Giving small businesses the tools to dream big

Dream big…no matter the size of your business. SAP Business One and HANA can help

As a product evangelist at SAP part of my responsibility is to understand our products and help people understand how they can utilize them to solve challenges in their business and of course, right now, the hottest product at SAP is HANA our new in-memory database technology.

SAP Business One is the first SAP ERP suite to run completely on HANA for both transactions (OLTP) and analytics (OLAP) and one of the things that peope have already seen and are talking about with HANA is the incredible speed of transaction processing and the ability to crunch huge amounts of data in seconds.

All of which is great but as I get to see more and more of our customers going live with HANA there’s a great trend that’s appearing….and that is that HANA is actually now giving customers the ability to implement new business processes and new business models in their businesses that are radically impacting on their business revenues and cost models in a great way.

One of the unrealized goals for many users of ERP software is to truly use their systems for proactive and forward looking decision support – to be able to ask questions based on their data and make decisions about what they should do in real time…in many situations each question you ask leads to more questions but in the past the challenge has been to have your ERP system give you the answers as quickly as you can ask the questions and then branch off to new questions that come up from looking at those answers.

As humans I find we take for granted the incredible power of the mind and its analytical capacity…and we often get frustrated by technologies ability to keep up.

Now for the first time, the technology can keep up and its driving a huge shift in the way that businesses of all sizes can operate…..our challenge as the people that build, sell and implement that technology is to also keep up with that rapid pace of change and to be able to explain what the software can do.

So here’s my suggestion if you are selling HANA…or if you are a customer looking at what HANA can do for you. Don’t just look at todays problems ad how you can solve them…of course HANA can do that. But the new opportunity is to start thinking again about what is the next step you can take in the business to better serve your customers, reduce your costs or boost your revenues by using the power of SAP HANA and SAP Business One to help you do that.

Draw up a list of all the things that you could do to beat your competition, to lower your cost, to improve how you serve your customers and then ask the question….how can I use the technology in HANA to help me do that.

In my next few posts I’ll give you some concrete examples of customers who are doing just that…so you have a point of reference  to start your thinking. But don’t wait till then. The opportunity is in front of you to take the next step and really take your business to the next level…using technology to help you get there.

Dream big….the tools are finally here to help you realize those dreams…and feel free to reach out to me if you want someone to bounce some ideas off or would like to know more about how you can do it and how SAP Business One and HANA can help you.