SAP Business One on HANA is the ERP solution for SME’s that require a software which not only runs day-to-day transactions such as journal entries, sales and purchase orders or helps to control inventory movements, but also provides real-time insight into business performance with ad-hoc reporting tools, dashboards and pervasive analytics.

SAP Business One, version for SAP HANA has a number of in-built functionalities that are not available on the SAP Business One for MS SQL version. In this blog we try to give you a more detailed view on those features.

in case you are in a rush and want the condensed version: the following picture contains the main functionality available within SAP Business One on HANA in one glance

SAP Business One on HANA Functionality Overview

Pre-Delivered Dashboards and Reports

SAP Business One on HANA has pre-delivered content taking advantage of the in-memory technology of SAP HANA. As data is stored in-memory, and is therefore easily accessible for processing, reports and dashboards can be built directly using ERP transaction data – without the need for extraction, transformation and loading in a BI environment. SAP Business One on HANA comes with pre-delivered content such as:

Ready dashboards for 4 main business functions:

  • Customer receivables aging
  • Cash flow forecast
  • Sales analysis and delivery analysis
  • Purchase quotations
  • inventory status
  • Service calls

In addition, 4 reports optimized for SAP HANA are provided as pre-delivered content:

  • Periodic sales analysis by customer
  • Customer open item list
  • Inventory turnover analysis
  • Monthly customer report (order, invoice, payment, return)

SAP Customer Receivables Ageing Dashboard

Cash-Flow Forecasting

With the interactive cash-flow reporting tool you gain a complete, accurate and timely picture of your entire cash flow. The reports can be adjusted to include or exclude optional items such as purchase orders and sales orders, to give you a more aggressive or more conservative analysis of the expected cash-flow of your business.

SAP Business One Cash Flow Forecasting

Advanced Available-To-Promise (ATP) Functionality

ATP enables you to compare inventory on hand and expected inventory in-flow (through purchase orders) with promised deliveries and customer sales orders. Understanding your real available-to-promise quantity allows you to significantly increase your ability to provide accurate commitment to your customers, and avoid delivery problems. This will also help you to reduce cost incurred due to re-scheduling of orders just to meet delivery commitments.

ATP Functionality SAP Business One

Delivery Schedule Management

With SAP Business One on HANA you can now stay on top of your scheduled deliveries, and change quantities on the fly. You will be able to see the scheduled delivery date and quantity of sales orders, inventory transfer requests, production orders, purchase orders, and reserve invoices. You also can reallocate quantities of documents to fulfill the quantity of the target documents. Now planners can split quantities from a single order and spread them out into multiple deliveries, or push quantities from one order to another in order to satisfy urgent requirements. All this allows you to manage the delivery of your products better, and to increase the accuracy of your delivery schedules.

Delivery Schedule Management B1 HANA

Pervasive Analytics Dashboards

Using SAP Business One on HANA, you can now get analytical reports embedded in transaction screens. As an example, if you create a sales order, you can immediately analyze the previous sales orders made by this customer without having to run some external report. This enables front line employees to see data needed to make business decisions at the moment it’s needed. You have real-time analysis available to reflect transactional activities, and you can even predict future behavior with forecasting capabilities.

SAP B1 Pervasive Analytics Dashboard

Pervasive Analytics KPI’s – build your own dashboards

You can now create KPI’s to help you evaluate the status of your business in an easy-to-view way. Those KPI’s are embedded in the SAP Business One Cockpit, and give you an immediate, real-time understanding your business performance. No knowledge of database tables and dependencies is needed, if the pre-build SAP HANA models are used!

SAP Business One KPI Dashboard

Ad-Hoc / Interactive Analysis

SAP Business One on HANA allows you to easily create ad-hoc reports. Those reports leverage familiar MS Excel pivot tables to make analysis work quick and simple, and enable any user to create and run reports without requiring IT support. The interactive analysis uses “semantic layers”, which come pre-defined with SAP Business One on HANA, and can be further extended by the user with HANA Studio. Some of the pre-defined models that can be used for interactive, real-time analysis are :

  • Cost center analysis
  • Cost account vs. financial
  • accounting
  • Budget analysis
  • Aging analysis
  • Inventory turnover analysis
  • Dynamic cash prediction
  • Sales opportunity analysis
  • Sales revenue analysis

SAP Business One Interactive Analysis

Enterprise “Google-like” Search

Have you ever wondered which other customers bought “widget one” last year? Wouldn’t it be great if you could just use the equivalent of a Google bar in your ERP system to give you relevant answers? SAP Business One on HANA let’s you do exactly that. Access the most relevant SAP Business One data with freestyle search, and locate business information just as you would do a search on the internet. This new search technology mimics that of the most popular search engines from the web, and provides a full 32-key text search. You can apply dynamic filters and drill-down on the search results, while still adhering to the existing data securities policies set by your administrator. You can filter on dates, sort results, and store search templates.

SAP B1 Enterprise Search

Unique Mobile App Scenarios for the iPad

Many of the new features available for SAP Business One on HANA are also available as mobile apps, extending the functionality of your ERP solution to your tablet / smartphone. The following apps have been added to the existing SAP Mobile App, included in every SAP Business One license:

  • Enterprise search integration
  • Available-to-Promise (ATP) check when creating sales orders
  • Embedded analytics, with interactive analysis for business partners and inventory
  • Cash flow forecast dashboard
  • Delivery rescheduling for existing sales order items
  • In closing

    If you are deciding between SAP Business One on MS SQL or Business One on HANA, don’t let price be the only deciding factor. There are quite a few benefits to be gained by moving to B1 on HANA. For more considerations on which version to choose, see our blog on SAP Business One HANA vs SQL.

    If you’d like to understand more, or get a free demonstration – please don’t hesitate to get in touch.