As a fully integrated, end-to-end organizational management application, SAP Business One provides organizations with a stable and efficient platform that manages most business tasks. It holds a wealth of critical organization, management, and SAP automation tools, yet businesses still rely on employees to manually monitor and react to data changes. This manual approach is prone to errors and is an inefficient use of employee time. This is especially true when it comes to notifications and alerts.

It is expected, in this day and age, that a customer is sent an order acknowledgment and informed of a delivery date and time when an order has been placed. With orders coming in from a wide variety of channels, from telesales to online marketplaces, being able to manage the delivery of these orders can be a time-consuming process. Processing delivery order notifications within SAP automation tools or SAP add-ons has to be performed manually, which takes up valuable time and resources.

Similarly, SAP Business One’s service management module helps organizations provide support for service and client related queries. Once again though, alerting customers, engineers and third-party providers about service renewals and jobs is also a manual task that can cause delays and affect the level of service provided.

Learn More: Simplified SAP Business Management

SAP Automation Tools Deliver Notifications using Bizweaver

Once an order has been placed, the next obvious step is to confirm that the order has been dispatched.

Bizweaver can vigorously monitor SAP Business One and automatically send an email notification or SMS alert to customers saying ‘Your goods have been shipped’. This delivery notification could include the ETA for the delivery of the goods and an associated reference number.

Bizweaver can also integrate with external delivery network systems to recover information such as delivery statuses or proof of delivery and push that data into SAP Business One.

Using that data, notifications can be automatically sent to clients giving them a link to a courier’s website enabling them to track the delivery. Additionally, Bizweaver can automatically generate internal alerts to account managers informing them of recent delivery statuses to crucial clients.

Once the delivery has been made and confirmed, Bizweaver can recover that information and automatically produce a follow-up notification to the client from within SAP’s ERP solution, such as a Completed Order Status. The notification can also be used to initiate a feedback campaign or promote additional products and services. This further enhances customer relations management and empowers you to explore new opportunities.

Automating Service Alerts from SAP Business One

On the service side, Bizweaver can be used to monitor the Customer Equipment Cards in SAP Business One to check for forthcoming services that are about to expire and are due for renewal. Bizweaver can then be set up to automatically send a service reminder notification to the client alerting them to the fact that a service is due, and to get in contact to arrange a visit by an engineer.

When a service job has been received by the organization and inputted into SAP Business One, Bizweaver can automatically collate the information and then send an alert, whether email or SMS,  to the relevant engineer. The alert can provide the specifics of the job request, including problems and parts required, as well as the location of the job and the date and time that it has been scheduled.

Engineers are usually extremely busy, rushing from job to job, and can therefore often fall behind on submitting necessary job completion forms. These are essential to keep the client database up-to-date. Bizweaver can monitor job progressions and send a reminder alert to an engineer if they haven’t completed the relevant forms, requesting they do so as soon as possible.

These are just two scenarios that showcase the abilities of the Notifications and Alerts platform for SAP Business One. When you buy the platform not only can you automate numerous notifications and alerts, you can also quickly add document automation, integration, or workflow capabilities to your business systems.

Contact a Third Wave expert for more information on how Bizweaver can enhance your SAP Business One processes, and the added functionality it can provide your organization.

SAP and the National Hockey League (NHL) announced a multi-year partnership aimed at transforming hockey through technology co-innovation. To launch the partnership, SAP and the NHL focus on increasing fan engagement and deepening fan loyalty with the newly released statistics platform on NHL.com powered by the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud service.

As the official cloud software partner of the NHL, SAP led the NHL through a series of design thinking workshops to overhaul its statistics solution on NHL.com, leading to the transformation of the existing static and limited stats page into a much more comprehensive, interactive and personalized experience. The new real-time data platform enables the League to bring a vast amount of official NHL statistical information directly to passionate fans’ fingertips on the League’s official website.

“Hockey is extremely fast-paced with very little stoppage in play, which results in many aspects of the game failing to show up in the box score,” said NHL Chief Operating Officer John Collins.

“In partnering with SAP and using its best-in-class SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud service, we are now able to capture data points like never before and present existing and new statistics in a visually appealing way.”

“The new NHL stats platform goes beyond data to offer insights that will help avid fans go deeper and help casual fans understand the game better. There are also unlimited storytelling opportunities as we provide our fans with a personalized and interactive experience.”

The NHL.com/Stats redesign will be released in a series of phases throughout the next few years. The first release, includes a brand new design, introduction of enhanced analytics and powerful new visualization capabilities for fans. The subsequent phases are anticipated to include advanced filtering, a playoff prediction tool, team power index, and integration of historical data dating back to the NHL’s inaugural 1917-18 season.

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Business Discussion: Managing Chargebacks

When your customers issue chargebacks for noncompliance of their business rules, it not only impacts your bottom line but also puts a strain on your accounts receivable department. After all, it can take a long time to research and reconcile a chargeback.

Find out how to track chargebacks, streamline the process for handling these transactions, and submit new invoices for incorrect deductions.

Technical Discussion: Implementing EDI with SAP Business One

While using EDI may be a requirement for one of your customers, it does bring significant benefits to your operations. Learn about what EDI is, when you need to consider it, and how to implement it with SAP Business One.

Spotlight Presentation: Produmex Warehouse Management

The PDMX Warehouse Management System for SAP Business One is a comprehensive logistics solution that spans the whole supply chain from planning & sourcing to delivering & invoicing. It supports all relevant inbound, internal and outbound logistics functions.

In addition, it offers advanced functions including cross-docking, various cycle counting options, automatic replenishment, route planning, warehouse transfers, etc.

All successful large companies must have proper campaign management strategies in place for things like quality, data, finance, human resources, and sales processes, among several other important business functions. Companies that deal with large amounts inventory, however, have the added management problem of achieving efficient and cost-effective inventory management strategies.

Since the warehouse and industrial property identification products we create at Camcode are designed to markedly improve business inventory management, we wanted to learn more about what goes into a cost-saving inventory management strategy.

More specifically, we wanted to find some expert tips from industry professionals on what they would consider a great tactic that could meaningfully reduce a business’ inventory costs. To do this, we asked 19 inventory management strategy experts to answer this question:

“What are the most effective inventory management strategies or techniques companies can use to control and reduce inventory costs?”

We’ve collected and compiled their expert advice into this comprehensive guide on how to create an inventory management strategy that can reduce your inventory costs. See what our experts said below:

Mark Breznak

Mark Breznak is COO of Third Wave Business Systems. His background is in application development and he has founded and successfully ran two consulting companies. Mark manages the strategic and tactical operations of Third Wave, ensuring the effective delivery of software and services. He holds both an undergraduate degree in Computer Science and a Master’s degree in Business Administration.

The most effective inventory management strategies that can ultimately help reduce inventory costs are…

Gain the business intelligence needed for your business by implementing the right Business Intelligence (BI) solution.

This will help you gain a better understanding of what inventory was sold over time, type of sale (in stock vs. custom order), fastest moving items, and where are they being shipped. It will also help you understand your suppliers, including what is the lead time, how quickly suppliers can produce, where the best place to ship given the destinations of the sale.

In addition, you’ll be able to determine a target inventory to keep on hand for the majority of items as well as have a process that automatically runs to calculate when the best time is for placing orders.

Click here to read the full article

At Third Wave Business Systems, we help companies achieve this using the SAP add-ons like BOARD Cube, a pre-packaged solution for budgeting, finance, sales and purchasing, and inventory management strategies.

Posted by Nicole Pontius in Camcode’s New Technology

Circle Research interviewed 800 senior decision makers in small and medium-sized enterprises with up to 1,000 people to find out more about their ambitions and business priorities. In this summary, we focus on the ambitions and goals of wholesale distributors.

4 Ambitions Wholesale Distributors Want to Achieve

The research focuses on four ambitions. These are, in order of priority for wholesale distributors:

1. Growth (47%)
2. Customer success (24%)
3. Business improvement (24%)
4. Improving society (4%).

1) Achieving growth (47%)

The main growth priorities for wholesale distributors are growing revenue (64%) and increasing profitability (64%).

Of less importance, are expanding into new territories (43%), introducing new products and services (42%), and expanding into new business premises (33%).

2) Customer success (24%)

Achieving optimal customer satisfaction (63%) and delivering on time and to standard (62%) are the highest priorities in this category.

Growing the customer base is also important with 58% while winning awards and accolades is of very low importance with 19%.

3) Business improvement (24%)

All of the five goals within this category are a high priority for between 47% and 52% of wholesale distributors. Responding to changing market conditions is top, followed by employee efficiency, and then streamlining business processes. Improving supply chain efficiencies and reducing the cost base are at the bottom.

4) Societal improvement (4%)

Societal improvement is the lowest priority for SME wholesale distributors, with only 4%. For those wholesale distributors that do want to improve society, improving employees’ lives is the main focus (32%) followed by building excellent corporate social responsibility (21%). Only 8% want to contribute to charitable causes.

Are Wholesale Distributors SMEs Ready To Realize Growth?

According to the survey, wholesale distributors have a significant way to go before they will be ready to achieve their main growth ambition. One of the main enablers for them will be penetrating new geographies – a high priority for 43% of wholesale distributors.

84% will be looking to connectivity software applications to help them to achieve their business goals and 72% will be looking to cloud solutions to help them.

Find out how Third Wave can help you achieve your business goals. Contact us now!

For most small enterprises, it is a priority to keep IT simple, but effective because the IT resources required to deploy and maintain complex software is not always attainable.

One of the benefits of this solution is that it is no longer necessary for third-party analytics software that complicates your IT landscape. You can deploy your systems without disturbing normal business activities.

Once implemented, your ERP, analytics, and reporting software come from a single software vendor – SAP. All functionality is available through the familiar interface to SAP Business One, so no end-user training is required to get staff members leveraging the power of real-time analytics and reporting.

With the analytics available for SAP Business One, you benefit from:

• Better, faster decision making thanks to fast reporting and enterprise search functions
• More efficient and empowered employees because they can generate standard, ad hoc, and live reporting using Microsoft Excel – without IT assistance
• Greater return on investment by fully leveraging the transactional and operational information being created and stored in SAP Business One for better, faster organizational decisions

Now you can have a powerful organizational analytics solution that runs smoothly with your SAP Business One application. Because the analytics functionality is in the background, you only see the incredible results – not technology. To learn more, contact Third Wave.

To meet the analytics requirements of small businesses, we’ve combine SAP Business One with the power of the SAP HANA platform. SAP HANA empowers you to analyze large amounts of data in such a short amount of time – giving you instant organizational insights as well as the ability to transform your company into a real-time organization.

The analytics powered by SAP HANA operate in the background of your SAP Business One system. This means all transactional and operational data within your SAP Business One application is available for instant organizational insight. You can see your business as it exists in real-time – not as it existed when you performed your personalized data extract, which was the case with previous analytics and reporting technology.

As a result, users at all levels can quickly make more informed decisions because they have real-time access to information – along with the ability to view more information before making decisions.

For instance, your organization can run simulations or “what-if” scenarios instantly, as well as access fast-running reports and dashboards that leverage the SAP HANA database.

Learn More: SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud Transforms National Hockey League

In addition, they can access all your data in SAP Business One with freestyle enterprise search and query large amounts of data instantly. This means that more complete information can be utilized in making more informed decisions.

This solution can also aid in increasing productivity by putting users in control of information. For instance, they can generate and run ad-hoc reports without the assistance of IT and the Microsoft Excel interface can also be used to explore and report on data – all from within SAP Business One.

Your organization benefits from this solution because it empowers your staff, lowers operational and IT costs, and generates faster information processing.

To learn more, contact Third Wave Business Systems.

As a leading business management software, you’ve probably heard the name, but what is SAP Business One? Unlike most other software applications that focus on a specific area of business, such as accounting or customer relationship management (CRM), SAP Business One is an integrated business management application.

It offers a complete set of core functions, including financials, customer relationship management, inventory and distribution, sales, operations, and logistics, which address the business management needs of your entire company.

What is SAP Business One?

More Than a Point Solution

SAP Business One is more than the typical financials software that was born out of accounting and bookkeeping, or a standalone customer relationship management solution. It helps businesses like yours manage the entire process of selling and servicing clients, and once orders are taken, they flow directly into automated fulfillment.

As a comprehensive and integrated system, SAP Business One gives you full visibility into your business, through on-demand analytics and business intelligence in a personalized cockpit, live alerts and approval procedures, and end-to-end business processes.

Information at Your Finger Tips, Any Time, Anywhere

With SAP Business One’s flexible delivery model, you can choose where and when to receive information. If you are in the office, use your personal computer to access the company data directly, if you are on the go, use your mobile device to receive alerts, approvals, and reports, view customer’s sales data and even create sales documents using the free mobile application for SAP Business One.

An Application for Everyone

The easiest way to understand SAP Business One is to think of all of the people who are involved in a business:

• There are people in sales that gather leads, go on sales calls, and make sales.
• There are people who account for what has been bought and sold, and who make sure the money flows properly in and out of the company to and from suppliers, customers, and employees.
• There are people who take customers’ orders and fulfill them, either by sending goods or by providing services.
• There are people who manage operations such as inventory control or service delivery.
• There are managers who monitor and manage the entire business.

Watch: SAP Business One Customer Service (Video)

SAP Business One

Now imagine that one application can help all of these people do their jobs and that all of them work with the same set of information using the same application that can do the following:

• Integrate all parts of your business so everyone operates on the same core business information
• Supply users with personalized interfaces designed to support the way they work
• Process data in real time so you never have to wait for nightly or weekly postings, which means that the financial data of your business is always up to date and available
• Issue warnings and trigger corrective actions to take place automatically when certain limits set by managers and other users are exceeded
• Simplify reporting and analysis with “easy to create and run” reports delivered to you on demand.

To learn more about SAP Business One, contact Third Wave.