Codestone has implemented the cloud-based SAP Business One as a Service (BOaaS) solution, together with Boyum’s Usability Pack (B1UP) and the warehouse management and stock control software, Codescan.

The solution spans 3 legal entities and for the first time this allows TPS to slice and dice financial data across the group. It enables each entity to report P&L accounts quickly and easily, but also by individual countries where sales are made. Most significantly B1 calculates profitability for each individual sale or customer. “Finally, we can identify our most profitable customers and products, transforming our ability to more effectively target resources to the benefit for our customers and our bottom line,” says Carl. “This was a challenge to achieve with any accuracy before, even after significant manual manipulation of data.”

TPS has experienced a step change in its ability to manage its extensive stock inventory. Previous paper-based and spreadsheet processes barely tracked total stock quantities, whereas now TPS has a global picture of stock locations, movements and most importantly stock values. The system calculates stock values including purchase and transportation costs, for each item for TPS products in warehouses in 5 European locations. “We didn’t have the manpower, systems or resources to do this with our previous systems,” says Carl. “This visibility is already having far-reaching impacts on our business, from purchasing planning to minimising the level of working capital tied up in stock.”

B1UP is being used to ensure data integrity at the point of entry, by identifying mandatory fields and checking compatibility of data such as GL codes. Efficiency is being improved as well by re-ordering fields on entry screens to ensure data is populated easily. Carl explains, “We have only touched the surface of this functionality for now, but we can see what a powerful tool it is.”

B1’s ability to attach documents within the database has already delivered a win for TPS, enabling TPS to add scanned or email documents to invoices which are then visible to the German tax authorities. “This is saving us the considerable effort we previously needed to produce physical evidence to the regulators,” says Carl.

With BOaaS, TPS no longer has to maintain or support on-premise servers and updates are automatically applied to the product, fully managed by Codestone. Support is provided 24/7 by Codestone’s UK-based team of experts.

Having parked the rollout of the SAP MRP and CRM modules until the core functionality was in place, TPS will be deploying these features in the near future. MRP will bring significant improvements to ‘just in time’ purchasing processes.