Item: SAP Business One
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are currently using SAP B1 as both an inventory management system and an accounting platform minus payroll for a wood flooring supplier. Inventory is tracked from the initial purchase orders sent to our suppliers, to receiving in our warehouses, to moving across our warehouses, to shipping to our customers, to taking returns and to fueling a B2B e-commerce website with live updates on order status and inventory stock levels. SAP B1 lets us have real time access to the count and location of all inventory (as well as a detailed movement history) for customer service reps, shipping staff, purchasing coordinators, warehouse personnel, billing and most importantly, a bird's eye view for ownership and upper management. B1's ability to show real time data easily is its most powerful feature along with the ability to scale when your business grows with more SKU's, customers and vendors.

Pros and Cons

Real-time inventory tracking and history across vendors, warehouses and customer shipments.
Ability to place purchase orders for material and supplies across many vendors and see a quick/easy history of what was ordered or by who.
Very customizable reporting capabilities that allow a user to view any data that has ever been recorded across multiple sales orders, delivery notes, invoices, etc. and compare them against types of similar shipments or costs or any other fields present on these forms which can be used as parameters. We commonly view shipping histories in relation to pallet count, price, shipping origin and destination for example and each of these is a field on a delivery note.

SAP B1 is a little bulky and is not made to have a sleek, perfectly user-friendly user interface. The main reason we decided to get a B2B website was to allow our internal staff, as well as customers, place orders more quickly by searching & grouping items together more easily.
SAP B1 is great for letting a user progress through a sales order to the delivery note to invoice but it is more of a hassle to go backwards in the workflow. For example, if someone made a mistake, entire documents need to be canceled and the entire process needs to be recreated creating new document numbers and customer info, etc.
SAP B1 has the ability to display data and reports in graphs and charts on the home screen but they are not ideal and do not compare anywhere near the quality of other existing 3rd party software like Microsoft Power BI.

Return on Investment

SAP B1 has let us cut down on the number of employees we've had to hire as our business grows. Saving on 1 employee justifies getting SAP B1 and we've saved on over 5 employees so far compared to our older ERP's.
SAP B1 really cuts down on the time it takes to lookup a product/customer/vendor history and view inventory compared to other ERPs.

Implementation Rating

Make sure to read as much as possible about the SAP B1 capabilities and then sit down with your team to figure out what your goals are for using the system. What are your pain points? You will have a difficult time with the implementation if you cannot answer those questions generally in a group setting.

Alternatives Considered

We have previously evaluated Netsuite but decided to go with SAP B1 due to the cost-effectiveness and more inventory geared toward it.

Likelihood to Recommend

SAP B1 is great for tracking inventory, purchase orders, and customer shipment workflows. It is a really great database engine to have. The one down side is it is often difficult to navigate through the workflows or to quickly find information on your own. Other software is often needed (like a B2B website or barcode scanning software) to allow a user quicker access to information.

Great for inventory, purchasing, customer order workflows, and data tracking

Software Version

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with SAP Business One