For 111 years, McRoskey Mattresses has been making handcrafted mattresses straight out of San Francisco, California. With only 33 employees producing about 6 mattresses a day and servicing a small number of customers, this small successful business knew it needed to move to an integrated business software solution to support growth. After meeting with Vision33, the choice became clear - SAP Business One.

SAP Business One’s overall simplicity and cost has allowed McRoskey Mattresses to leverage the software for sales, production fulfillment and accounting to name a few key areas. By better managing their older and more intricate business processes, the company is able to focus on sustainability – making sure they will be around for another 111 years.

A solid company with firm business processes in place, McRoskey Mattresses worked closely with Vision33 during the SAP Business One implementation and formed a true give and take relationship.  McRoskey worked with Vision33 to realign business processes for the future and ensure the project was a success for employees and customers.  To hear what Vice President, Rob Burke had to say about their experience using SAP Business One, watch the video here!

The next new feature on our Top 5 list is the Journal Entry Preview. Version 8.81 offers the ability to preview the journal entry for any marketing document that posts anything to the general ledger prior to adding the document. For purchasing and delivery, you can now see exactly what the journal entry will look like – then once you preview it and like what you see you simply follow through.

Watch how easy it is to do this in the newest version of SAP Business One.

Here is what our Top 5 list looks like so far:

1. Relationship Maps
2. Recurring Transactions and Activities
3. Journal Entry Preview

Check out our YouTube Channel for the release of reasons 4 and 5 in our series of “Top 5 Reasons To Choose SAP Business One 8.81.”

As mentioned a few weeks ago, the most recent release of SAP Business One 8.81 brings several new features to the world of ERP for small to midsized businesses. The 2^nd feature I would like to highlight is setting up Recurring Transactions and Activities.

You can now stay on track with delivering routine invoices or check-up calls for a business partner by creating a recurring transaction invoice or activity assignment. This simple automation process ensures timely invoicing to your partners and payments made on a regular basis. See for yourself on our demo –

Keep an eye out for the full Top 5 Features list!

The most recent release of SAP Business One 8.81 brings a wealth of new features and functionality for users. With this new release, I have produced a list of the Top 5 New Features in SAP Business One 8.81 that Vision33 feels are most beneficial to users. The first one I would like to share this week is Relationship Maps.

In SAP Business One 8.81, Relationship Maps now show you the entire document flow from start to finish, allowing users to drill down into any desired document in the flow. Enabling a graphical presentation of various transactions that are linked with SAP Business One, Relationship Maps allow a user to see all documents in a document chain at a glance. Click here to see our YouTube video of Relationship Maps in action!

Tune in next week for the next exciting new feature in SAP Business One 8.81!

The concept is straightforward, yet cash flow is one of the top issues facing most small to midsized businesses in 2011. The majority of these businesses are focused on growing their business but the reality is that you need a solid foundation before you can achieve profitable growth. Growing broke doesn’t get you very far. It’s all about maintaining a balance and freeing up cash flow in your day-to-day business processes.

We all know what cash flow is, but why is it so hard to resolve? Last month, small business software expert Carl Lewis of Vision33 brought us an appealing Webinar on cash flow that showed five basic ways to increase cash flow in a growing business. The list includes:

1. Inventory Reduction
2. Improved Collections
3. Vendor Performance
4. Integrated Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
5. Alert Management and Real-Time Reporting

These changes are smart and make sense, but for a number of people the trouble is in the follow-through. These top 5 areas seem easy to implement in theory but you need to put them into context of your business and see how they can work for you. If you listen to the recorded Webinar, you’ll find out how enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems such as SAP Business One can help you achieve improvements in each of these areas. Start freeing up cash flow and grow your business.

Click here to watch the Webinar.

The time you spend putting out fires comes at a cost. While you’re solving critical problems that seem to arise from nowhere, you’re losing time you could have used to generate new business, service your client base, or develop the new products that will make you an industry leader.

You can’t get lost time back, so this expense follows you – and accumulates.

Increase the efficiency of your IT operation, and the benefits will be felt across your business. With small business ERP software, you can turn technology into a competitive advantage – regardless of the business you’re in – by freeing up your IT team and your end users to focus on the high-impact projects that will move your company forward.

Here are five ways you can gain an edge in the marketplace:

1. Win new business and retain existing clients

Relationships may be the key to business development, but they are fueled by accurate information. With SAP solutions, for example, you’ll have all customer details at your fingertips, enabling you to move forward confidently and effectively when servicing current clients, penetrating existing accounts, or pursuing new opportunities.

2. Optimize your supply chain

Coordinate supply chain processes easily and efficiently. Small business ERP software should allow you to manage the entire supply chain more easily through a user-friendly environment. Your business users will spend less time working with the software and more time doing their real jobs. Your team will be able to adapt to changing requirements quickly and with minimal disruption.

3. Keep complexity from creeping up on you

The curse of growth is complexity: there are more moving parts to be managed. Bookkeeping becomes more difficult, and you’ll need to move to an accounting solution that can handle your new workload. Financial and accounting management tools in your ERP software should be designed to grow with you and they integrate with your core business processes to give you a single, up-to-date-view of your financial condition.

4. Shorten your sales cycle

There is plenty of waste in the average sale cycle that is just waiting to be cut. You can eliminate redundant data entry, make it easier to monitor inventories, and deliver up-to-the-minute customer information with only a few clicks. Your sales team will spend less time hunting for information and be out in the field more, interacting with leads and customers – with the benefits of better information!

5. Supercharge your service department

The best sales and marketing tool you have is customer satisfaction – which is especially true for smaller businesses. Customer satisfaction leads to increased orders, loyalty, and referrals. A happy customer is a growth engine. To ensure that your customers remain delighted with your products and services, equip your employees to deliver. Use ERP software to provide easy access to contracts, warranty information, and previous customer interactions. Your team will answer customer questions faster and remedy problems more thoroughly. Your customers will receive the service they need to use your product effectively, reducing the time it takes to help them.

Photo credit: Michel Filion

Growth is on every company’s agenda. Following the financial crisis, many were focused on retaining customers and market share, deferring new pursuits until the market stabilized. As the shift to recovery ensues, attention is turning back to top- and bottom-line growth, however. For organizations that have become accustomed to running lean, for the past two years, this requires a significant change in perspective. After a prolonged period of cuts and caution, it’s now time to invest … a difficult proposition since memories of a difficult market are still fresh.

Lean organizations, of course, tend to be reluctant to invest in headcount. An employee is a long-term expense, and the nature of the economic recovery is appropriately influencing this trepidation. But, there are opportunities arising, and you need to be able to capitalize on them. To attain growth without adding unwanted financial risk, you need a way to increase company productivity without bringing new employees into the company. Business process automation is the solution, as it can free up employee time, effectively creating new resources for your business with little incremental expense.

SAP Business ByDesign provides the affordable business process automation and management capabilities you need to take pressure off your workforce and create the employee availability necessary to maximize your company’s potential. Using this integrated solution, you’ll be able to reduce your reliance on spreadsheets and disparate software, consolidate your operation around a single point of control, and access data to measure your company’s progress. And since it is cloud-based, you won’t have to invest in IT headcount that elevate the cost and complexity of doing business.

Since SAP Business ByDesign comes with preconfigured process best practices for managing your financials, customer relationships, human resources, projects, and supply chain—along with other areas of your business—implementation can happen quickly. As a result, you’ll begin to realize a return on your solution investment sooner and adapt more easily to changing market conditions.

Are you ready to get back on a growth trajectory? Manage your budget while pursuing new opportunities in the marketplace by increasing employee productivity. Use SAP Business ByDesign to automate your business processes, and recapture employee time that you can invest in the projects and relationships that lead to more revenue and profits. You have the resources you need already—you just need to unleash them.

Photo credit: Dennis Hamilton

Previously known as “Early Watch”, SAP has revamped this intelligent system protection service and created a winner. This service can be set to periodically run and keep your IT staff, Vision33 TOTAL Care and SAP constantly aware of your system’s health. In the near future, SAP will be able to deliver new version, patches, hot-fixes, analysis and update queries directly to your system. If you need to send your database to SAP, this service will simplify that process tremendously.

Customers running SAP Business One for three (3) or more years or customers with very high transactional volumes have seen their SQL Databases grow exponentially. This can cause the performance SAP Business One to degrade. Data Archiving will allow you to move older data to the side, while maintaining visibility into that data. The result – it will make the system faster, enhance the user experience, increase customer service and protect the historical data.

SAP Business One customers have always received a free add on for Fixed Assets. That was great, but it never worked properly in the US until now.

This add on will provide greater accuracy, free up your accounting time and track every fixed asset your business owns. You will no longer need to keep this detail in spreadsheets or a third party product disconnected from your accounting system.

How will the new and improved Fixed Assets support in SAP Business One impact your accounting processes? Let us know in the comments below.