6 Key Productivity Gains from SAP Business One in the Food Equipment Service Industry

It is important for all businesses to maintain their competitive edge in this ever-changing industry landscape. In order to maintain your position, you must be aware of new technologies being introduced to the market that are designed to help you optimize your business. Here are 6 key gains that your Food and Equipment Service business can achieve with SAP Business One.

1.) Auto Quotes Integration

SAP Business One provides seamless integration with AutoQuotes (AQ). It allows for prices in SAP Business One to be automatically synchronized with AQ vendor retail prices so that the current prices in AQ are always available in SAP Business One. The integration also provides access to common items, item descriptions, attachments, specs sheets, document images etc. Moreover, the ability to import quotes directly from AQ into SAP Business One quickly allows you to convert quotes into sales orders eliminating any manual processing between the two systems.

2.) Inventory & Warehouse Management

Inventory and warehouse management is one of the most important roles in any food service operation. Being able to accurately track all purchased goods on hand and quickly access it will streamline your business, cut costs, and increase your profits. SAP Business One provides the ability to manage multiple warehouses, set up bin locations, track serialization, run virtual warehouses and track multiple unit of measure for both purchasing and sales activities. Moreover, it gives you the ability to automate your warehouse using bar code scanning for shipping and receiving and picking and packing efficiencies. Key benefits include lower warehousing costs, increased inventory turnover, ability to easily identify dead stock, decrease or eliminate stock-outs, shorter lead times, improved delivery performance and increased sales.

3.) Sales, Service and Repair

Acquiring new customers is important for business success but maintaining customer relationships is just as crucial. SAP Business One provides the tools to turn prospects into customers, grow customer profitability and sales, and increase customer satisfaction. Giving your sales teams the tools to access the system anywhere, anytime for real-time 360-degree insights and simplifying the ordering processes via the SAP Business One mobile application streamlines their sales efforts and drives productivity. The service management functionality in SAP Business one allows you to efficiently administer customer warranty and service contracts and manage service calls. You also have the ability to quickly create RMA’s on the fly making every day customer service processes straightforward and simple. With SAP Business One it automatically creates a customer equipment card for every serialized product sold giving you complete traceability of that product in one central repository. Having the ability to drill down on each component making it up, view any service calls against it, what is covered under warranty and what is out-of-warranty, a complete history of the product’s movements and much more.

4.) Routing and Deliveries

With the flexibility of SAP Business One’s capabilities such as user-defined tables, user-defined fields, calculation views, and stored procedures complex delivery schedules and service related appointments can be automatically generated based on a pre-defined set of rules/logic that govern a specific action for your business needs. Additionally, SAP Business One’s mobile apps for sales and service can be utilized for outside sales reps, service tech’s or delivery drivers alike.

5.) Seamless eCommerce Integration

Food Equipment Service providers just like any other business are being forced to continuously innovate. Providing an online channel that offers 24/7 customer service will undoubtedly generate more revenue and optimize your operational costs. Having bi-directional integration between your eCommerce platform and your ERP system delivers a good customer experience by ensuring data consistency across your channels; prepares your business to scale and saves on manual resources for re-entering data that already exist in one system, and eliminates risk of human error and inconsistent data. SAP Business One provides seamless integration to all of the leading eCommerce solutions like Magento, Shopify, Wayfair, and Focused Impressions but also with many lesser known solutions available on the market today.

6.) Forecasting and Analytical Prowess

In an industry where there are endless products available and your business is tasked with servicing your customers on demand with very little to no lead time, forecasting and analytical intelligence is king. SAP’s intelligent forecast brings built-in models based on statistical calculations that help predict trends and seasonal factors inside an organization. Coupled with SAP’s material requirements planning wizard it helps you plan your procurement needs by looking at all of the inputs that affect your demand and supply. Furthermore, SAP Business One powered by SAP HANA provides various analytical tools with such ease of use – it is simply unmatched. SAP’s pervasive analytics presents dashboards, KPI’s, and count widgets that help you keep a real-time pulse on your business. Other reporting tools that can help you differentiate your business include enterprise search, interactive analysis, analytical portal, query generator and much more.

For more information or if you are interested in discussing SAP Business One's potential benefits for your organization please contact njohnie@illumiti.com