SAP Busi­ness ByDe­sign 21.05 – What’s new?

SAP’s cloud-based ERP sys­tem SAP Busi­ness ByDe­sign is updat­ed four times a year. The May 2021 ver­sion update gave a lot of new func­tion­al­i­ties and enhance­ments to many areas. The updates were for cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment, gen­er­al sys­tem func­tions, reports and ana­lyt­ics, finance, time man­age­ment and sup­pli­er rela­tion­ship man­age­ment. 

Jump into the key reforms! 

New func­tion­al­i­ties in CRM 

In con­tracts cus­tomers are now able to see the start and end date to each billing item. It is also added to the con­tract form. This is espe­cial­ly rel­e­vant for the sub­scrip­tion busi­ness. Also, cus­tomers in the sales order sce­nario can now use a GTIN/UPC (Glob­al Trade Item Num­ber) for the kit head­er prod­uct. It allows charg­ing for the over­all kit and scan UPC rather than the indi­vid­ual prod­ucts. 

Gen­er­al improve­ments to increase every­day con­ve­nience 

SAP Busi­ness ByDe­sign has col­lab­o­rat­ed with Microsoft Teams. Users are now able to eas­i­ly access SAP Busi­ness ByDe­sign fea­tures direct­ly from Microsoft Teams for exam­ple, oppor­tu­ni­ty, project, or cus­tomer list. 

There are also improve­ments with mobile solu­tions, as users can now scan a receipt which then will be con­vert­ed as an expense with­in an expense report. This will make the expense report process more con­ve­nient. Also, employ­ees and man­agers can now use SAP Busi­ness ByDe­sign Mobile app for time record­ings and see push noti­fi­ca­tions for approvals. 

There is a new end user help­ing func­tion­al­i­ty in the sys­tem. SAP Enable Now Web Assis­tant is a web-based front-end solu­tion which comes inte­grat­ed in the sys­tem. It will pro­vide con­text-sen­si­tive assis­tance for end users straight in the sys­tem, and it is in addi­tion to Help Cen­ter. 

It is now pos­si­ble to con­fig­ure the use of gen­er­al actions like down­load, send and add fields in the ana­lyt­i­cal reports. Also, admin­is­tra­tors are now able to con­fig­ure events which will push data to exter­nal appli­ca­tions based on events in SAP Busi­ness ByDe­sign. 

Cus­tomers are now able to access and extract KPI data from SAP Busi­ness ByDe­sign by using ODa­ta ser­vice. It will help to per­form ana­lyt­ics in exter­nal tools like SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud or any oth­er third-par­ty tool like excel. 

Flex­i­bil­i­ty to finance and lease man­age­ment 

When you select a G/L account that uses open item man­age­ment and click edit open items on select­ed account, a new default view appears. It shows only the open items in the cur­rent account­ing peri­od. With oth­er views, besides cur­rent fil­ters, you can now restrict the items to a spe­cif­ic fis­cal year. Also, exter­nal ref­er­ence num­ber can now be entered for a man­u­al tax entry. Bank branch­es can also be main­tained when upload­ing the bank direc­to­ry through the migra­tion tool. 

You can now main­tain the lease con­tract tran­si­tion date at a com­pa­ny lev­el. If not main­tained, it will be cal­cu­lat­ed accord­ing to the default log­ic. Also, lease account­ing is now avail­able for the Pub­lic Sec­tor. You can now assign funds and func­tions to leased objects in a lease con­tract. It is also pos­si­ble to reuse the exter­nal ref­er­ence IDs of a can­celed lease con­tract. 

Enhance­ment to ser­vice con­fir­ma­tion-based time entries 

When an employ­ee per­forms a ser­vice con­fir­ma­tion on a ser­vice order and releas­es it, a time entry gets cre­at­ed in the employee’s timesheet with a ref­er­ence to it. This fea­ture is now avail­able also for ser­vice agents includ­ing inter­com­pa­ny ser­vice sce­nar­ios. 

Improve­ments and intel­li­gence to sup­pli­er rela­tion­ship man­age­ment 

Intel­li­gent sup­pli­er invoice scan­ning has been enhanced to reduce man­u­al effort and increase flex­i­bil­i­ty. Sup­pli­er and com­pa­ny mas­ter data do not need to be syn­chro­nized man­u­al­ly any­more as there is now a dai­ly job that uploads the data to Doc­u­ment Infor­ma­tion Extrac­tion Ser­vice. Also, users can now send cor­rect­ed val­ues back to SAP in order to fur­ther improve the qual­i­ty of pre-trained PDF extrac­tion mod­el. It is also pos­si­ble to cre­ate a cred­it memo from the scanned doc­u­ments. 

Due to short-term planned changes, it might hap­pen that com­po­nents need to be added to already start­ed pro­duc­tion orders, which is now pos­si­ble. This is sup­port­ed for activ­i­ties that belong to not yet fin­ished pro­duc­tions tasks.  

Out­bound deliv­ery now sup­ports ser­i­al num­bers from a return to sup­pli­er doc­u­ment. The sys­tem now cap­tures the ser­i­al num­ber infor­ma­tion from the out­bound deliv­ery request. Also, when you edit the ship-to address while cre­at­ing a new return to sup­pli­er doc­u­ment or add a doc­u­ment-spe­cif­ic address, the same is now reflect­ed in the out­bound deliv­ery process. 

Two new sup­ply chain man­age­ment reports are avail­able enabling bet­ter ana­lyt­i­cal insights for the pro­duc­tion and ware­house man­agers. Those reports are Pro­duc­tion Order/​Lot: Dates and Quan­ti­ties report that pro­vides the actu­al pro­duc­tion dura­tion and the delay and Inven­to­ry Age­ing report that shows the stock quan­ti­ty for a product/​site com­bi­na­tion grouped into ranges of age in days for which the stock remains in the ware­house or site. 

Con­sign­ment stock is com­prised of goods which are send to and stored at the cus­tomers loca­tion, but which are owned by the send­ing com­pa­ny. The cus­tomer is only oblig­ed to pay for these goods when they remove them from con­sign­ment stock. Cus­tomers are now able to get an overview about the con­sign­ment stock at, to and from the customer’s loca­tion. 

Sources: SAP blog & SAP Help Portal 

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 is like a duck in water in dif­fer­ent environments.

#SAP #Busi­ness­By­De­sign #Islet­Group