SAP releases new version of SAP Business ByDesign

August 2, 2010

Feature Pack 2.5 for SAP® Business ByDesign™ Solution Generally Available; Innovative Starter Packages Speed On-Demand Suite Adoption

“WALLDORF, Germany – August 02, 2010 - SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced the general availability of the feature pack 2.5 for the SAP® Business ByDesign™ solution beginning July 30, 2010. This comprehensive, fully integrated on-demand business management suite is now available in China, France, Germany, India, the United Kingdom and the United States. SAP also announced the introduction of three new predefined starter packages that provide customers a compelling starting point for their adoption of the complete SAP Business ByDesign solution.”

Click HERE to continue reading the article on SAP.com…

*excerpt taken from SAP.com

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Posted by aforeman

Top 10 Reasons To Choose SAP Business One

April 19, 2010

1. COMPLETE SMALL-BUSINESS ESSENTIALS IN A SINGLE SYSTEM
The SAP Business One application seamlessly integrates the entire business across financials, sales, customer relationships, and operations in one system, eliminating duplicate entries and errors.

2. FUNCTIONALITY THAT HELPS YOU KEEP YOUR CUSTOMERS CLOSE
 Small businesses like yours can rely on SAP Business One to quickly track and access all customer contacts, records, and history to respond to customer needs faster and better than the competition.

3. ACCESS TO INSTANT INFORMATION FOR IMMEDIATE ACTION
 SAP Business One keeps all business information in one place for instant access and drill down, enabling you to respond quickly to changing business needs.

4. APPLICATION DESIGNED SPECIFICALLY FOR SMALL BUSINESSES
 Designed from the ground up, SAP Business One is an affordable, awarding-winning product that is quick to install, easy to use, and simple to maintain.

5. DECADES OF PROVEN EXPERIENCE
 With SAP Business One, SAP brings decades of proven experience in serving leading companies worldwide to small businesses like yours to help you achieve better results.

6. ABILITY TO GROW WITH YOUR BUSINESS
 As your business grows, SAP Business One can be flexibly configured to match your evolving business needs today and tomorrow.

7. WIDE RANGE OF INDUSTRY-SPECIFIC PACKAGES
 SAP Business One is tailored to your type of business by combining core small-business fundamentals and additional functionality specific to your industry.

8. LOCAL SUPPORT
 SAP Business One is delivered and supported by certified local resellers that are knowledgeable about your business and responsive to your needs.

9. BACKING FROM THE PEOPLE AT SAP
 SAP Business One is backed by SAP, the world’s leading business software provider.

10. SOFTWARE TRUSTED BY THOUSANDS OF SMALL BUSINESSES AROUND THE WORLD
 SAP Business One is widely used and trusted by over 15,000 small businesses like yours around the world

Head over to our main site for more information regarding our SAP Business One software

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Posted by aforeman

Continuous Improvement with Crystal Reports

April 15, 2010

“You can’t manage what you don’t measure’ is a particularly useful piece of advice for growing businesses. Yet many companies don’t have the measurements in place that they need to guide their actions. Why? Some struggle to access and integrate data from multiple sources. Others get bogged down by disagreements over which spreadsheets have the correct numbers. And some have difficulty getting information in a timely fashion to the people who need it to make decisions.

For businesses that want to better measure and manage performance, Crystal Reports provides access to all your data, ensures trust in information, and speeds delivery of information. With broader visibility and deeper insight, you and your employees can make more effective fact based decisions, and improve operational efficiency.

Access all your data

In order to see what is happening across your business, you need a clear view of all of your information. With Crystal Reports, you can access all of your data, whether it resides in ERP or CRM systems, custom applications, relational databases, or even web log files. You can then use it to create reports and dashboards to satisfy business requirements across the organization — from finance and sales, to manufacturing and operations.

When you have a 360-degree view of the business, you can identify trends and variances faster, understand what’s causing them and how they are impacting your business, and model scenarios to capitalize on opportunities or resolve problems.

Ensure trust in information

In order to improve coordination of efforts across departments and get everyone moving in the same direction you need agreement on the accuracy of information being used to make decisions. With Crystal Reports you can establish reporting and analysis standards and best practices. When you and everyone else can see where the information comes from and how KPIs (key performance indicators) are calculated it increases trust, collaboration and accountability across your business.

Speed delivery of information

In order to improve productivity and ensure decisions are made based on facts and not gut feel, you need to provide easy and timely access to information. With Crystal Reports, people can use the interface that best meets their needs – through a web browser, in PDF format, via Microsoft Office, on a mobile phone or embedded directly in a transactional application. And alerts can be used to automatically notify you when variances are out of the expected range.

When the information people need is readily accessible their day-to-day decisions are made faster, are more aligned with business priorities, and make greater contributions to business performance.

Visit the VEITS Group website to learn more about our SAP BusinessObjects offerings now!

The above article was taken from our monthly SAP Business One Business Insights newsletter. Click HERE if you would like to begin receiving our monthly newsletter.

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Posted by aforeman

SAP Business One Web Demo on March 24th – Sign up below!

February 25, 2010

sap-b1-integrated-office

On March 24th, 2010 at 11:00AM EST VEITS Group will be hosting a free SAP Business One web demo.  Simply sign up below and you will be registered for the web demonstration.  The demo will be an excellent opportunity for you to view the ins and outs of SAP Business One.  We’ll take you through Accounting & Financials, Customer Relationship Management, Operations & Distribution, and Administration & Reporting.  A major reason we decided to partner with SAP was the affordability and predictability that SAP Business One lends to small- and medium-sized businesses.


Click HERE to Sign Up for the SAP Business One Web Demo!

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Posted by aforeman

Business Insights – “Plan Your Future with SAP Business One and Crystal Reports”

February 8, 2010

Plan Your Future with SAP Business One and Crystal Reports

You’ve worked hard to get your business where it is today. Now for the big question: where do you want to go next?

Blazing a trail to tomorrow means knowing exactly where your business is today – down to the last detail – and making adjustments to your processes based on changing conditions. The SAP® Business One application can help by improving visibility across the board. Together with fully integrated Crystal Reports® software, it can give you a 360-degree view of your business, from the big picture to the smallest data point.

SAP Business One and Crystal Reports
It all begins with SAP Business One. This comprehensive, easy-to-use business application can help you integrate data from across all aspects of your business, including sales, financials, human resources, and production. You’ll be able to streamline your processes and workflow, implement standards and controls, and – perhaps most importantly – align your resources with your goals.

Crystal Reports takes all the data coming from SAP Business One and helps you interpret it. You can create reports and dashboards with minimal involvement from IT, quickly getting a clear picture of the data you need to meet your business challenges. You can export reports into a variety of familiar formats and distribute them via e-mail and fax, or post them securely to crystalreports.com so that you and your employees can access them from practically anywhere.

The power of visualization
By using SAP Business One and Crystal Reports together, you get a fuller, richer understanding of your business operations. With them, you can:

  • Easily monitor trends and variances – such as revenue, costs, and profitability – in real time
  • Better understand the factors causing market trends, from a product, regional, or customer level
  • Improve efficiency by identifying workflow and collaboration bottlenecks early on, helping your teams stay on track and work together
  • Increase productivity by determining best practices, which can then be incorporated into standard procedures
  • Quickly adapt to changing business conditions


You can also create scenarios to better capitalize on opportunities or resolve problems. For example, if sales are going up by 10%, what adjustments should you make to your inventory levels and manufacturing schedules? If fuel costs are going up by 10%, is it viable to invest in new vehicles? If days sales outstanding goes up by 10 days, will you need to access credit lines? And how will this affect your profitability?

SAP Business One and Crystal Reports can help you address these issues and many like them, giving you a wide range of benefits that come with improved visibility.

A clearer vision of tomorrow
To know exactly where your business is heading – and when to change course – you need current, accurate data. But you also need to analyze that data and share it with your entire team, clearly and efficiently.

SAP Business One, together with Crystal Reports, can give you all this and more. As you face the challenges of today, you’ll be armed with the information necessary to overcome them. And, as you plan for tomorrow, you’ll have visibility into the myriad of factors that can impact your operations, your products and services, and your customer base.

The above article was taken from our monthly SAP Business One Business Insights Newsletter. Simply CLICK HERE if you would like to begin receiving this complimentary industry newsletter.

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Posted by aforeman

“Install this APAR and let me know if it fixes the problem…”

September 3, 2009

These are famous last words with worlds of unstated assumptions.  I have seen this same Infor support suggestion used for APARs (Infor’s Single Fix for SyteLine) that include only a simple non-critical stored procedure, versus APARs which require a test utility server, and FormSync to be run.

Here is a list of the critical small print –not always mentioned by the Infor support representative:

  1. You should apply APARS to a Test Environment instead of applying this directly to live.
  2. If this includes any form object updates, and if you have any custom forms, you should assume that you need to run FormSync.  Otherwise – your custom forms may not continue to work.  Even if the forms seem to work, your custom forms will not have any of the fixes in the APAR if you didn’t run FormSync.
  3. If this APAR includes any class (.cls) files, you need to have a test utility server.  If you try to apply this to test databases, but you don’t have a separate test utility server – you could break your live SyteLine.
  4. If this APAR includes any report (.rpt) files, you need to have a test Taskman server (usually part of your test utility server.)  Otherwise – if you try to apply this to your test environment, you will overwrite your live reports.
  5. If you or your business partner have modified Infor stored procedures or IDOs, you may lose your changes.
  6. If you have business partner add on products – you may need the corresponding fix from the business partner.  You need to have any corresponding fixes applied before running FormSync on the test environment.

Remember – there is no uninstall for an APAR.  It is much safer to assume the worst than to try to deal with the consequences of applying a large APAR directly to your live environment.

Does anyone have any horror stories of what happened when they applied an APAR without reading the small print?

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Posted by cbsims

How many Forms Databases do I need for a Multisite SyteLine Implementation?

August 10, 2009

How many Forms Databases do I need for a Multisite SyteLine Implementation?  The answer is simple – as few as possible. In a perfect development world, this would be one.  This question is often asked upon implementation, but the consequences of the decision are not thoroughly explained.

Recently I was asked to do a small personalization to a new customer’s Order Shipping form.  I quickly realized that not only did the customer have eight separate development forms databases, but most of the copies of their Order Shipping form had minor differences, so the development would need to be manually redone at each site.  A project that we anticipated to take about four hours, had the sudden potential of being a 16-20 hour project of tedious repetition.

Upon this realization, we had a discussion with the customer and realized that they had not understood the implication of having multiple forms databases.  Not only that, they had been trying to enforce that all 8 of their sites had the same modifications.  It was determined that a number of changes had been made by other vendors at a substantial cost to the customer in the past.  My recommendation was that we should eliminate this from happening again if possible.  With a little testing, I was able to setup a single forms database that was to be used by all sites.  This eliminated huge amounts of unnecessary overhead for future projects, including eliminating the overhead for the original Order Shipping modification.  Typically this is not the case. Once the decision has been made you have to live with it.

In addition to the costs involved in maintaining or creating modifications across multiple forms databases, upgrade costs grow for each additional forms database as well.  At each APAR, Service Pack, or major upgrade – FormSync session needs to be run for each forms database.  After FormSync is run, testing needs to be repeated for each forms database.

VEITS Group Recommendation:
Start with one forms database.  You can always add another forms database later if a business need arises that dictates this.   If a unique business need does arise that leads you to believe a second forms database may be required, consider other options.  For example – if the modification for one of your sites consists of new forms or new reports, can you manage this in other sites by simply not giving those users permission to that form/report/or button.  Another great option is to have your code check the site before continuing.   Just be sure you weigh the cost of this minor complexity against the additional cost at every future modification and every future upgrade before blindly opting to add another forms database.

This simple recommendation could save you thousands of dollars over the years. For those of you with one forms database – what other ways have you used to manage multiple business site needs with a shared forms database?  For those of you with multiple forms databases – do you agree?  How would you advise a new SyteLine customer?

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Posted by cbsims

VEITS Special SyteLine Offer – Free Excess Inventory Software

July 30, 2009

We are thrilled to offer an exclusive SyteLine promotion to our outstanding blog followers! The first 25 people who respond will receive our VEITS SyteLine Excess Inventory software at no charge!* To respond, simply click the link below and fill out the necessary information, or contact us at 877-VEITS-02 for more information.

Click HERE for your free VEITS Excess Inventory software!

The VEITS Group Excess Inventory software is designed to help manufacturing companies minimize excess inventory of raw materials, sub-components, and finished goods. With our proven Excess Inventory software, clients have the ability to;

  • Reduce inventory on average up to 20%
  • Cut taxes
  • Clear up warehouse space
  • Free up working capital
  • Improve cash flows
  • And more!

Our main objective has always been to deliver business solutions that enhance value-add capability for manufacturers. Providing our Excess Inventory software at no cost is our way of lending a hand to companies like yours in these economic times. Software installation, training, and support are also available at an additional cost.

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*Offer only available for new VEITS Group clients

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Posted by aforeman

VEITS ERP Poll #2 – When Will You Be Upgrading Your ERP?

July 27, 2009

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Posted by aforeman

SyteLine ERP Upgrade – How do you know when’s a good time for it?

June 25, 2009

We talk to a lot of customers every week and invariably the topic of upgrade comes up, especially if the customer is on older version of Syteline.  Almost everyone wants to, or has looked into, upgrading, but has not pulled the trigger.  What are the criteria customers should look at as part of their decision making cycle?

The first criteria of course is – age of the hardware. This is the most important one.  If your hardware has been in place for 5 years or longer then it is definitely a good time to consider upgrading.  Since your Syteline ERP software is the central nervous system of your business, you cannot afford to let it go down even for a few hours.  In our experience, timing the upgrade to hardware purchase cycle is the best.  You can prepare the new hardware with latest upgraded version and test and pilot and make that production server when the time is right.

The second criteria are – features and benefits. If there are compelling benefits to migrating to newer version, which can streamline your business and you can show ROI from it, then it becomes an excellent reason to upgrade. A quick read on what’s new and improved in newer version should help in this decision.

The third criteria are – fixes to critical issues are available in newer version. Sometimes you cannot get a fix for a critical issue in the present version you are on, so in that case you have to invariably upgrade to resolve your problems.  This again depends on how critical the issue is and if you can or cannot live with it.

The fourth criteria are – staying current. It is not a bad idea to stay perhaps one to two revisions behind, but anything further back could jeopardize your support for the software.  Besides, if you have been paying maintenance over the years, you should take advantage of newer versions every 4 to 5 years.

The fifth criteria – budget. If you don’t have the necessary IT infrastructure, or the skill set, then it becomes necessary to upgrade the infrastructure and outsource the effort.  A budget is required for this.

Finally – what other initiatives you have going on in the company. If there are some critical deadlines or projects in the works, you may not want the distraction of an upgrade.

Looking to upgrade your SyteLine ERP, but don’t think it’s in your budget?  Click HERE to check out our VEITS Fast Track SyteLine Upgrade approach. With the VEITS Fast Track Upgrade approach, we use our unique methodology to provide a quicker, less costly SyteLine upgrade without the distractions.

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Posted by vraman

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