SAP Business One How to Secure Implementation Success

Let’s begin with functionality match to your business requirements.  Good recommendation is to stick to native functionality of the application with possible several exceptions where you cover lacking functionality with customization.  Try to be neutral and avoid possible sympathies and antipathies and look at the functionality match.  Review major ERP brands and pick the one with maximum functionality coverage.  When you are done with selection let’s now take a look at implementation phases and their potential problems:

1. Data Conversion.  This phase is famous to cause high percent of project failures.  When you are moving data from legacy accounting to new system think about what has to happen.  First of all you are exporting data from legacy table and then do so-called data cleansing trying to weed out whatever is not relevant and reshuffle table record fields to fit new format.  And then you physically move documents to SAP B1.  Native migration tool is Data Transfer Workbench which works with CSV files.  Think about conversion levels where probably the required one would be master records, such as business partners, General Ledger accounts and addresses.  Again these are likely required candidates to be exported, cleansed and imported.  Now let’s think about historical documents.  Here you have the potential to drive into swamp and eat up your implementation budget.  First of all the magnitude of historical documents might be measured in millions and each one should be passed through business logic in order to be saved with all the chores of summary tables update as well as GL distributions.  Do not expect historical documents migration to be done right the first time and be ready to restore company database from backup and start over with corrections.  We have the following suggestion.  Isn’t easier to keep legacy accounting running for inquiries only in case if historical customer calls and asks about document status?

2. Customizations.  Deep custom programming is the second culprit to cause high percentage of implementation hurdles.  It might look simple to program SAP Business One SDK by reviewing sample codes in VB or C# and do the job in Microsoft Visual Studio.  However it might be a tough for generic C# programmer to learn SB1 objects structure and functionality.  Inefficient code often leads to such bypass issues as poor performance and various bugs.  Also think about the future surgeries such as version updates and patches application.  Upgrades require you to recompile modification code to be compatible with the new version.  Microsoft .Net is subject to permanent evolution and some of the methods could be deprecated in the future.  The same could be said about Software Development Kit.  And by the way this  is one of the reasons why you should own source code of your customization

3. Integrations.  Here you should play by the rules.  SQL programmer could tell you that he or she is ready to code integration in SQL Stored Procedure.  Business One has three tiers ERP architecture where communication with SQL server is controlled by Application Server layer.  This application server provides rollbacks in the case when transaction is not saved consistently.  SQL Stored Procedure has no idea about application server and could cause data inconsistency just due to the fact that SQL programmer is coming through learning curve and you should expect software bugs.  Both Data Transfer Workbench and Software Development Kit talk to SQL Server via Application Server and provide business logic validation and reliable data integrity

4. Consulting Firm Expertise and Specialization.  If your project seems to challenging and requires custom programming, Crystal Reports design and integration we recommend you to pay attention to the consulting partner selection.  Popular question to answer is ‘do I want local reseller or I have to pick nationwide firm with profound technology tracking records?’  We are inclined recommend regional or nationwide firm with SDK programming expertise.  Modern VOIP and web sessions technologies make local service advantage less and less valuable

5. Project Recovery or Second Opinion.  Looks like here you really have a problem and need help.  Second opinion is available.  Just open Google or Yahoo and enter keywords in the search bar.  Read several pages and we believe that in half an hour you should be ready to make several calls in selecting alternative consulting firms

6. Please call us 1-866-304-3265, 1-269-605-4904 (for international customers, where our representatives pick up the phone in Naperville and St. Joseph, MI call centers).  help@efaru.com.  We have local presence in Atlanta, Chicago, Southern California, South West Michigan, Houston and Dallas areas of Texas. We serve customers USA, Canada, Mexico and Brazil nationwide and internationally via web sessions and phone conferences (Skype is welcomed). Our consultants speak English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and Chinese.  One of our experiences is international Corporate ERP and Consolidated Financial reporting