Integrated Business Solution Choosing the right business solution for growth

1. Business Management Made Simpler Integrated Business Solution Choosing the right business solution for growth Publisher- Silver Touch Technologies UK Limited Editor- Disha Kakkad © Copyright 2015 Silver Touch Technologies UK All rights reserved. No part of this Guide shall be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from Silver Touch Technologies UK

2. The importance of digital transformation in the business world is no longer a question of if, but when and how fast. However, all too often, a company’s financial, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or IT Systems are often fragmented and heavily customised, and there are numerous business priorities all competing for investment, so making the decision to finally replace outdated systems is rarely a straightforward process in practice. Against this backdrop it is easy to see why many opt to maintain the status quo rather than take a leap into new territory. But making do with outdated technology, or justifying Excel-based systems that are cumbersome to manage and often creaking at the seams, will not only stunt growth in the short term, but will put companies at a strategic disadvantage long term. Customers’ expectations of how they interact with organisations have changed enormously. Therefore it is important that your back-office software can bring your organisation closer to its customers, partners and suppliers and enhance experi- ences, productivity and profitability. Leading Market Analyst Gartner predicts that by 2020 every company will be IT-led, providing acknowledgement that technol- ogy is now intrinsic to a company's growth. So now is the time to get ahead of the game and utilise different strategies, approaches and tools to gain market share and successfully compete. Introducing SAP® Business One SAP® Business One is a cost-effective, easy to use & implement and a comprehensive business management solution catering to the requirements of small & midsize enterprises. It helps SMEs to boost profitability and automate their entire business processes. It allows you to manage all your core business functions including finance & accounting, banking, sales, procurement, customer relationship management, inventory, reporting and more. The solution has been made flexible, which can be deployed on the premise or even in the Cloud. You can even access it on-the-go through SAP® Business One mobile app. It also provides scalability to your business, allowing customisation and expansion to meet your growing business needs. This integrated solution provides clear visibility into your business and allows you to capture all your business information, giving you its on-demand and up-to-data access and helping you make informed decisions. Unlike accounting packages or spreadsheets, it is a complete business solution, which can help you to manage all the aspects of your business.

3. Accounting and Finance Businesses face the challenge of handling their financials as they grow. Without a financial management solution, they face problems in managing their financial and accounting process. Through a proper solution in place, you can increase your efficiencies and overcome inaccuracies, leading to increased revenues. SAP® Business One offers a comprehensive set of tools to automate all your accounting and financial functions. The solution supports financial management in the following ways: Accounting Management SAP® Business One helps to manage all your accounting transactions, allowing you to use its comprehensive predefined as well as customisable chart-of-accounts templates, based on your business needs. You can handle accounting transactions like journal entries, vouchers, recurring postings and more. SAP® Business One helps to define and manage budgets, handle payment terms, customer reminders, and cash collections. You can even manage direct & indirect expenses, and revenues for multiple cost centres. SAP® Business One also allows you to manage and forecast your cash-flows accurately, track fixed assets, control budgets and monitor project costs. Banking & Reconciliation Financial Reporting & Analysis SAP® Business one processes reconciliations, bank state- ment, and manages incoming and outgoing payments through various methods like cheques, cash and bank transfer. It also processes bank statements and performs automatic reconciliation of your ledgers. It helps in clearing multiple accounts receivable and payable invoices automati- cally in batches. SAP® Business One provides a wide range of financial reports like balance sheets, profit & loss statements, profitability reports, multi-period comparisons, sales & purchasing analysis, aging reports and budget reports. You can create standardised as well as customised reports from real-time data for efficient business planning and audit reviews.

4. Sales and Customer Management CRM in SAP® Business One helps you to close your sales faster and serve your customers in a better way. It can automate processes and efficiently manage your entire sales cycle activities including activities like contact, proposal, sales closure and post-sales service & support. The solution helps you to take better decisions and meet your business needs with its highly integrated features, providing a holistic view of your prospects and customers. SAP® Business One simplifies sales and customer management in the following ways: Opportunities & Sales SAP® Business One helps to track & manage opportuni- ties throughout the sales cycle. You can create instant prices quotes, convert them to orders and even perform checks on real-time product availability. You can even create dashboards and interactive reports for forecast- ing and analysing sales. Customer Contacts You can manage lead and customer data in a simple UI through SAP® Business One. You can even access customer balances, credit lines, opportunities and open orders from a single screen. SAP® Business One helps in viewing and synchronising contacts with Microsoft Outlook. It allows you to automatically transfer data from master records to relevant transac- tions. Service Through the Sales and Customer Management feature you can administer warranty and service information of the clients. You can respond to the customer service requests from a central location and search for solutions to your clients' problems in a solutions knowledge database. SAP® Business One also allows you to monitor service levels with alerts and reports.

5. Purchasing and Operations Every small business should have a systematic approach to managing its procurement process, from requesting vendor quotes to creating purchase requests to paying vendors. SAP® Business One allows managing complete order-to-pay cycle, including receipts, invoices, returns, and payments. It also helps you to manage item and supplier master data with detailed, multilevel information, apply price lists and costing models to purchase items and get real-time view of purchase order values and inventory valuations. SAP® Business One offers the following purchasing and operations management functionality: Procurement Item and Vendor Master Data You can create single or multiple Purchase Orders (POs) and goods receipts, link purchasing documents and view document trails for audit purposes. You can even manage additional expenses and multiple currencies through SAP® Business One. The solution allows you to manage detailed data in user-friendly interface, view account balance and purchase analysis in supplier master record. You can even maintain detailed item purchasing information with price lists and tax information. Warehouse and Accounting Integra- tion Real-Time Reporting You can generate intuitive and interactive reports with real-time purchase data in SAP® Business One. You can even get additional reporting functionality, such as dashboards, through built-in functionality or by integrating Microsoft excel templates. SAP® Business One can help you to achieve real-time synchronisation of goods receipts and inventory warehouse levels. You can process accounts payable invoices and credit memos with PO reference, calculate inventory book values and last purchase price automatically.

6. Inventory and Distribution SAP® Business One helps to manage detailed warehouse data, track and record stock movements, and execute production orders. You can keep track of product inventory, quantity at different warehouses, movement history and the status of stock. Inventory data is updated in real-time allowing you gain insights to meet the demand and expectations of your clients. The solution helps you to value inventory using standard costing, moving average, FIFO and various other methods; monitor stock levels and track the transfer of stocks in real-time. SAP® Business One supports the following: Warehouse and Inventory Manage- ment Production and Material Requirements Planning SAP® Business One allows you to manage inventories using various costing models, maintain item master data, and use multiple units of measurement and pricing. You can implement serial and batch number management and generate comprehensive item list, transaction, and valuation reports. You can manage inventory by dividing each warehouse into multiple subzones, set up allocation rules, optimise stock movement, and reduce picking times. Goods Receipt and Issue Control Bin Location Management The solution will help you to record goods receipts and issues, track stock transfers, enable consignment and perform inventory and cycle counts. You can create and maintain multilevel Bills of Materials (BOMs), issue and release production orders manually or by backflush, and globally maintain prices for BOMs. Efficient and Up-To-Date Reporting You can generate reports with data that is regularly updated, and display them in various report formats or as dashboards.

7. Reporting & Management A large number of small businesses struggle to generate accurate and real-time financial reports from company data. SAP® Business One caters to this requirement and allows you to create updated reports easily. It provides you with end-to-end visibility of your business operations with a “drag and relate” feature that helps you to instantly understand key relationships and transactions within the business. You can use the XL Reporter tool (or optional Xcelsius) to create SAP® Business One management reports, or dashboards, that provide snapshots of key performance indicators. You can even use Crystal Reports for layouts, reports, customisation and distribution.SAP® Business One reporting includes: Report Creation and Customisation Report Viewing You can access data from multiple sources, create new reports, or customise existing ones in a variety of layouts with minimal IT overhead through SAP® Business One SAP® Business One enables powerful visualisations and interactivity using integrated tools such as Adobe Flash and Adobe Flex. Publishing and Distribution Intuitive Tools You can export reports to electronic formats that best fit your business needs, and deliver them either over the Web or embedded in other applications, including portals, while preserving security. You can drag and relate, drill down, search assistance, and get workflow-based alerts in SAP® Business One.

8. Challenges facing SMEs It’s not easy being an owner of an SME (small to medium size enterprise) in the UK these days. Senior partner, Chris Collier, looks at some of the most common challenges SMEs may be facing. Money Management Customer Issues It is important for your business to have enough cash to cover your bills along with finding adequate funding, getting billings out on time, collections, and credit management. You must understand what your customers or potential customers really want and keep them happy because without customers you will have no business. You have to take care they don’t turn to your competitors. Your People Time and Resources Employing the right staff for your business is no easy feat and can take hours. Once you’ve found your ideal candidate, you have to retain, train, motivate and encourage them. You are unlikely to have the time or the skills to play every role that a larger organisation might have such as research, marketing, finance or IT departments, to address challenges or opportunities. It is therefore worth spending on outsourc- ing in certain areas. Remaining competitive against the big players Red Tape Ever changing legislation, ensuring that PAT testing is carried out and the bureaucracy surrounding national insurance and income tax can be onerous but are all things that must be dealt with. Proving that your business is capable of undertaking work against some of the larger organisations can be a challenge. Also, large companies often require detailed information about your business before being able to place you on their preferred supplier list not forgetting harsh credit terms. These can prolong the process and feel very unfair.

9. IT Challenges facing SMEs Increasing Business Productivity Accelerating Business Performance Your business system should be able to integrate with other applications. You should be able to capture information and manage processes for all your business functions like sales, customer relationships, financials and operations. You should even be able to extend your solution to Smartphone's and be able to support continuous improvement to opera- tional performance. You need to continuously accelerate your business efficien- cies and remove the limitations of your existing solution that creates difficulties for your customers or suppliers to do business with you. You have to overcome the challenge of delay in decision-making due to lack of timely informa- tion. You are even required to focus on complete and on-time delivery, accelerated financial close, increased profitability, 100% accuracy of financial reporting and reduced time to decisions. Moreover your solution should be customisable and adaptable to business changes. Unlocking New Insights Improving IT Efficiency Your current solution should be able to solve your demand planning and forecasting challenges. It should be able to give you visibility into your business and control over your operations. Your system should be having reporting and analytical capabilities, helping you unlock new insights. It should have the capability to capture critical business information and even customise existing reports. You need to evaluate how much your existing solution support the growth of your business, responsiveness and customer relationships and keep technology costs to an acceptable minimum. You face the challenge of overcoming redundant data entry and errors across your business. You even have to consider providing secure mobile access to back-office information and processes. It is important to think about how you can customise your existing solution or integrate it with third-party tools. You have to overcome all the obstacles standing between your business and a cloud-based ERP solution.

10. Silver Touch's Approach to Implementing SAP® Business One Silver Touch follows comprehensive methodology for the setup and implementation of SAP® Business One to ensure success- ful deployment on time and within budget. We take a phased approach starting with the planning, implementation and end-user testing. We ensure the business objec- tives are fully understood and are built into the implementation. We ensure in our phased approach, that we include all aspects of testing, training and management of the system, so you are ready to run your business on SAP® Business One. We are always on hand to support you with our SAP® Business One experts. This is provided by our 24/7 support center. We pride ourselves on achieving customer satisfaction, since the cornerstone of our success lies in building long-term relationships with our clients ensuring successful use of Business One.

11. Getting the Business Benefits of Using SAP® Business One » SAP® Business One caters to the requirements of small and midsized businesses. It can help you to automate manual processes, manage all aspects of your business and reduce human errors and duplication, thus increasing operational efficiency of your business. » SAP® Business One is a must have for small & midsized businesses, supporting every critical business function, allowing you to stay on top of your business and giving boost to your profitability. » You can expand your business and customer base through SAP® Business One's opportunity management, web-based CRM and e-commerce capabilities. You get a complete customer view across sales, distribution, and financials, helping you uncover new ways to serve your customers in a faster and better way. » It is a cost-effective and user friendly solution that can be integrated in less time, helping you to streamline your opera- tions and integrating key business processes. » You can efficiently manage your business functions by seamlessly integrating key business processes such as sales, purchasing, inventory, and financials together, eliminating redundant data entries and errors. » You can get automatic alerts, instantaneous insights, workflows, up-to-date dashboard through SAP® Business One, allowing you to take proactive control of your business and responding to your customer requirements promptly. » You can adapt to your changing needs with user-friendly customisation tools to tailor SAP® Business One to fit your specific business needs and individual user preferences. » SAP® Business One is quick to implement and ensures rapid ROI, increases productivity and enhances profitability. » The solution will give you real-time business information to help you make better decisions and improve revenues. » Through SAP® Business One and third party solution extensions, your business can get the same depth of functionality that your larger competitors enjoy. » SAP® Business One minimises your day-to-day administrative tasks such as manual data entry and paper-based procure- ment. It will connect all your business functions, thus automating your day-to-day activities and allowing you to focus more on priority tasks like growing your business. » SAP® Business One can provide you with sales figures, stock status, pricing and supplier statistics. By creating custom reports you can identify the areas in which your business is most successful, recognise where you require more strategic planning and act promptly through real-time decision-making. » SAP® Business One will also enable you to easily fulfil large orders; ensure on-time deliveries by proactively addressing critical issues; help you to forecast potential revenues; allow to monitor and analyse sales opportunities and let you look into the pipeline to monitor new initiatives. 

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