SAP B1 is becoming a rising star on small and mid-size business sector horizons, SAP itself plans to increase number of installations worldwide to 100 thousand to the year 2010, which translates to two digits number of percentage growth per year. Alba Spectrum SBO team is very optimistic about market perspectives and we are coming the following incentives:

1. If you are in USA, we send our sales engineer after reasonable sales preparation cycle at our cost and he does face-to-face demo at your office.

2. Central Sales Engineering support in Sales presentation. It is too optimistic to expect that one sales person would know all the case studies and implementation scenarios on SB1, including industry verticals and third party products, as well as integrations, EDI, ecommerce, custom barcoding, programming SB1 SDK, etc. This is why we allocate Sales Support team, which participates in Sales presentation via remote web session connection to immediately answer your questions

3. Rapid Installation and Implementation onsite. Again as we plan to have it for 2008, we will send our experienced consultant, who has at least ten SAP Business One projects experience under his or her belt at our expense. You will only pay normal hourly rates

4. Some facts about SAP Business One. This ERP and also MRP application has pretty solid and at the same time simplified functionality, including Production, CRM, Projects, Service Management, e-commerce. SB1 licensed on the all-in-one model, where you get number of named user licenses. Each user will have access to all the modules of SB1. Limited functionality users will have access to CRM module ? this is very good fit for roust Sales department, where you can prepare quotes to your leads, prospect and customers

5. Barcode extensions. Alba Spectrum offers turn key barcoding extensions for SAP Business One. In fact one of our partners runs barcoding business: scanners, POS terminals, Hand held devices, Wireless scanning equipment, etc.

SAP B1 demos and presentations face-to-face and via remote web meetings, provided by Alba Spectrum SAP BO sales team.

If you are in the ERP selection process and if your company is small or medium size business, please check out SAP Business One. This MRP application is member of SAP ERP suite and as such carries SAP leading brand, and no doubt it will add the value to your business. Let?s review some SB1 features:

1. Modern and intuitive interface. As this ERP was programmed relatively recently, comparing to other brands on the accounting applications market, you will be surprised by the interface intuitive self evidence

2. Simple and very broad functionality. You should expect most of simple typical business ERP routines in it: production (manufacturing or sometimes referred as assembly), projects, CRM, eCommerce, Service management. At the same time the functionality in each mentioned module is light and doesn?t require advanced training. If you had previous experience in using other ERP, you should easily recognize SB1 logic

3. Customization and Integration. SB1 goes beyond the small business applications restrictions, where you typically can not do serious modifications. In SB1 you have SDK, work bench (integration via Excel templates), plus you can have full control in querying SAP B1 SQL database, if that is what you are looking for

SAP ERP family of products includes SAP B1, which is oriented to small and mid-size companies. It is definitely a SAP brand and SAP itself plans aggressive expansion in US, including its SAP BO product. Each ERP platform has its own features and it is important to make your homework in accounting application selection. We’ll try to give you SAP Business One highlights in this publication:

1. Simple functionality. SAP B1 interface is very intuitive and its functionality is pretty self explanatory, or if you know other accounting applications, let’s say with reasonable self discovery you can begin setting up and using application on your own

2. Broad ERP functionality coverage. You should not expect this application to have very deep and advanced functionality as we already mentioned above, however in its simplicity SAP B1 covers such features as Production (light manufacturing), Service (including field service), Customer Relation Management or CRM, eCommerce. Imagine, if your company has really simple manufacturing and warehouse management operations, this ERP could be great discovery for you

3. Flexibility to customizations, integrations, data conversion, reporting. If you are in the dilemma of switching from Quick Books to something more advanced, and one of your criteria is system modification or custom programmability, then again you should include SAP B1 into the list of your potential candidates. Such thing as SAP Business One SDK or Software Development Kit opens the gateway to SB1 objects to Microsoft Visual Studio C# or VB developer

4. SAP MRP Brand. SAP is leader on ERP market and it is wise to just increase the value of your business in mounting its accounting on SB1 platform. If you plan to sell your business in the future, you probably know that one of the first things evaluators will review is your IT infrastructure and ERP

5. Competition. Among the leaders we recommend you to review Microsoft Dynamics small and midsize products: Small Business Financials and Microsoft Dynamics GP. Microsoft ERP products are more technology-oriented and their interface reminds Microsoft Outlook. If your company depends on the majority of Microsoft applications: Sharepoint, Exchange, Active Directory, BizTalk, Microsoft Dynamics is very good fit

SAP B1 ERP has integrated CRM functionality and you can purchase named user licenses for CRM only at half of the normal all-in-one user license price. Client Relation Management business logic typically fits to your sales people and considering typical business office, you may have as many as half of all office employee working in Sales department, CRM licenses might help your budget in Software purchasing and implementing. Let?s review the functionality:

1. Opportunity. This is the key CRM object. Opportunity might be assigned to either Customer or Lead Business Partner. Toward opportunity you can do activities, such as phone calls, meetings, task, note or other. You also can associate opportunity with Partner channel ? if you sell SAP products you can associate with SAP BO product line (SAP Business One you can make a partner for opportunities). Also you can associate opportunity with competitor, for example Microsoft Dynamics. Plus for the opportunity you can select existing or create new quotation or sales order, in this case you may decide to update opportunity budget from Quote or Order

2. Opportunity phases and stages. By default new opportunity is created in open phase. Then as you go with your sales cycle you can move it to won or lost phase. In CRM setup you define opportunity stages with estimated closing percentages at each stage. As well you enumerate stages. You can also move back to previous stages. Good example is negotiation and following quotation stage. You can move back from quotation to further additional negotiation

3. Related Documents. These are quotes and sales orders. If you have multiple re-negotiation steps you may associate multiple sales documents to the same opportunity and every time you can update budgets and plus closing estimated percentages

4. Opportunity reporting. Here, as you normally expecting from SAP BO, reporting is really sophisticated and at the same time pretty intuitive. Besides standard reporting we encourage you to practice or establish good habit to practice in SAP B1 unique drag-and-relate technology, which is very cool feature, resembling data mining and warehousing