If you receive orders directly from customers, distributors, wholesalers, or partners, or receive incoming shipment information from suppliers for parts and products, you will probably want to be able to integrate data from custom files with SAP Business One. We are all familiar with the benefits of non-manual integration:
- Reduced manual data entry errors
- Faster order processing
- Improved workflow
- Better relationships with customers and suppliers due to faster response times and fewer errors
- Reduced cost due to fewer resources needed to input data and less money spent on correcting errors
Alluvia’s SAP Business One integration application is a cost-effective way to automatically upload these data files in seconds, using a mapping wizard to create a template.
The problem: SAP Business One integration consulting can be expensive
Paying a consultant to add custom data files to SAP Business One can be very expensive. If you have multiple files coming in from various customers and suppliers, consulting quickly becomes unaffordable.
If files are large (purchasing orders with several hundred items per file, for example), the time spent manually entering the data into SAP Business One pulls you and your employees away from higher value-added tasks. Errors in manually keying in data tack on additional costs and tarnish your reputation.
Or you may try using SAP’s Data Transfer Workbench (DTW) tool. This does ease the pain of uploading custom data files to SAP, but there is still substantial work involved, often requiring a consultant with extensive database and SAP knowledge. Here are the steps involved:
- You need to know what kind of data you are uploading. Is it transactional or administrative, for example?
- The file must be structured exactly according to SAP’s requirements. Your date format must match SAP’s date format. This carries over to every column in your file – they must all match the SAP format. You or someone on your team has to manually reformat each column so it maps properly to SAP. This can take a skilled person several hours, and you may need to pay a developer or consultant to do it if you’re an amateur.
- Run your file through the DTW tool and address any errors that come back. Errors can result from improper formatting or blank fields.
- Fix the errors and run it through the tool again. Hopefully this time it is error-free.
- The next time you receive a file you start all over again, re-formatting each column to match SAP.
The solution: Alluvia’s SAP Business One integration application
Now you can add custom files to SAP Business One in just a few clicks. The process is simple:
- Upload any structured file (no special formatting required) to Alluvia. The tool will strip out the data and convert it into the SAP required format.
- Use the intuitive drag-and-drop interface to match the file headings with the corresponding data elements in SAP Business One.
- Name your custom template for reuse.
The next time you receive this type of file format from your customer or vendor, just upload the file, select the appropriate template, and all the data in the file will be uploaded to SAP Business One in seconds. No starting over. No developers or consultants needed. If you want 100% automation, an FTP server can be used to automate the file upload process, removing all manual intervention.
Alluvia understands the value this brings to small and medium-sized businesses. Our goal is to create an affordable solution that can benefit businesses of all sizes. A custom template can be created for a one-time setup fee, and you get up to 1,000 transactions per month for less than $100.
Integrating custom files from customers, suppliers, and partners into SAP Business One is a necessary step that can be time-consuming and costly. Businesses have often been forced to choose between devoting extra man hours and dealing with manual data entry errors or shelling out large sums of money for custom integrations. Now you can get complete automation at an extremely affordable price. And you can set it up yourself in minutes.