SAP Busi­ness ByDe­sign 21.02 — What’s new?

SAP’s cloud-based ERP sys­tem SAP Busi­ness ByDe­sign is updat­ed four times a year. The Feb­ru­ary 2021 ver­sion update brought reforms in a wide range of areas. The updates were for the sys­tem basic func­tions, cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment, finance, and human resource man­age­ment, as well as sup­pli­er rela­tion­ship and sup­ply chain man­age­ment areas.

Dive deep­er into the key reforms.

Prac­ti­cal­i­ty for every­day life

Admin­is­tra­tors can now check logged in users and close the open ses­sions if need­ed, as it also releas­es the doc­u­ments locked by the user. SAP Man­ag­er Approvals now allows noti­fi­ca­tions for all approval cat­e­gories except for time post­ing approvals. There was also a reform for mobile expense pro­cess­ing, as the new solu­tion enables receipt scan­ning with the mobile phone, and with the machine learn­ing the data is con­vert­ed direct­ly to the expense report as expens­es. This allows faster and more flex­i­ble trav­el expens­es pro­cess­ing, espe­cial­ly for peo­ple trav­el for work often.

Stream­lined sales

The sys­tem now sup­ports trade item iden­ti­fi­ca­tion GTIN and UPC num­bers for sales kit prod­ucts in over-the-counter sce­nario. The num­bers also allow sales rep­re­sen­ta­tives to accept sales orders that con­tain sales kits via elec­tron­ic data inter­change (EDI).

It is now pos­si­ble to can­cel not start­ed con­tract items. If the con­tract item sta­tus is Not Start­ed, the can­cel­la­tion date can be added. The date can be ear­li­er on than the con­tract item start date. Pre­vi­ous­ly, the can­cel­la­tion was pos­si­ble only if the can­cel­la­tion date fell between the item start and end dates.

Reforms to finance management

Two new Web Ser­vices were added to the Finance area. Man­age­BankState­mentIn enables bank­ing trans­ac­tions man­age­ment by cus­tomer through bank state­ments. The web ser­vice inter­face offers the oper­a­tions Main­tain­Bun­dle and Check­Main­tain­Bun­dle. More­over, with the new field Par­ty Tax ID in web ser­vice Man­age­TaxRe­ceiv­a­bles­Payable­sEn­tryIn, it is now pos­si­ble to cre­ate and post a VAT entry with Par­ty Tax ID.

You can now re-open closed lease con­tracts if the right of use asset is not yet expired. Lease con­tract post­ing runs can be con­fig­ured to car­ry out ini­ti­a­tion, clear­ing or clo­sure post­ings. In the new Lease Con­tract Pro­cess­ing Run view, you can now start the lease con­tract pro­cess­ing run to cre­ate and sched­ule mass data runs for the val­u­a­tion, release or clo­sure of sev­er­al lease contracts.

Pay­ment for­mat 94 — ISO20022 was updat­ed, and the pay­ment method 23 — SEPA Cred­it Trans­fer was removed from it. This means the gen­er­a­tion of out­go­ing bank trans­fer pay­ments and their pay­ment files is no longer sup­port­ed with the com­bi­na­tion of the pay­ment for­mat ISO20022 and the pay­ment method SEPA cred­it trans­fer. This update requires con­fig­u­ra­tion changes to ensure that the pay­ments con­tin­ue to work prop­er­ly after the upgrade. The pay­ment method 26 — SEPA Direct Deb­it was also removed from the same pay­ment for­mat, so that com­bi­na­tion is no longer sup­port­ed either.

Pur­chase account man­age­ment can now be acti­vat­ed for addi­tion­al coun­tries, allow­ing to main­tain the account­ing prin­ci­ple for a country/​region. In addi­tion, the pur­chase account man­age­ment is also pos­si­ble to be acti­vat­ed for the third-par­ty order processing.

Automa­tion for time record­ings and new work object to resource calendar

New scop­ing ele­ment for auto­mat­ic time record­ing from ser­vice con­fir­ma­tions on ser­vice orders is now avail­able. When it is scoped, the sys­tem auto­mat­i­cal­ly cre­ates a time entry for already exist­ing and a new time and mate­r­i­al or fixed-price ser­vice order items, against which a ser­vice con­fir­ma­tion has been cre­at­ed and released. It also includes time entries for unplanned items added to a ser­vice order. The sys­tem cre­ates a time entry against each indi­vid­ual item.

A new busi­ness object, Resource Cal­en­dar Gener­ic Work Assign­ment, has been added to Pub­lic Solu­tion Mod­el (PMS). It means both the cus­tomer solu­tions that are built using SAP Busi­ness ByDe­sign Cloud Appli­ca­tions Stu­dio and the cap­tured by exter­nal solu­tion can be added to the employ­ee’s resource cal­en­dar. This busi­ness object works kind of an inter­face as you can add cus­tomer work objects to the stan­dard resource calendar.

Upgrade for ven­dor invoice scan­ning and improve­ments to pur­chase orders

Intel­li­gent sup­pli­er invoice scan­ning is upgrad­ed. The iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of pur­chas­ing com­pa­ny data has been improved, which helps com­pa­nies that upload PDF doc­u­ments cen­tral­ly for mul­ti­ple com­pa­nies. PDF doc­u­ments can also be uploaded using an ODa­ta ser­vice and in addi­tion, the ser­vice allows to upload and also start the scan­ning. Now it is pos­si­ble to spec­i­fy whether you want all the pur­chase order items to be copied or only the scanned items, an option espe­cial­ly use­ful in par­tial deliv­ery sce­nar­ios. In addi­tion, it is also pos­si­ble to delete mul­ti­ple scanned items.

The sys­tem now allows you to define the num­ber of days for dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tions of com­pa­nies, sup­pli­ers and pur­chas­ing units. When a new pur­chase order is cre­at­ed, the deliv­ery date is cal­cu­lat­ed con­sid­er­ing these set­tings. In addi­tion, in inter­com­pa­ny project sce­nario if there are cus­tom codes for account assign­ment for the pur­chase order, the cus­tomer codes now flow from the pur­chase order to the goods and ser­vices receipt.

Flu­en­cy to pro­duc­tion order and pro­duc­tion Task management

The pos­si­bil­i­ty to change pro­duc­tion order start and end dates became pos­si­ble with the update 20.11. Now the planned out­put and com­po­nent quan­ti­ties of already start­ed pro­duc­tion orders can also be changed. Chang­ing quan­ti­ties affects all the pro­duc­tion tasks in the pro­duc­tion order, as all their quan­ti­ties and sched­ules will be updat­ed. More­over, it is now pos­si­ble to pre­vent the pro­duc­tion task exe­cu­tion if the task is par­tial­ly fea­si­ble or not fea­si­ble at all.

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