes, act on timely information, and can accelerate profitable growth.

To find out more about SAP Business One and how it can help you become a best run business visit www.beabetterbusiness.co.uk or www.beabetterbusiness.ie

Sources: Computer Weekly; Spiceworks Report – The State of SMB IT September 2010

Data Improvement key to growth, innovation and improved customer relationships

“The fewer data needed, the better the information. And an overload of information, that is, anything much beyond what is truly needed, leads to information blackout. It does not enrich, but impoverishes.”

Peter F. Drucker

It’s not more data we need, its better more refined and useful data, rather than an abundance of useless information.

Sybase, Inc., an SAP company and industry leader in enterprise and mobile software, today issued the second installment of results from a new report -- 'Measuring the Business Impacts of Effective Data' -- an extensive study benchmarking some of the world's leading Fortune 1000 enterprises across a wide range of vertical industries by measuring the direct correlation between a company's IT investments and overall business performance.

While the first installment quantifies the relationship between incremental investments in effective data and the key financial indicators of an enterprise's health and profitability, the second installment examines 'Impacts of Effective Data on Business Innovation and Growth.' That is, the impact on a company's ability to drive innovation, organic growth and sustained customer growth -- each of which make financial performance gains possible.

"Business growth attributable to new offerings and new customers are both critical indicators of the competitiveness of an organisation, and this second installment of findings begins to unearth where data improvement impacts are felt the most," said Anitesh Barua, distinguished teaching professor and lead researcher, University of Texas at Austin.

"We have already drawn definitive correlations between improvements in data and key financial performance metrics of businesses today, as outlined in our initial installment. Unlike previous studies, we are continuing to further peel back the onion to more holistically understand how better data influences a company's health and profitability."

Even the most incremental investments made towards improving only two data attributes -- data accessibility and intelligence -- can deliver dramatic impacts on the following key business innovation and growth metrics:

"Every day, we have conversations with our customers about how their data can be leveraged in new ways to generate revenue, whether it be through the development of new products and services or reaching a new market segment," said Dr. Raj Nathan, executive vice president & CMO, Sybase.

"In the end, we always come back to one thing -- empowering employees with effective data so that data itself doesn't become an impediment to business growth. This study deductively shows that simple, pragmatic improvements in data intelligence and accessibility help employees better understand evolving demand patterns, customer preferences and market dynamics that enable companies to both drive innovations to market faster and attract new customers."

Press Release Business Wire 27/09/2010

SAP contributes to Unilever’s saving of £980 million in costs

In recent years, Unilever has moved to “dramatically” cut the number of suppliers it uses, after at one point using 160 vendors for 1,200 applications. That project, alongside the SAP rollout and a company-wide reorganisation, has helped it save £960 million from costs.

Earlier this year the company said its own SAP rollout, with supplier Accenture, was significantly improving “operational execution” and efficiency, as well as dramatically cutting complexity. The most effective cost cutting was being effected in western Europe, it said, the first region to go live with the system.

Unilever is now facing a large SAP integration, following the announcement it will buy TRESemmé shampoo maker Alberto Culver for $3.7 billion (£2.3 billion).
Unilever, which makes related products including Dove soap and Sunsilk shampoo, as well as other household brands, is standardising globally on SAP enterprise resource planning software.

Unilever said it would become the world’s second largest shampoo maker as a result
of the acquisition, emphasising the importance of the UK, US, Canadian, Mexican and Australasian markets.

Unilever boasts a portfolio of over 400 brands. “With 400 brands spanning 14 categories of home, personal care and foods products, no other company touches so many people's lives in so many different ways.” They are leaders in almost every field within which they work.

The world’s leading, largest and best companies are using SAP and yet it is now within reach of small to midsize companies, supporting them on their quest to become a best run business.

SAP Business One has been designed specifically with small to midsize companies needs in mind. Visit www.beabetterbusiness.co.uk or www.beabetterbusiness.ie to find out more

Intelligent Targeter

Enables Sales Targeting From SAP Business One

Intelligent Targeter enables users of SAP Business One to set targets for customers and sales employees.

Functionalities

•Set targets for customers.
•Multiple Measurements.
•Progress Alerts and Reports.

Business Challenges

All Business starts with Sales. One of the elements of Intelligent Essentials is Sales Targeter. This solution enhances SAP Business One around the areas of Sales Forecasting and budgeting. This ensures that your business is monitoring sales performance against the initial budget and the ever changing forecast.

Key Features

•Track sales against Budget and forecast
•Set sales targets by Sales rep for Customers, Customer group or customer properties.
•Measure Sales against individual products, product groups or product properties
•Set the targets by one or all of the Qty, Turnover, Gross Profit

Business Benefits

By setting Sales budgets for the year within SAP Business One each sales person can be monitored against actual sales. The system also enables a user to manage their forecasts for the coming months based on feedback from customers or the level of sales quotes being generated. Every business needs to be able to track sales and ensure that the sales figures are on par with the initial company budgets. Sales Targeter enables management and sales people alike to track their sales to ensure the company is on track to achieve its numbers.

Find out more about other Intelligent Essentials elements at www.beabetterbusiness.co.uk or www.beabetterbusiness.ie

Intelligent Essentials, Making SAP B1 Better!

Intelligent Colour Size Matrix

Create and maintain parent and child items within SAP Business One

Intelligent Colour/Size Matrix enables you to create and maintain parent and child items via matrix templates within SAP Business One. The matrix templates define the item code and description to be assigned to each child item created. The module also allows you to optionally copy parent item price list prices to their child items.

Functionalities

•Creates item codes within a user defined matrix template based on two item variables.
•Assign templates to parent items enabling user to create child items for the parent.
•Defines parent and child items in Item Master Data UDF – Colour Size Matrix.
•Assign multiple templates to one parent item.
•Apply parent pricing tab allows the user to copy selected price list prices from a parent item to all of its child items at any point in time.

Business Challenges

•Ensuring visibility and proper tracking of inventory for multi-variant items.
•Creating item codes for multi variant items.
•Efficiently completing inventory reporting and sales analysis by size and colour.

Key Features

•Customisable user defined colour/size matrix templates to meet your inventory needs.
•Multiple colour/size matrix templates can be assigned to one parent item to create multi-variant child items.
•Apply parent pricing to child items when applicable.
•Leverage standard order processing capabilities of SAP Business One such as special pricing, warehouse, availability check, etc in combination with colour/size matrix as items are processed through ordinary SAP Business One processing cycle.

Business Benefits

•Save time creating item codes by creating child items within user defined templates.
•Quickly set up a product range for a new multi-attribute.
•Beat the competition and capture the market with proper inventory tracking.
•Quickly fulfill orders for multi attribute items.
•Improves inventory reporting and sales analysis by allowing any business in need of tracking by the sizes and colours of their merchandise to do so efficiently.

To find out more about other Intelligent Essentials elements visit www.beabetterbusiness.co.uk or www.beabetterbusiness.ie

Intelligent Essentials, Making B1 Better!

Online sales - the barriers are smaller than you think with Intelligent Ecommerce!

Today’s consumers expect to be able to find everything they need or want online.
Despite this 69% of entrepreneurs have not yet made the move to e-commerce in the UK despite it being an extremely lucrative marketing channel. Many small businesses in the UK have failed to capitlise and enter the online market because they fear the unknown, they don’t know where to begin and a lot of them feel that the market is “out of their league” so to speak.

The most obvious benefit to trading online is that it gives you greater reach to customers and drives sales. In PayPoint.net’s recent report, Powering Small Business Britain, 59% of the over 800 entrepreneurs surveyed identified this aspect as the biggest pull to e-commerce. Consumers look to buy everything online, from their groceries and taxi bookings, to their insurance.

Clearly there are many advantages to e-commerce and this is recognised by small businesses in Britain; the issue, is that entrepreneurs want to go online, but feel that this is not possible for various reasons, such as cost, fraud, or simply apprehension.

With SAP Business One and Intelligent Ecommerce your small to midsize business can enter the world of online trading with ease.

Intelligent Ecommerce provides users of SAP Business One with a robust and easy to use solution to provide information to customers. Using Intelligent Ecommerce companies can provide their customers with an on-line portal. Customers can log onto the website, enter their username and password and view products on offer.

To find out more about SAP Business One, Intelligent Ecommerce and other Intelligent Essentials add-ons which take SAP B1 further visit www.beabetterbusiness.co.uk or www.beabetterbusiness.ie

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