Follow a SAP Business One implementation and business transformation

A Boutique Bicycle Company, Torelli Bicycle, will be the first company to have their SAP Business One implementation and business transformation tracked and documented in the first of a series by Information Week.

The entire process – from planning and business process mapping, to go-live, to the company’s first experiences using its new software – is being documented by InformationWeek over the next few weeks as part of its "SMB Location Makeover" series, co-sponsored by SAP AG (NYSE: SAP). This implementation is being supported by SAP channel partner Navigator Business Solutions.

InformationWeek will follow the transformation at Torelli step by step via weekly updates, blogs, videos, interviews and feature stories. To help streamline business processes, pave the way for future growth, and help focus more on its core business and customers, the bike-maker is implementing the SAP® Business One application.

Torelli Bicycle, now entering its 30th year in business, runs a frame-building operation, in which it designs and builds custom road bikes and frames for professional racers and biking enthusiasts, as well as a parts and accessory business. The small shop of four full-time employees has experienced consistent growth, but its current computing systems and business processes were not keeping pace. The solution will help Torelli integrate its entire business across financials, sales, customer relationships, inventory and operations.

The InformationWeek documentation of Torelli Bicycle’s implementation is the first in a real-time, multimedia series that will showcase real-world technology deployments of enterprise resource planning (ERP) offerings to small and midsize businesses (SMBs). To follow in Torelli’s tracks as it plans, implements and runs SAP Business One, visit InformationWeek SMB On Location Makeover.

Source: SAP AG

Online Trading with SAP Business One and Intelligent E-Commerce

With the rise and increasing precedence for SMEs to consider E-Commerce SAP Business One and Intelligent E-Commerce provide the functionality can support you in your quest to enter the growing world of online trading.

The Powering Small Business Britain report from online payment service provider PayPoint.net revealed that 27%, over a quarter of those surveyed believe ecommerce to be the future of their business yet they haven’t yet made it central to their commercial activity.

SAP Business One designed specifically for SME’s along with Intelligent E-Commerce, the standardised add on from Intelligent Information Systems, will help you overcome the initial hurdles and support you throughout the online trading process helping you to manage it and your presence more effectively and efficiently.

Intelligent E-commerce provides users of SAP Business One with a robust and easy to use solution to provide information to customers Business 2 Business E-commerce. Using Intelligent E-commerce 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.

Business Challenges

•Providing customers with an online portal.
•Offering service via the web.
•Displaying products with customers’ prices online.
•Providing self service customer account information.
•Providing Reps with a web portal to place orders and access customer information.

Key Features

•Web Store with product pricing in multi currency and customers special pricing.
•Robust and easy to use.
•Service management online.
•Sales Rep order entry for their customers only.

Business Benefits

•Lower cost of sales by enabling customers to buy online.
•Allows customers to get their own copy transactions.
•Displays your products on the web.
•Gets customer to interact online for support.
•Lets your sales reps enter orders and check stock in real time.

See related blog post: Small Businesses saved by E-Commerce http://intelligentinformationsystems.blogspot.com/2010/09/small-businesses-saved-by-ecommerce.html

Small businesses saved by ECommerce!

Shop owners who have decided to sell their goods online say the move has saved their businesses.

Some four-fifths (79 per cent) of retailers claim they couldn’t have kept their high street presence alive without being online at the same time, according to a survey from eBay.

Mark Lewis, managing director for eBay in the UK, says retailers can’t afford to ignore e-commerce. ‘To ensure businesses continue to thrive on the high street, they must raise their game and exploit new sales channels. The internet can provide a lifeline to all businesses, connecting them to customers across the globe.’

UK consumers spent a staggering £250 billion shopping online in the last decade. That’s according to the IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary.

Our love affair with online retail therapy shows no signs of abating, with sales during 2010 alone expected to hit £56 billion.

The Index’s performance over the last decade tells the story of e-retail success in awe-inspiring numbers. It has grown by 5,772% since launch and continues to track the rise and rise of an industry that still continues to grow, despite the continued challenging economic conditions.

The Powering Small Business Britain report from online payment service provider PayPoint.net unearths a broad range of changes that are forecast for British entrepreneurship over the next five years.
PayPoint.net and YouGov surveyed over 800 UK small businesses about the critical business issues they face today. The findings provide a snapshot of business thinking and highlight a number of changes that have to take place as the UK economy emerges from recession.

The report yielded some interesting key findings…

•35% of small businesses across all sectors see the majority of their revenues coming from online income over the next five years
•58% of survey respondents predict that the greatest growth in their turnover will be through online sales
•Access to more customers is the top benefit to moving online for 59% of businesses
•36% of businesses have been able to grow through access to global markets as a result of trading online

Looking forward, over a quarter (27%) of the businesses covered see e-commerce as the future for their business but have not yet made it central to their commercial activity. Meanwhile, 44% acknowledge the importance of online revenues but are still only at the early stages of developing an on and offline presence to maximise revenue opportunities.

Have you made the move yet???

Sources: Smallbusiness.co.uk, Electronic Payments

Increasing your Twitter followers

As a business the idea behind using Twitter is to connect with as many interested parties and customers as possible so that you can update them regularly with news, insight, company activities and also to provide a more humanistic aspect of your business. It’s free marketing and potentially will support you in managing your customer relationships so why wouldn’t you use it!?

You want to make the most of the large community, extend your reach and gain as many followers as possible.

Here are some tips on how to gain more followers!

Tweet during rush hour – catch people on the move when they have the time to catch up on twitter, tweet and retweet themselves

Follow Others – they may return the favour

Follow those with the same interests as you – you want to have some common ground and based upon the shared interest the audiences you’ll be reaching will more likely to be interested in your company, what you offer and what you have to say

Interact with your followers – this will help to spread your messages and twitter presence to a wider audience as your interaction will be viewable to their followers

Target power tweeters – these tweeters are those which are well established, widely known and respected. Interacting and following them will spread the your presence on Twitter, potentially reaching a wider audience

Put links to your twitter page everywhere – putting links to your twitter page on your website, within Ezines and in the signature of all your mailings will drive traffic to your twitter page and support you in gaining more followers

Use the # functionality – using the # key before the name of the topic you are tweeting about or the key words within your tweet will help visitors to find you and for your company and tweets to be suggested to them when they input or search for the given topic/s.

Happy tweeting!!!!

Follow Intelligent Information Systems on Twitter –http://twitter.com/iisystems

Upgrade hurdles conquered with SAP Business One

The word “upgrade” has historically been an unpopular word amongst SAP customers due to the associated time, pain and cost of moving to a new version of the given software.

SAP Business One overcomes these issues as you can now reintegrate your modifications into new versions of the solution with minimal effort, virtually eliminating the frustration and costs typically associated with upgrades.

Once the hurdles have been overcome the benefits of upgrading can shine through. Why would you not want to take advantage of new innovative solutions which have been designed to better meet your needs? Improvements have been made with you in mind and the upgrade has been developed to increase and build upon the benefits that your current system provides. Upgrades are designed to support you in keeping your business in line with external environments and help you overcome the changing business challenges which you face.

Sports equipment designer, manufacturer and distributor Unicorn Products reports a successful upgrade from SAP R3 to SAP ECC6.

Unicorn managing director Ed Lowy explains that the company has been running on a SAP ERP system since 1999, but that it needed a system capable of managing the growing complexities of the organisation and improving efficiency.

"Unicorn Products has gone from strength to strength over the last 10 years and an upgrade was necessary to provide us with the maintenance and functionality we need to sustain our growth," he says.

According to an Upgrade survey carried out by Panaya, 2010, 79% of companies surveyed have definitive plans to perform an SAP upgrade in the next 16 months and 45% of those are upgrading in the next 6 months.
SAP Business One 8.8 is refined, simplified and faster.

The new SAP Business One release accommodates the continuous demands of the changing market by including an upgrade wizard that is simple and straightforward, reducing customer’s downtime to a minimum. In addition, the new release integrates to partner applications and business services. Based on the flexible business platform of SAP Business One, small businesses can quickly start with core business management applications and add additional capabilities over time with easy-to-consume business applications from SAP partners. In the future, customers will be able to more easily extend their solutions with cloud-based applications, mash-ups and mobile integration.

The upgrade takes less than four hours, and the benefits are immediate with more speed, nice new user interface, and embedded Crystal Reports.

To find out more about SAP Business One 8.8 and how you can upgrade, Contact sales@iisystems.net.

ERP supporting critical CRM within SMEs

“Brands are built by what people are saying about you, not what you are saying about yourself”, Guy Kawasaki, one of the original Apple employees.

Businesses spend 80% of their marketing funds going after new customers and clients rather than nurturing, retaining, and maintaining the customer relationships they already have.

It is important to build relationships with the customers you currently have as they are your assets and potentially the key to future growth. Consider the following facts…

•Repeat customers spend 33% more than new customers.
•Referrals among repeat customers are 107% greater than non-customers.
•It costs six times more to sell something to a prospect than to sell that same thing to a customer.

Companies that fail to nurture and retain their customer base ultimately fail. You will also spend twice as much to get new clients as you will in maintaining your existing customer base as well as being limited in your ability to attract new clients if you can't hold onto and satisfy your existing customers and clients.

The bottom line is that one of the key components in marketing and business growth is to spend the majority of your time and effort nurturing customer relationships, so that you get business from existing clients and customers. This is a strategy that will move you forward in increasing your sales by 50% without increasing your budget.

As a small business CRM is even more important as you are more likely to depend upon repeat business rather than sales volume.

CRM is one piece of the new wave of ERP that focuses on outward facing processes, tying them together with the inside-the-enterprise transaction processing engine of the original ERP systems.

With the popularity of the Web and Web-based business, companies operating in a mass production world were able to truly personalise relationships with customers. The ability to build strong relationships with customers is causing renewed efforts among businesses to achieve lifetime value from current customers and to put strategic plans in place to go after lifetime value for new customers in new markets.

In the world of eBusiness, companies can replicate the personal customer relationship that existed prior to mass markets by using knowledge of the customer to personalise customer service while continuing to sell standard products.

The SAP Business One CRM application provides the tools to turn prospects into customers, grow customer sales, and profitability, and increase customer satisfaction.

To find out more visit www.beabetterbusiness.com or contact sales@iisystems.net

Sources: ERP Bandit.com, Ezine Articles.

Intelligent Scheduler - Schedule and assign your activities within SAP Business One

The latest Intelligent Essentials element, Intelligent Scheduler is now available!

Intelligent Scheduler allows you to schedule your activities and updates them within SAP Business One permitting you to manage your diary more efficiently and cross check your schedule against those within your department or across the whole company.
As with all Intelligent Essentials elements this a standardised enhancement designed to make your SAP Business One solution even better.

Functionalities

•Uses your SAP Business One Login to connect to the database.
•Calendar allowing to you to select a single or range of dates to be displayed.
•Filter employees that are presented by department or turn on and off by individual employee.
•Creates a list of activities that are open, scheduled and those within the specified date range.
•Colour coding of activities according to due date.

Key Features

•Easily assign activities to employees from a predefined, user created list.
•Assigned activities automatically updated in SAP.
•Notification of conflicting appoints to user before activities are scheduled.
•Scheduled activities are displayed in a different colour depending on their status.
•Choice of daily, weekly or monthly view.

Business Benefits

•Efficiently manage multiple employee diaries.
•Readily access information regarding your own or employee activities.
•Schedule activities for employees without having to request information regarding their schedule.
•Promptly organise team meetings without having to individually consult employees individually.
•Saves you time by automatically updating SAP Business One with any changes made to activities and schedule.

To find out more about Intelligent Scheduler and other Intelligent Essentials elements visit www.beabetterbusiness.com, or contact michelle.hunt@iisystems.net for a brochure!