SAP HANA for Business One

SITSPL Team 9 Apr 3 min read

When you run a small business, business is personal. You have to carefully think through the implications of every decision – and also know when to just go with your gut. Either way, your business software has to provide you with information you can trust and help you execute on those decisions quickly and cost-effectively.

SAP HANA for SAP Business One offers real-time insight and performance at an affordable price

SAP HANA for SAP Business One has the functionality to help you transform your business into a real-time enterprise. You can take advantage of high-speed analysis of all your business information to get the answers you need right away. From analyzing product categories to resource planning for batch manufacturing, business transactions are available for analysis the second they are completed. You can also deliver relevant data into SAP Business One screens using pervasive analytics.

SAP Business One for SAP HANA, is also priced attractively for small businesses. And it can lower your cost of ownership by enabling your IT department to be more efficient and by eliminating lengthy data preparation, pre-aggregation, or tuning tasks required by traditional reporting and analytics tools.  Best of all, the application scales as your small business grows, delivering even greater value from your initial investment.

Smarter business processes for greater business agility using SAP HANA for SAP Business One

SAP HANA for SAP Business One includes new and powerful functionality that can accelerate business processes and improve your bottom line. It offers an advanced available-to-promise (ATP) application that provides real-time visibility into current inventory, ordered stock, replenished stock, and stock being delivered. You can immediately reserve current stock for future delivery dates and reschedule existing orders to ensure on-time fulfillment of your best customers’ orders and to optimize product movement.

SAP HANA for SAP Business One also delivers an improved cash-flow forecasting application that dramatically improves your cash balance visibility. This is a critical need for small businesses where the quality of cash-flow forecasting can mean the difference between staying in business and closing for good. The advanced app takes cash-flow forecasting to the next level of performance by tracking sales orders, POs, down payments, recurrent postings, and other critical cash-related transactions in its calculations.

Embedded analytics support SAP Business One users every step of the way

SAP HANA for SAP Business One revolutionizes all of your critical business reporting. It quickly searches through your SAP Business One ERP solution data to give you the answers you need right now. Reports that used to take days or hours to run and compile now take only minutes, if not seconds. And even if your small business accumulates huge amounts of data, you can still run highly complex and data-intensive analyses in real time.

The application also includes new embedded analytics functionality that delivers critical and timely information to all those who need it, when and where they need it. You’ll benefit from highly visual and contextual dashboards that are embedded in the familiar SAP Business One screens. For example, when a customer’s name is entered into a sales order screen, a side panel on the screen opens showing the products most often purchased by that customer. This enables your reps to make informed recommendations at the point of sale. Your business transactions can be completed faster than ever before while giving your customers the personal service they deserve.

SAP Business One HANA-Overview

SITSPL TEAM 7 Apr 1 min read

The SAP HANA platform is transforming data processing. It achieves this impact through a radically new IT architecture that isolates all active workloads from reading and writing to disk, the most time-consuming task in data processing, and does so at a scale heretofore unimaginable.

Now, next-generation applications, such as SAP HANA, can integrate high-speed transaction processing with in-depth analytics in real time, dramatically improving the effectiveness and efficiency of processes across the enterprise when using tried and tested ERP such as SAP Business One.

SAP HANA Overview – Version for SAP Business One

SAP HANA for SAP Business One is a client-server application and comprises the fat client and database server. The entire SAP Business One database runs on SAP HANA.  The SAP HANA database server not only stores data, but also uses triggers as well as views, especially for reporting and upgrade purposes.

This version of SAP HANA does several things:

• Brings transactions and analytics together: In SAP Business One, version for SAP HANA, there is one appliance for both online transaction processing and for online analytical processing.

• Runs on a Linux server: With SAP Business One, version for SAP HANA, there is a seamless user experience.   Users can run “in memory” reports from the SAP Business One menu.  The “in-memory” dashboards are found in the SAP Business One cockpit.  Users can run the enterprise search from SAP Business One. All these functions run on the SAP HANA database so you will have much more speed than running on the SQL database.

• Brings new analytics such as:
  • Advanced ATP: ATP Check for real time inventory transparency on daily basis & on-the-fly sales order delivery re-scheduling capability
  • Cash Flow Forecast: Forecasting cash flow real time using cash certainty levels and displaying a dynamic aggregation of all relevant business activities and option for drilldown.
  • Pervasive analytics: Quick and easy visualization of custom queries attached to a SAP Business One master data or transactions or displayed as a dashboard in the cockpit environment.

• Brings enterprise search: Enterprise search provides new ways to find information quickly to support operations and decision making.  You can search fields (such as Description, Amount, Remark, and so on) of the business objects in SAP HANA for SAP Business One that have been stored in the SAP HANA database server.   Enterprise search supports the following business object types:   Master data; analytic content, including Crystal reports and dashboards based on the SAP HANA database; and transactions, including: A/R Transactions, A/P Transactions,  Inventory transactions, Service documents, Sales Opportunities, Production documents, and even User Defined Objects.

• Brings interactive analysis and Crystal Reports.  You can use pre-built and customized semantic layers to analyse transactional data in Microsoft Excel pivot tables. The semantic layers can also serve as a data source for dashboards and Crystal reports.

SAP Business One, version for SAP HANA, also differs in that it is primarily intended for net-new customers interested in SAP Business One with embedded analytics running on an in-memory platform.

SAP HANA Overview – SAP Business One Analytics powered by SAP HANA

Decision time frames are shorter than ever today. And as a result, small businesses and midsize companies need near-instant access to all of their business information and a way to analyse it for fast, informed decision making that drives better business outcomes.

SAP Business One ERP together with analytics powered by the SAP HANA platform, is a breakthrough solution that brings up-to-date data from SAP Business One into local memory for instant, real-time insight into your business. And because the software is designed for ease of use, anyone can create and run custom reports without IT or consulting assistance. This advanced solution enables query response times that are much faster than traditional database technology can deliver. As a result, people can make decisions based on data that is accurate as of the minute, instead of relying on data extracts that are outdated as soon as they are run.

With analytics offered in SAP Business One, companies get an affordable solution that empowers people to be more productive and informed. For example, they can perform simple to complex data analysis, investigate results more easily, and populate custom spread sheets and reports with current data – all without IT assistance. Access to prebuilt reports and dashboards, along with freestyle search and intuitive ad hoc reporting functionality, accelerates employee adoption for faster time to value.

SAP Business One, analytics powered by SAP HANA, is delivered preconfigured and preinstalled on Fujitsu hardware that has been certified by the SAP HANA development support team and is sold separately. There may be additional certified hardware offerings once generally available.

To run this solution, customers must be on SAP Business One version 8.82 PL04. Upgrades are licensed separately.   Customers must license the same number of named users for SAP Business One, analytics powered by SAP HANA, as they have for SAP Business One.

SAP HANA Quick Facts

SITSPL Team 6 Apr 2 min read

Experience speed like never before with SAP HANA

Need big business performance at a small business price? SAP Business One ERP for small to mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) running on the SAP HANA platform can help your business increase margins and grow. With these innovative technologies, you can instantly analyze growing volumes of data and experience the benefits of fast application performance without complicating your IT landscape. And with new embedded analytics and high-performance applications, you can work more efficiently than ever before.

SAP HANA for SAP Business One Objectives

• Leverage the power of SAP HANA to improve performance and agility while lowering IT costs
• Analyze growing volumes of data instantly to streamline business processes and improve decision making
• Run your business on a single, affordable enterprise solution that will scale as your business grows

SAP HANA for SAP Business One Solution

• Real-time analytics that can crunch through all of your SAP Business One data in seconds
• New functionality enabling high-performance dashboards and reporting as well as realtime inventory, order management, and cash-flow visibility
• Single software platform that simplifies IT administration

SAP HANA for SAP Business One Benefits

• Dramatically improved responsiveness of planning, sales, production, and financial processes
• Faster business insight for improved decision making
• Unmatched performance gains as more users access the software concurrently
• Reduced IT ownership costs

SAP Business One HANA-FAQ's

SITSPL TEAM 6 Apr 1 min read

SAP Business One, Version for SAP HANA: High Performance for Small Businesses

With a foundation of more than 40 years of innovation with best-in-class business applications SAP has introduced a new element of innovation by providing the ability to run SAP Business One ERP on the next-generation in-memory platform SAP HANA. This is the new paradigm of computing for the future, enabling companies to drive their entire business in real time for unprecedented value.

Priced specifically for smaller businesses, SAP HANA for SAP Business One brings together transactions and analytics into a single in-memory platform for smarter business innovations, faster business processes, and simpler business interactions. Please note: SAP remains committed to supportits customer’s choice of database technologies and vendors. SAP Business One will continue to be offered on the Microsoft SQL database.

 This page provides answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about SAP HANA for SAP Business One.

What is SAP Business One, version for SAP HANA?

SAP developed the game-changing SAP HANA platform – leveraging the power of in-memory technology to address concerns about growing data volume that impact businesses of all sizes. It provides a modern platform for real-time applications and real-time analytics without complicating your IT landscape.

SAP HANA for SAP Business One combines content and tools including:

• All the functionality of SAP Business One – from financials and accounting to inventory and customer relationship management – only with faster response times
• Powerful new functionality that includes enhanced logic behind cash flow and support for availability-to-promise processes
• Embedded analytics that appear in the transaction screens of SAP Business One (such as analytics used by sales people to make better customer recommendations on cross- and up-sells at the point of sale)
• Predefined calculation-intensive reports, such as inventory analysis and monthly customer stats
• Predefined dashboards including those delivered with SAP Crystal solutions today, plus three new ones (sales opportunity, stock analysis, and CEO key performance indicators)
• Freestyle enterprise search that enables people to search all the data in SAP Business One
• Interactive, ad-hoc analysis through a Microsoft Excel pivot table interface
• Predefined semantic layer for interacting with data using familiar business terminology or business intelligence tools like SAP Crystal solutions without needing to understand business rules or know where the data resides
• Lifecycle management including an initialization and duplication mechanism, backup and recovery, monitoring, and an administration console
• Additional functionality for the SAP Business One mobile app – including integrated enterprise search, available-to-promise (ATP) check when creating orders, cash flow dashboards, and more – for customers using the SAP HANA platform

How does this offering differ from the SAP Business One version that uses the Microsoft SQL database?

The offerings differ in their underlying technology. The traditional SAP Business One solution employs a Microsoft SQL database, while the version that runs on SAP HANA employs the SAP HANA database.

Both applications support key business processes, but have a few differences:

• In-memory calculations and optimization for multicore, 64-bit processors of the SAP HANA platform result in faster processing for both transactional and analytical information
• Pre-packaged business logic that comes with the SAP HANA platform enables faster software development and deployment
• Analytics powered by SAP HANA can be licensed separately for the SQL version of SAP Business One. These analytics are included in the version for SAP HANA
• The version for SAP HANA runs on a certified SUSE Linux server
• Customers using the version for SAP HANA and the SAP Business One mobile app will benefit from enhancements in enterprise search, advanced ATP, cash flow forecasting, delivery rescheduling for existing sales order items, and embedded analytics

Will SAP continue to offer SAP Business One that uses the Microsoft SQL database?

Yes, SAP plans to offer two database options for SAP Business One for the foreseeable future: the Microsoft SQL database and the SAP HANA database. While SAP strongly believes in the value and competitive advantage of SAP HANA, we understand the importance of Microsoft SQL in the small business segment and in the install base for SAP Business One.

How does this offering differ from the traditional SAP Business One solution that has analytics powered by SAP HANA?

With analytics powered by SAP HANA, the traditional version of SAP Business One runs exclusively on Microsoft SQL. The analytics functionality is licensed separately. The new version of SAP Business One that runs on SAP HANA includes all the functionality of analytics powered by SAP HANA. The analytics functionality does not have to be licensed separately.

What type of company can benefit from using SAP Business One when it’s powered by SAP HANA?

Any small business can benefit by using the SAP Business One and SAP HANA solutions, especially those that operate in industries that process large volumes of transactions or need insight into their company-wide data in real-time. The solution makes innovation, previously accessible to only large enterprises, available to smaller businesses and within a small business budget. It may be of interest to net new customers, as well as existing customers of SAP Business One.

What are the customer benefits of SAP Business One when it’s powered by SAP HANA?

With this solution, SAP is making the power of in-memory technology available to small businesses at a reasonable price point. Customers choosing to deploy this new offering can expect:

• Better, faster decision making due to fast reporting, enterprise search, and access to more data
• Empowered employees who can generate real-time standard and ad-hoc reports without IT assistance
• Fast transaction processing that allows people to find the information they need, when they need it
• Higher ROI by leveraging transactional and operational data to make the right decisions
• The security of a long-term investment with a complete solution from a single vendor

Where, when, and how can customers buy SAP HANA?

The version of SAP Business One that runs on SAP HANA is an offering for new and existing customers of SAP Business One. Ramp-up began in late 2012, and the solution is now widely available. General availability was in mid-2013, when the offering will be sold exclusively by SAP channel partners worldwide, such as Bluekey.

From whom can customers purchase the version of SAP Business One that’s powered by SAP HANA?

This new offering will be exclusively available from SAP channel partners worldwide. All SAP channel partners who are value-added resellers (VARs), such as Africa’s leading SAP Business One Partner, Bluekey, will have the option to resell SAP HANA along with SAP Business One.

Is pricing for this solution significantly different than that of other offerings of SAP HANA or SAP Business One?

SAP HANA for SAP Business One is priced to meet the needs of the small business market. It includes a set engine price, as well as a per-user price. Its pricing is comparable to the standard version of SAP Business One, which runs on the SQL database.

If a customer invested in analytics for SAP Business One, is that investment protected?

Yes, a customer’s investment in analytics for SAP Business One is protected in the event that it decides to move to the version of SAP Business One that runs on SAP HANA.

How can my customer move from the SQL-version of SAP Business One to the new version for SAP HANA?

A database migration tool enables the smooth transition to the version of SAP Business One that runs on SAP HANA

SAP HANA-Future of Business

SITSPL Team 6 Apr 1 min read

The pace of change in business is accelerating at a rate the world has never seen before. Advances in mobile, cloud and Big Data technologies, such as SAP HANA. require companies to analyze data, make decisions and innovate faster.

Get all the details here

Explore why SAP HANA is the Future of Business

Massive Speed

Database scans up to 3.19 billion per second, per core.

Real-Time Business

Up to 2,000 times faster inter-company reconciliation.

Extreme Scale

Proven to run massive data sets to petabyte scale.

Radical Efficiency

Reduces financial accounting data footprint by up to 37 times.

Lower Cost

A single system for OLTP & OLAP.

Choice

Deploy anywhere, in the datacenter or in the cloud.

Innovation

Supporting over 2,200 enterprises and over 1,000 start-ups.

Faster Financials

Significant time savings closing your quarter.

Open

Runs on leading hardware systems; used by leading software vendors.

Flexibility

Supports multiple data types — structured and unstructured: text, social, machine, geospatial and business data.

Speed to Decision

Real-time insight into multi-channel sales data

Analytics Powered by SAP HANA

SITSPL Team 6 Apr 2 min read

With analytics powered by the SAP HANA platform, the SAP Business One ERP solution for SMEs lets you take advantage of the latest advances in in-memory computing technology for analysis and reporting. You gain real-time access to information to support decision making – and a way to explore it in detail without IT assistance. As a result, you can make better decisions faster and increase employee productivity by putting your users in control of information.

You know the frustration – and business consequences – of slow management reporting. Each time you run a query, your analytics software has to find the right data in your back-end database, run calculations, and deliver them to you – a process that can take 30 seconds or longer.  The results often lead you to ask additional questions and run deeper queries.  Each time you have the same delays, or worse, have to run a special query, which takes even more time. At a certain point,  you’re out of time, frustrated, and still  need to make the best decision you can  with the information and insights available to you. Even with an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, you likely can’t access the insight you need instantly – which is what today time pressed executives need is.

Ever think there has to be a better way?  Now there is. Analytics powered by the SAP HANA platform are now available for the SAP Business One ERP solution.
Imagine having a world-class ERP solution for small businesses that allows you to generate reports instantly, at the click of a button. Imagine being able to run query after query with no delays – no matter how large your database. And imagine being able to do all this within your ERP application, while providing a streamlined experience for every user – and all at an affordable price point.

Then imagine freeing yourself from spending time and money on integrating multiple third-party tools to perform the analysis you need. Now that we’ve integrated analytics with SAP Business One, you can gain the comprehensive reporting and analysis functionality you need in a single solution from one vendor – SAP, a market leader in ERP and business intelligence (BI) software.

SAP HANA – Key Benefits

With the analytics now available for SAP Business One, you benefit from:

• Better, faster decision making thanks to fast reporting and enterprise search functions
• More efficient and empowered employees because they can generate standard, ad hoc, and live reporting using Microsoft Excel – without IT assistance
• Greater return on investment – by fully leveraging the transactional and operational data being created and stored in SAP Business One for better, faster business decisions
• Analytics and reporting – Create and run reports on up-to-date data in SAP Business One in seconds, without IT assistance, and perform what-if analysis
• with the data you use most
• Productivity tools – Use predefined content and multidimensional data sources to analyse data and build reports, and use Microsoft Excel to explore and investigate real-time data
• Predefined dashboards and reports – Gain access to a variety of pre-built reports, customized around the business processes you use most
• Search – Find and access all data in SAP Business One with freestyle enterprise search

HANA-A Relational Database Management System

SITSPL Team 6 Apr 8 min read

SAP HANA is an in-memory,column-oriented, relational database management system developed and marketed by "SAP SE" . Its primary function as database server is to store and retrieve data as requested by the applications. In addition, it performs advanced analytics (predictive analytics,spatial data processing , text analytics, text search, streaming analytics,graph data processing) and includes ETL(Extract, transform, load).

Architecture

The main process, called the index server, has a structure shown in the diagram to the right.

The index server performs session management, authorization, transaction management and command processing. Note that HANA has both a row store and a columnar store. Users can create tables using either store, but the columnar store has more capabilities and most frequently used. Tables in the row store are not duplicated to the columnar store. The index server also manages persistence between cached memory images of database objects, log files and permanent storage files. XS engine allows to build web applications.

Supported platforms

• Linux on x86-64 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE distributions are supported
• Linux on POWER Systems

Deployment

SAP HANA can be deployed on-premises as an appliance from a certified hardware vendor or on certified hardware with tailored data center integration (TDI).With tailored data center integration (TDI) approach, existing hardware components such as storage and network can be reused.Both horizontal and virtical scalability are supported. HANA is also available in the cloud as a Database as a Service on Amazon Web Services Microsoft Azure, or the SAP HANA Cloud Platform.

Editions

SAP HANA licensing is primarily divided into two categories.

Runtime License:

Used to run SAP applications such as SAP Business Warehouse powered by SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA.

Full Use License:

Used to run both SAP and non-SAP applications. This licensing can be used to create custom applications.

As part of the full use license, features are grouped as editions targeting various use cases.

• Base Edition: Provides core database features and development tools but does not support SAP applications.
• Platform Edition: Base edition plus spatial, predictive, R server integration, search, text, analytics, graph engines and additional packaged business libraries.
• Enterprise Edition: Platform edition plus additional bundled components for some of the data loading capabilities and the rule framework.

In addition, capabilities such as streaming and ETL are licensed as an additional options.

Budget

SITSPL Team 6 Apr 5 min read

Budget

Scenarios can be different.

• Display Accounts with no Budget:  Displays G/L accounts for which no budget amount has been entered.
• Dimension: From the dropdown list, select an active dimension for which you want to define the budget.
• Acct No., Acct Name: Account code and name as defined in the chart of accounts.
• Parent Acct: A percentage of this account will be the budget for the account in focus.
• %: Percentage of the parent account amount.[Note: Since the amount in the parent account is not divided between the child accounts, the rate can exceed 100%].
• Method: Specify the required method according to which the budget is distributed over months:

               >Equal – The budget amount is distributed equally among 12 months.

               >Ascending Order – The budget is distributed in such a way that most of it is dedicated to the last months, and only a

                     small part is used during the first months.
               >Descending Series – The budget is distributed in such a way that most of it is dedicated to the first months of the

                     year, and the amount assigned to each month decreases as the year progresses.

               >Manual – Enables you to manually specify how the budget is distributed among the different months. You can, for

                    example, decide that the budget is distributed among two months only.
               >Define New – Opens the Budget Distribution Method window where you can define new budget distribution methods.

• Debit: Budget amount in local currency. Budget calculation is always performed against the debit side.
• Credit: Budget amount for incoming payment accounts, for reporting purposes only.
• Actual: Actual amount in this account based on its journal entries,
• Distr. Rule Code, Distr. Rule Name: Displays the code and name of the distribution rules to which the budget amount is    distributed. You can add cost centres by right-clicking the G/L account row and choosing Add Cost Centre.
• Distr. Rule Debit: Enter the budget amount, in local currency or system currency, that you want to distribute to each distribution rule. Budget calculation is always performed against the debit side.
• Distr. Rule Credit: Enter the budget amount, in local currency or system currency, that you want to distribute to each distribution rule. This is the budget amount for incoming payment accounts, for reporting purposes only.
• Distr. Rule Actual: Displays the actual amount, in local currency or system currency, accrued in this account as a result of the distribution rule.