Meet the Consultant is our new blog series, which will give you the chance to get to know the people behind Ascarii. This week, we’re speaking to Scott, who has been a key member of Ascarii’s implementation team for nearly three years.
Scott lives and breathes SAP Business One, as well as various add-ons, and today we’re talking to him about what he likes best about B1 Usability Package from Boyum IT. We always sell this alongside SAP Business One licences as it enables users to easily customise SAP Business One, opening up unlimited potential for tailoring and automation, even for non-tech professionals.
What’s so good about Boyum’s B1 Usability Package?
Well, in the simplest terms, if you ever need more than one click, one person or one department to validate any data or process in SAP, B1UP can automate that validation for you. Be it a simple check that a field is populated, adding in default / extra data into forms or requiring a full replacement of any SAP Business One process, B1UP can do it.
Customers often ask me, “what can I do with Boyum?”, and my response is always, “anything you like”. Now obviously this is taken with a pinch of salt, it won’t boil the kettle….. (unless you have Alexa, a Smart Plug and a spare afternoon, I actually managed to get it to boil the kettle!) but the reasoning is there. If your business needs to automate, streamline, validate, check or populate any type of data, B1UP can more than likely achieve this.
What exactly is B1 Usability Package?
Now B1UP is a suite of very useful tools, the biggest one probably being the B1 Validation rules and the ability to write macros and message boxes really easily. It allows us as consultants to massively broaden the scope of what we can achieve for a customer, as each customisation can be catered for without the need for an in-depth knowledge of development languages and custom code.
I think, if it wasn’t for B1UP, I probably wouldn’t be an SAP Business One consultant. That’s because I’m a problem solver – I get a kick out of when customers give me problems and I’m able to solve them. Now obviously SAP Business One is a powerful tool out of the box, giving any SME all of the tools they would ever need to run their business. But what it doesn’t do is personalise that experience for both that customer and also that user.
If a warehouse manager needs a bespoke dashboard, or the accounts team want to ensure the correct information is being entered at the Sales Order stage, then this is where B1UP comes into its own. For each of these customer specific requests, I simply need to understand the “trigger” of the problem, which could be the adding of a document or the posting of a journal for example, and the ‘action’ to take when that trigger is met. This simplifies not only the customers’ requirements but also my understanding of the issue, and then using a series of validations, macros, line loops or whatever I need to within B1UP, I can more often than not solve the problem in hand.
What sort of things have you done with B1UP to help customers?
Some examples in my time of working with B1UP are:
- A fully fledged ePOS system using SAP’s Invoice & Payment feature.
- Automation of Pick List Generation from newly created sales orders based on customer group.
- The setting of multiple mandatory fields across many document types ensuring the correct data is being populated.
- The automatic closing of Sales Quotations that have expired past the contracted date.
These projects weren’t always easy or quick, but not once did I feel, as a consultant, that I didn’t have the correct tool for the job. It was all about finding each trigger and action and then using the tools to hand to implement these into SAP B1.
Are there any other features in B1UP that you really like?
B1UP comes with a wide range of extra tools that are really useful. Some of these are used so often they were actually implemented into SAP Business One itself (Add+New button in v10? Boyum did it first!).
- The toolbox gives you ‘quick wins’ for document and data management, such as the use of little flags against BPs for quick identification of the nationality of the customer you are dealing with.
- The ‘Quick Create’ feature automates any user defined fields but a series of SAP ones making adding multiple documents of similar type a complete doddle.
- The ‘Data Managers’ (Item Master, BP Master etc) enable you to make changes to data in SAP Business One without the need for importing via DTW. This is really useful if you’ve just added a new UDF and want all of your existing data to have a default value.
There are too many others to point out, it’s such an extensive tool to work with and without it I’d feel so much more restricted in my problem solving capabilities using SAP Business One alone. If you don’t have B1UP alongside your SAP Business One implementation, it’s like owning a new house but not being able to paint the walls – you can never really make it feel like home.
To find out more about how easy it is to customise SAP Business One with B1 Usability Package from Boyum IT, please contact our friendly team now.