SAP Busi­ness ByDe­sign 20.08 – What’s New?

About a month ago, SAP’s cloud-based ERP sys­tem SAP Busi­ness ByDe­sign was upgrad­ed to ver­sion 20.08, which brought with it many use­ful and effi­cient func­tion­al­i­ties. There were winds of change espe­cial­ly in the areas of cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment, per­son­nel man­age­ment, sup­ply chain & sup­pli­er rela­tion­ship man­age­ment – let’s have a look at these new functionalities.

Flex­i­bil­i­ty and accu­ra­cy in cus­tomer rela­tion­ship management 

The upgrade brought many desir­able fea­tures to cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment that make it eas­i­er for those work­ing in mar­ket­ing, sales and cus­tomer ser­vice. Cus­tomer tar­get groups can now be seg­ment­ed in mar­ket­ing so that the tar­get group is based on any report or per­for­mance met­ric. This enables cus­tomer com­mu­ni­ca­tion based on up-to-date busi­ness trans­ac­tions, which can be uti­lized in f.ex. sea­son­al cam­paign man­age­ment. Cus­tomer’s ABC clas­si­fi­ca­tion can also be changed direct­ly on the report, which allows imme­di­ate response based on the data obtained from the report, such as pay­ment his­to­ry of invoices.

Sales fore­cast­ing can be done more accu­rate­ly in the new ver­sion. It can now also take into account the dif­fer­ent ver­sions of sales offers, as well as the sales sup­port and ser­vice doc­u­ments linked to sales offers after­wards. Dif­fer­ent ver­sions of sales offers can be cre­at­ed and ana­lyt­ics viewed from the mas­ter ver­sions and, if desired, also from oth­er work­ing ver­sions. This func­tion­al­i­ty bet­ter reflects the real sales sit­u­a­tion where many nego­ti­a­tions are held with the cus­tomer and mul­ti­ple alter­na­tive offers are prepared.

Pric­ing has been devel­oped to be more flex­i­ble, as one doc­u­ment can main­tain two dif­fer­ent dis­count meth­ods instead of one. Cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment doc­u­ments, such as sales and ser­vice and billing doc­u­ments, can be used for both fixed amount and per­cent­age dis­counts at the same time, enabling the desired flex­i­bil­i­ty in pricing.

Resource man­age­ment clos­er to project planning

Pro­jec­t’s resource man­age­ment has been stream­lined with improved resource retrieval. The resource man­ag­er is now able to see the avail­abil­i­ty of employ­ees accord­ing to the planned work tasks of the project, and the search takes the lev­els of project task, ser­vice, and sea­son­al plan­ning into account. With resource search, the resource man­ag­er is able to find employ­ees who are free to be assigned to the project. In addi­tion to free work­ing time, oth­er cri­te­ria can be added as search cri­te­ria, f.ex. areas of exper­tise if you want to find a per­son pro­fi­cient in a par­tic­u­lar area of​exper­tise for the project. Once the search cri­te­ria are met, the resource cal­en­dar can be used to view employ­ee project attach­ments and, if nec­es­sary, edit project work assign­ments, planned hours, and even cre­ate sea­son­al plans direct­ly from the cal­en­dar view. Resource search can also be used direct­ly from the project view, and when a per­son is being assigned to a job, the search func­tion in the same view can also be used to search for oth­er avail­able employ­ees with­in the desired criteria.

Block updates to time entries

Edit­ing timesheets has gained a desired fea­ture where edit­ing pre­vi­ous timesheets can be blocked for employ­ees after a cer­tain peri­od of time. This def­i­n­i­tion can be made on a month­ly basis, in which case f.ex. work­ing time entries can be edit­ed for the cur­rent and pre­vi­ous month, or even for the cur­rent month alone. Work­ing hours can be edit­ed lat­er on, but in this case it can only be done by the per­son in charge, ie. the employ­ee’s supervisor.

Flu­en­cy in pro­duc­tion core data man­age­ment and project inven­to­ry orders

If the prod­uct struc­ture (BoM) or pro­duc­tion phas­ing (BoO) is no longer used in pro­duc­tion, for exam­ple due to the end of the prod­uct life cycle or changes in the pro­duc­tion process, their sta­tus may be changed to expired. This helps orga­nize and main­tain core pro­duc­tion infor­ma­tion and pre­vents the use of out­dat­ed pro­duc­tion models.

The project ware­house orders have gained a new func­tion­al­i­ty, in which pre­de­liv­ery option is also avail­able in ware­house orders that are sent from exter­nal stor­age loca­tions man­aged by a third par­ty. Out­go­ing deliv­ery prints have been stream­lined, as it is now pos­si­ble to include in them impor­tant attach­ments to be sent to the cus­tomer. When upload­ing attach­ments, select “Include in print­out” for each desired attach­ment, in which case the attach­ment will be sent auto­mat­i­cal­ly with the deliv­ery receipt by e‑mail, or will be print­ed togeth­er with the deliv­ery confirmation.

Intel­li­gence for sup­pli­er invoice scanning

Sys­tem users can now scan PDF doc­u­ments using SAP’s Intel­li­gent Doc­u­ment Extrac­tion ser­vice, which pro­vides a sim­pler and more effi­cient way to process ven­dor invoic­es. Com­pared to the pre­vi­ous scan­ning func­tion, just scan­ning PDF doc­u­ments is enough and text doc­u­ments are no longer need­ed. The PDF file is scanned using SAP’s Doc­u­ment Infor­ma­tion Extrac­tion (DOX) ser­vice, which includes an inte­grat­ed text recog­ni­tion ser­vice (OCR) and a mod­el based on machine-learn­ing. The new scan­ning ser­vice is part of the stan­dard SAP license, so there will be no addi­tion­al costs. The sup­port­ed lan­guages​of the ser­vice are cur­rent­ly Eng­lish, Ger­man, French and Spanish.

Source: SAP

Over 4,000 com­pa­nies from 27 dif­fer­ent indus­tries have opt­ed for Busi­ness ByDe­sign solu­tion. ISLET Group has pack­aged the imple­men­ta­tion of a com­pre­hen­sive ERP sys­tem for two indus­tries: ISLET SMART PRO­DUC­TION for man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­nies and ISLET SMART PRO­FES­SION­AL SER­VICES for project busi­ness and spe­cial­ist orga­ni­za­tions. We’d love to dis­cuss more about how Busi­ness ByDe­sign might fit in with your business!

Get in touch:

Juk­ka Pent­ti­nen
Chief Busi­ness Offi­cer, Islet­ter
+358 40 355 1973
jukka.​penttinen@​isletgroup.​fi

The author of the blog, Karoli­ina Luhanka, is ISLET’s SAP Con­sul­tant who man­ages both large lines and small details in projects. She has diverse expe­ri­ence from dif­fer­ent indus­tries, so she blends like a duck in water into dif­fer­ent environments.

#SAP #Busi­ness­By­De­sign #Islet­Group