SAP Business ByDesign Road Map 2020/2021

If you are anything like me, you are like a kid waking up at 5AM on Christmas morning when you see the release of SAP’s road map for SAP Business ByDesign.  The past few releases of ByDesign have been dedicated to extremely large pieces of functionality to adhere to new global requirements specific to IFRS16 and GDPR.

SAP’s general direction for SAP Business ByDesign near-term road map will focus on the following areas:

• Requests which have received votes on the Customer Influence The number of votes required to qualify for road map review has increased from 15 to 20 – so get out and vote.
• Analytics for the intelligent enterprise and openness to support customer and partner-specific enhancements
• Cross-Industry capabilities for process optimization
• Enhancements to the technical foundation
• Legal and compliance requirements
• Extended capabilities in Logistics, Production and Service Resource Management

The last point is where I will focus this blog.  Here are some of the key innovations planned for the next 6 releases which are getting me out of bed each morning.

Supply Chain Management:

• Exclusion of logistics areas from planning and consignment inventory at a customer site – in many distribution environments, it is a key requirement to be able to reserve inventory for high priority customers or to hold goods in a customer site and not invoice until their customer ships product. In order to do this, it was necessary to set up a virtual warehouse and transfer goods in and out, which can lead to a higher degree of data maintenance.
• Kits for customer returns.
• 3PL for service order and project items.
• Web Service for ATP simulation – this opens the door to enable customer/partner solutions for more in depth ATP or CATP checking on Sales orders and Outbound Logistics Control.

Production Management:

• Cancellation of Production Orders – this has been a long-asked for enhancement, due to the number of steps required to cancel a production order, either before or after release.
• Master Data enhancements – auto-numbering of ECO, multi-level where used, text items in BOM and ability to obsolete production master data.
• Change dates for released production order – this is a big one folks. Prior to this functionality, once a production order is released, it is assumed that nothing will change in downstream processes.  This is exceptionally challenging in manufacturing environments that have Production Models with many operation steps which need to be individually scheduled in WIP.

Service

• Time Recording parity for Service Orders – this feature will be especially exciting for companies that have both long-term project work as well as short term service order work, which requires the same resources. Users would be required to enter time confirmations for projects but service confirmations for Service orders which would not tie into a time sheet entry.  With this new function, a service/project resource will be able to enter time sheet entries for both transactions.
• Simplified customer contracts for subscription business.
• Resource management for Service Orders – this will enable a scheduler to filter resources needed for a job based on skill sets or certifications.

Other Notable enhancements:

• Improved Supplier Invoice Scanning – currently, a supplier invoice needs to be sent through the collaboration window in both a .pdf and .txt format to be picked up for OCR matching. With the new enhancements, supplier invoice pdf documents can be directly loaded into ByD or by forwarding the document to a dedicated ByD email.
• Dynamic Target Groups – when executing campaigns, updating target groups on a campaign by campaign basis can be cumbersome. This will be a great feature when creating campaigns based on dynamic criteria such as last order date or specific types of product purchased.
• Automatic release of sales order upon approval.
• Approval workflows for changes to products, suppliers and business partners.

Stay tuned for upcoming blogs and live webinars as future developments on enhancements are released throughout the year. For more helpful articles on ByDesign, go to our Resources page.

Here’s ByDesign’s Roadmap, click on the following resource from SAP:

Rainer Zinow’s video SAP Business ByDesign Roadmap 2020/2021