The Personality of SAP Business One
Much like the story of “The Places You’ll Go” by Dr. Suess, SAP Business One has many diverse turns and paths that users can capitalize on an efficient, effective, and comprehensive ERP system for small to medium sized businesses. However, at the beginning of your SAP Business One Experience, users will need to understand the general layout of the software they will be working with. In Dr. Suess’ famous book, the child finds his way through life going through different experiences such as Grade School, Highschool and then traditionally off to college to transition into professional life.
The same is true with SAP Business One in which users build the foundation using features such as the Personalized Cockpit, Drag and Relate, Enterprise Search, Drill Down to related data, or Copying to and from other documents. These features and functionalities enable the user to gain control over their business and ultimately help transition to more advanced functionality and tools that are just as familiar as they are flexible and integrated. The following tips for beginners (in addition to previous installments of our Tutorials for Beginners) will help kickstart the foundation needed to expand their knowledge.
“Oh, the places you’ll go! There is fun to be done!
There are points to be scored. There are games to be won.
And the magical things you can do with that ball
will make you the winning-est winner of all.”
Dr. Seuss, Oh, The Places You’ll Go!
The first screen that you see is the login window where you enter your user name and password. After the first login, the last company that you logged into is automatically selected. At the bottom right of the login window, you can click the Change Company button to select a different company to work with. Some organizations use multiple SAP Business One companies, keeping track of different legal entities, divisions, or business activities as separate companies.
The first time you log in, you will need to select your database server as well. Consult your system administration to retrieve this information. A user name and a password must be entered in order to log into the company database. For audit purposes, user information is recorded in every new record or modification to an existing record that a user performs.
User setup: During the implementation, user names are created for the employees that will log into SAP Business One. Each user must be assigned a valid license and the user’s activities are restricted based on the license type. Users can be set up for single sign-on as well. See the security guide for more information.
training ground for accelerating learning or testing new ways of using SAP Business One. Once you have successfully logged in, the learning process can begin.
Understanding the Personality of SAP Business One
Before we move into a detailed explanation of the user interface, we want to give you a sense of the style, or personality, of SAP Business One. The first time someone shows you the SAP Business One main window and the main menu, it all looks pretty simple. Then you ask a question: How can we find purchase orders related to a given supplier? Without hesitating a second, whoever is showing you the program clicks on the main menu a couple of times, brings up a blank purchase order window, enters the name of the supplier, and, quick as a flash, there is a purchase order for that supplier.
Shortcuts: There is nothing better than using shortcuts! There are many ways to create shortcuts to your frequently used documents and reports. Later in the guide, you will see how you can use the workbench widget to quickly access all forms that may be relevant to sales, purchasing and more, with one click of a button, as well as creating key-board shortcuts to popular windows.
You can now scroll through and see all of the purchase orders for that supplier. Let’s say you want to see the items on a purchase order. You simply click on the Contents tab to review the ordered items. You want to see the details for one item? One click, and you have the item window. Which warehouse is that item stored in? Another click and you’re looking at it. Before you realize it, you’ve accessed a number of windows. The most common reaction at this point is, well, that was fast. But where am I? And what can I do next?
Once you read this chapter, you’ll know where you were, and where you need to go next. And once you work with SAP Business One for just a bit, you won’t want to work with any application that isn’t as convenient and easy to use.
But to get to this destination—the place where it all makes sense—you need to spend some time with a guide.
SAP Business One Version notification: SAP Business One is available in two platforms: Microsoft SQL Server and SAP Business One version for SAP HANA. In this guide, we are using the SAP Business One version for SAP HANA, which includes certain features that are not part of the MS SQL version. We will indicated if a certain feature is only available in the SAP Business One version for SAP HANA.
What happens in the moment when SAP Business One makes sense is that you see how the screens that you are looking at are connected to both the top-down way of finding information through the main menu and the transactional, process-oriented connections between each document in the application. You start to understand
how each document in SAP Business One is constructed from reusable parts. Once you get all of this, SAP Business One is a snap. Our tour of the personality of SAP Business One starts by describing these structures.
Building Documents from Reusable Parts
SAP Business One tracks business activities using documents such as purchase orders, invoices, production orders, sales quotations, and so on. Each of these documents is constructed from smaller reusable chunks of data called master data. Master data, a topic covered in detail in Chapter 4, refers to the key information that describes your customers, vendors, and leads as well as items that your company buys and sells. Figure below shows how a document a purchase order—is constructed from master data.
Creating documents from master data increases productivity, ensures data consistency, and reduces errors. As you learn more about SAP Business One, you will come to appreciate the benefits of building documents from reusable master data.
Opening Documents Using the Main Menu
The second key thing to learn about SAP Business One is how to use the main menu to find documents or master data records. When you first start SAP Business One, the Main Menu is shown. Using the Main Menu, as shown in Figure below, you can open links leading to windows from which you can search for a particular document or scrol through all the documents of a particular type.
The second key thing to learn about SAP Business One is how to use the main menu to find documents or master data records. When you first start SAP Business One, the Main Menu is shown. Using the Main Menu, as shown in Figure below, you can open links leading to windows from which you can search for a particular document or scrol through all the documents of a particular type.
The Transactional and Process Structure of Information in SAP Business One
To record all the relevant activity related to a business process, a sequence of documents can be used and the links between them must be recorded. Let’s look at the sales process. First, a lead is recorded as master data, followed by sales activities such as calls and meetings. Eventually a sales quotation is issued, which may lead to a
sales order and then an invoice. When a payment comes in, it must be reconciled with the invoice. So, there is a stream of activity from document to document in which each step in the business process is recorded. Each step is an individual business transaction in the most general sense of the word. A business process for selling or ordering supplies may require many transactions in sequence. One of the application’s strongest features is that it allows you to copy one document to create the next in a sequence, while maintaining identical structure between documents, for ease of use. SAP Business One also keeps track of the connections between the documents so that you can move through the sequence of documents related to a particular transaction. The transactional connections between documents are maintained in a variety of ways that are explained in this
chapter and in later chapters.
Questions for Increasing Your Understanding
The moment of clarity, the moment that the personality of SAP Business One becomes crystal clear happens after you have used it for a little while, and the concepts we have presented are confirmed and made concrete by actual experience. So far, this chapter has prepared you to ask the following questions any time you view a new screen:
· Is this a document? Is this master data? Is this window something else and, if so, how does it relate to documents and master data?
· How does this screen fit in the top-down structure or in the transactional and process-oriented structure of SAP Business One?
· How can I get to this screen from the main menu?
· What process-oriented navigation allows me to find related documents and master data from this screen?
· Does this screen display data, allow me to search for data, or allow me to add data?
One of the innovations of SAP Business One is the way that the design naturally incorporates both top-down navigation through the main menu and process-oriented relationships through workbenches, as well as navigation, search, and document creation mechanisms based on those relationships. In other words, you can personalize the way you get to the data you need. The rest of this chapter explains all of these mechanisms in detail so that whenever you look at a screen you understand exactly what you are looking at.
