SAP Updates BusinessByDesign
SAP yesterday announced general availability of the second release of the SAP Business ByDesign solution in 2011. SAP Business ByDesign is now available in Australia and Mexico and includes language support for Spanish. Mobile support is also planned for the Windows 7 mobile platform.
The latest feature pack for SAP Business ByDesign delivers new enhancements, including:
- Community-driven enhancements: SAP has continuously collected customer requirements throughout recent years; more than 500 of those requests have been incorporated into the two feature packs for SAP Business ByDesign in 2011. Based on a successful pilot program in German-speaking countries during the first half of this year, SAP is now offering a global community platform in English for its customers and partners to provide their ideas and requests for future enhancements of the solution. A Chinese version is planned for later this year.
- Additional professional service functionality: The latest feature pack delivers further professional services functionality to address additional industry needs, which also follows the recommendation from SAP customers and partners. Key enhancements include customer contract management, support managed services, and enhanced revenue recognition automation.
- Extended flexibility through co-innovation: To continue enabling partners and customers to adapt the solution capabilities to their needs, the latest release of the SAP Business ByDesign studio expands on the concept of co-innovation with even more development opportunities. The constantly growing SAP partner network is using this software development kit to develop and deploy customer- and industry-specific add-on functionality, using their knowledge and experience to extend the solution reach of SAP Business ByDesign.
- Procure-to-pay with integration to SAP Business Suite software: Subsidiaries working with SAP Business Suite are a key target group for SAP Business ByDesign, in addition to small businesses and midsize enterprises. SAP continues to explore further market opportunities in this area by expanding the number of preconfigured integration scenarios. A new integration scenario supports automated procurement processes between subsidiaries and headquarters. As customer orders come into a subsidiary, purchase orders can be sent electronically from the subsidiary system to SAP Business Suite software at the headquarters. Preconfigured installations offer fast, out-of-the-box integration with SAP Business Suite.
"With the second release of SAP Business ByDesign this year, we are taking another significant step in executing our cloud computing strategy, building on feedback of trusted partners and customers and our commitment to delivering immediate innovation through bi-yearly release cycles," said Peter Lorenz, executive vice president of OnDemand Solutions and a corporate officer at SAP. "We continue to gain market traction with SAP Business ByDesign, have expanded our ecosystem to 250 partner companies, and welcome companies around the world — now also in Australia and Mexico— to experience the new release's usability and business value."