SAP Partner Summit for SME 2024 review: SEIDOR UK again selected as the region’s leading SAP Business One partner

The 2024 SAP Partner Summits came to an end in Madrid with SEIDOR UK again selected as the leading SAP Business One partner for the EMEA North region.
Following on from last year’s success, when the SAP Platinum Partner was presented with five awards at the Partner Summit in Vienna, SEIDOR UK was again recognised with a series of leading awards from our partners:

• EMEA North SAP Business One Highest Revenue Award 2023
• UKI SAP Business One Highest Revenue Award 2023
• Boyum IT Top Performing Partner UKI 2023
  

The accolades reflect the award-winning services and solutions provided to growing businesses looking to transform operations with SEIDOR’s range of innovative software.
On the eve of the Summit, SEIDOR was also selected as a Grand Winner in the SAP Quality Awards for its project with SICPA and its global migration project to S/4 HANA Public Cloud Edition. The project has also been selected as a finalist in the SAP Worldwide Innovation Awards 2024.

Investing in SAP Business One

SAP Business One continues to be SAP’s most popular ERP solution with more than 3,500 SMEs deploying the solution in 2023. Claus Gruenewald, Global Eco-system Lead for SAP Cloud, started the conference by telling delegates that “SAP Business One is here to stay” with Peter Dominik, Head of SAP Business One Product Management, outlining how SAP are “investing in the next decade” and beyond in the solution.

Main areas of investment continue to be around security, data privacy, localised compliance, and the web client launched in Version 10. SAP are constantly adding new features into the Web Client, such as stock counting, and aim to include 80% of the desktop functionality by next year.

In his dedicated Web Client seminar, Ari Schapia, Senior Director of Product Management for SAP Business One, outlined how the existing dashboards within the browser version can be customised to create user-defined reports for users. He told delegates how the Web Client analytics were a “secret weapon” for users and that the “sky is the limit” for the potential in unlocking new insights through these dashboards and reports.

S/4 HANA: Next-gen ERP

On day two of the Summit, Jonathan Rhodes, Global VP SAP S/4 HANA Cloud Solution Management, explained to delegates how S/4 is the “next-gen ERP” solution for the mid-market.

The solution is SAP’s fastest growing solution with significant growth in 2023 after companies migrated away from legacy or unsupported systems to this true SaaS application. Core ERP tools are supported by innovative features such as the Joulle assistant, powered by AI tools to enhance user-experience.

In his keynote update for EMEA North, Johan Mine, Head of S/4 HANA Cloud Public Edition, said that the solution “is the future for SAP”. He added that the solution is already available with 59 local versions; available in 33 languages; includes 900 scope items; with 22 industry-specific versions available.

SAP Business One Version 11

Following similar events at the Singapore and Phoenix legs of the Partner Summit, SAP welcomed delegates to share their thoughts on what new features or enhancements should be added into SAP Business One Version 11.

It’s expected that V11 is still a few years away. However, SAP are still keen to gain feedback from partners and end users on the direction of SAP Business One.

SAP outlined plans for greater web client engagement, with the majority of users working within the browser version in V11. The Business Technology Platform (BTP) is also set to be fully enabled for SAP Business One with the latest capabilities to help drive new AI tools that can enhance the set of core functionality. Enhanced core functionality for Item Variants, BOM versioning, multi-company for single localisation and a new embedded co-pilot assistant, powered by AI, were also discussed during the session.