You sometimes here the pronouncement from our executives, that this is a new SAP, more agile, responsive and delighting our customers and I often cringe when I hear it, being from the school of don't pronounce it, live it.
Well, check out what the folks around SAP Business One are doing.
Yesterday the SAP Mentors had a public webinar organized by tim.guest with richard.duffy around the latest features of SAP Business One.
In it Richard told us that because of lean/agile development methodology the SAP Business One team are able to deliver 30% more functionality than originally planned. In my 25 years of being in the software business I have never heard of something like that. He also shared that they are in Ramp Up with the latest release right now, the one he introduced in the webinar. Some hand selected customers are running it already. There is a certain threshold of open bugs that you need to be below for an SAP product to go to general availability. Apparently they never even had enough open bugs to cross that threshold. They could go out of Ramp Up now, but because of promises to keep it open for a certain number of weeks, they are continuing with the Ramp Up. .
Richard has also created a Khan Accademy style SAP Business One Academy where he is adding about 2-3 videos on how to not only use B1, but also how to become an SAP Business One partner. He also covers in his videos how to be successful as a B1 partner. He has invited everyone to add their own videos too. If I wanted to make a name for myself in the B1 world, I would be all over that opportunity. This is the education of the future right here.
He came into the mentor webinar yesterday with a set of slides and said, you don't need to write anything down, I shared the slides on SlideShare and I taped me presenting and posted it on YouTube already. Richard is on top of things.
He also shared that about 20-30% of the improvements in B1 came in through SAP's Idea Place, and they are just getting started.
Years ago my friend and former colleague Peter Ebert had the idea to have a jump off point to something like Idea Place from every screen of an SAP system. Your moment of inspiration comes when you are working with the system and it would be cool to capture these ideas on the spot. The likelihood for the idea to be posted is so much higher if the Idea Place is only a click away. I wondered whether that has been implemented already in B1. Not yet, but people on the call liked the idea, so I posted it in the Idea Place, while still in the webinar.
To my delight it got 4 up votes and a couple of comments right away. The power of the Idea Place at work.
But then the real magic happened. Richard forwarded the idea to the lead Business One development manager and he agreed that it is a good improvement and will be in one of the next releases, which Richard reported/commented back. SAP is not promising when, as we don't like to be sued for promises made, but judging by the current pace of development I am fairly confident it will be soon.
Richard didn't stop here. Business One is easily expandable, which makes it so powerful in the market. With not a lot of effort you can add a field to a drop down menu on every screen of B1 that links to the B1 Area of Idea Place.
Richard created a little video showing how to do exactly that. More or less an elegant hack for the time until the functionality will be in the standard.
In summary:
SAP Business One's latest release is coming out with more features than originally promised
It is so stable that it could go out of Ramp-Up already
20-30% of their enhancements came through Idea-Place suggestions
A feature enhancement went from suggestion to being on the roadmap within 24 hours
A video that shows an elegant hack on how you can add that functionality to your current B1 system has been posted to the SAP Business One Academy for everyone to implement too.
I am floored. This is the new agile,responsive, customer delighting SAP in action.
With a hat tip to William Gipson: The new SAP is here, it is just not yet evenly distributed.
