SAP Busi­ness ByDe­sign 20.11 — What’s new?

SAP’s cloud-based ERP sys­tem SAP Busi­ness ByDe­sign is updat­ed four times a year. The Novem­ber ver­sion update on 20 Novem­ber brought reforms in a wide range of areas. Updates were for the cus­tomer search func­tion, tick­et man­age­ment, and the trans­la­tion tool. Fur­ther­more, updates were made to the areas of cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment, finance, human resources, dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nels, sup­pli­er rela­tions and project management.

Con­tin­ue read­ing, as we will go through the key reforms next.

Improve­ments in basic functions

You can now set a more spe­cif­ic restric­tion on client pro­file per­mis­sions to lim­it client vis­i­bil­i­ty in the end-user search results view. The syn­chro­niza­tion issue with the SAP tick­et­ing sys­tem has also been fixed and the com­ment can­not be saved to the tick­et with­out chang­ing the sta­tus of the tick­et. This way, you will always receive a noti­fi­ca­tion when the tick­et is updat­ed. In addi­tion, with the new ver­sion of the lan­guage trans­la­tion tool, there is a Replace Text tab, where you can select the source texts that you want to replace with the tar­get text desired by the customer.

New addi­tions in cus­tomer rela­tion­ship management

The new ver­sion update brought many com­plete­ly new func­tion­al­i­ties to cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment (CRM). New doc­u­ments and trans­ac­tions cre­at­ed for CRM now con­firm that blocked mate­ri­als and ser­vices can no longer be added man­u­al­ly. If you try to add a blocked prod­uct, the doc­u­ment will not be saved. If the prod­uct has been used with a pre­vi­ous doc­u­ment and the block­ing has only tak­en place since then, the doc­u­ment will be processed successfully.

It is now pos­si­ble to remove mate­ri­als and ser­vice items from the sys­tem and the ID num­ber of the delet­ed prod­uct can also be reused. Dele­tion is pos­si­ble when the prod­uct has not yet been activated.

In Over-the counter sales, the finan­cial account­ing of doc­u­ments will no longer be pos­si­ble if the account­ing is blocked for a cer­tain cre­ation date in any process, for exam­ple in cus­tomer invoic­ing or cost report­ing. This is to pre­vent doc­u­ments from being incon­sis­tent when they are sent to account­ing. Account­ing for the desired date can be enabled in the process con­trol settings.

In addi­tion to admin­is­tra­tors, busi­ness users now have access to view and resched­ule auto­mat­ed tasks relat­ed to con­tract doc­u­ments that have gone into error log. You can now find the Auto­mat­ed Error Tasks option in the Con­tracts client drop-down menu. Once the cause of the error has been checked in the appli­ca­tion log and fixed, the task can be resched­uled. It is also pos­si­ble to resched­ule mul­ti­ple tasks at the same time.

The pre­vi­ous update 20.08 pro­vid­ed a new func­tion­al­i­ty where a man­u­al ref­er­ence to sales doc­u­ments, such as a lead or sales oppor­tu­ni­ty, could be added to the sales offer. Now the man­u­al ref­er­ence can be added to the sales order and the ref­er­ence can also be deleted.

With cus­tomer invoic­ing reports, it is pos­si­ble to view the net val­ue both with­out addi­tion­al charges and with them. Addi­tion­al charges can be, for exam­ple, freight, oth­er sur­charges or tax­es. This val­ue can also be used in cus­tom reports as well as data sources. Also, SAP Man­ag­er Approvals now includes approval process­es for cus­tomer invoic­es as well as cred­it memos.

More flu­ent finan­cial management

The source of the account state­ment can now be seen in the overview of the Liq­uid­i­ty Man­age­ment work­sta­tion as well as on the account state­ment itself. Addi­tion­al­ly, two new Web Ser­vices are avail­able. Man­age­BankState­mentIn man­ages cus­tomer bank­ing trans­ac­tions using account state­ments and Query­BankState­mentIn allows you to query and read account state­ments in the system.

Lease Con­tract man­age­ment of the cost object; for exam­ple, the Cost Cen­ter, or the expi­ra­tion date of the project to be per­formed by the con­tract is deter­mined by the valid­i­ty of the cost object. For exam­ple, if the end date of the project task is set to 31/12/2021 and the task is used in the con­tract as an expense object, then the expi­ra­tion date of the expense object is the same, both for the project task and the con­tract itself.

More detailed human resource management

Copy­ing employ­ee work­ing time data with the Mas­ter Data Repli­ca­tion inter­face can now be more pre­cise­ly con­trolled. When the Work­ing Time Inte­gra­tion fea­ture is select­ed, employ­ee time pro­files are copied from the exter­nal sys­tem into SAP. Edit­ing them in the time pro­file is then locked, i.e. only the admin­is­tra­tor can edit the work­ing hours via the Mas­ter Data Repli­ca­tion work­sta­tion. If the fea­ture is not on, all the infor­ma­tion in the work­ing time pro­file can be edit­ed normally.

With the pur­chase order, you can see the remain­ing work­ing time in the work time post­ing views, such as the work time pro­file, the work time post­ing cal­en­dar, the work time report, and the employ­ee self-ser­vice view. The remain­ing time is dis­played if unlim­it­ed overde­liv­ery is not select­ed in the pur­chase order settings.

It is pos­si­ble to add four addi­tion­al fields to the hourly report, which are Country/​Region, State, and two option­al fields that can be used as desired. It was pre­vi­ous­ly not pos­si­ble to cre­ate addi­tion­al fields for the hourly report with the cus­tomiza­tion func­tion, so SAP has now cre­at­ed two cus­tomiz­able fields in the struc­ture, which allows you to enter option­al data. Because these are addi­tion­al fields cre­at­ed by SAP, they are auto­mat­i­cal­ly dis­played in oth­er work­ing time views and can be used as data sources in reports.

When an employ­ee makes a time record­ing on a project, a cost entry is made at the same time based on the labour resource assigned to the employee’s cost cen­tre. In the past, if there was a back­dat­ed change in labour resource on a cost cen­tre or an employee’s allo­ca­tion and a change was made to work­ing hours that were still relat­ed to old data, this caused prob­lems in the sys­tem. Con­se­quent­ly, retroac­tive changes are no longer reviewed in the time val­u­a­tion process. Now they should be acti­vat­ed sep­a­rate­ly from the gen­er­al tasks of the Time Admin­is­tra­tion work­sta­tion, where you can acti­vate a run on the employee’s work­ing time. You must select the back­dat­ed changes to be includ­ed from the set­tings if you also want to include back­dat­ed time changes to labour resource.

More flex­i­bil­i­ty in sup­ply chain management

It is now pos­si­ble to spec­i­fy and update a doc­u­ment-spe­cif­ic deliv­ery address for stock trans­fer orders that have not yet been released. Pre­vi­ous­ly, when cre­at­ing a stock trans­fer order, you could only select a ship­ping address from pre­de­fined ship­ping address­es attached to deliv­ery locations.

The dates of the pro­duc­tion order can now be changed, even if the exe­cu­tion of the task has already start­ed. Chang­ing the Last End Date and Ear­ly Start Date fields resched­ules tasks accord­ing to the changes made again.

When cre­at­ing a cus­tomer return noti­fi­ca­tion, an exter­nal doc­u­ment set­ting can be select­ed in the future for those items that do not have an exist­ing ref­er­ence in the sys­tem. When the set­ting is select­ed, the infor­ma­tion is auto­mat­i­cal­ly trans­ferred from the return noti­fi­ca­tion to the cus­tomer return doc­u­ment. This process starts in the area of Inbound logis­tics and it is also essen­tial on the CRM side.

Project man­age­ment bill­ables at task level

If the project has an item tied to time and expense, the source doc­u­ment of which is a pur­chase or cred­it memo, receipt, stock removal or return, then bill­able flag is defined at the task lev­el. Pre­vi­ous­ly, bill­able flag was only defined at the project head­er lev­el. The amount and val­ue of the item to be billed is entered into Billing Amount and Billing Expens­es fields. Cor­re­spond­ing­ly, for the non-bill­able item, the Off Post­ing Amount and Off Post­ing Expens­es fields are used.

Clar­i­fi­ca­tions for sup­pli­er rela­tion­ship billing

If no val­ues​have been main­tained for the cus­tom Z pay­ment term and it is used with the invoice, the date spec­i­fied for the invoice becomes the due date. In addi­tion, it is no longer manda­to­ry to spec­i­fy the account allo­ca­tion type when a new pre­pay­ment request is cre­at­ed through the Sup­pli­er Invoic­ing workstation.

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