Are you wondering how you can improve SAP Business One? You are SAP Business One! (updated Feb 2020)

[former_member186605]

Attention, update note: I no longer maintain this blog as my responsibilities at SAP have changed.
Some information may become outdated or inaccessible.
Please refer to the other documentation, rollout and enablement materials on the topics addressed here. Kind regards, Peter

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Dear SAP Business One Customers, Consultants, and Partners!

SAP Business One uses the Customer Influence session for collecting, tracking, and prioritizing of product requirements (to be exact, non-legal requirements and all other cases of product improvements but no bugs).

I would like to explain how you can improve SAP Business One as a customer or partner.
Embedded in SAP's Customer Influence programs, SAP Business One has its own Influence Session: https://influence.sap.com/SAPBusinessOneImprovements



Every customer and partner is invited to vote on, comment on, and submit improvement requests (IR). To participate, you need a s-user (read this blog in case you never received your s-user).

How all this works

1. Search and Vote for Existing IRs
   Before submitting IRs for new or enhanced functionality, please search for your topic of interest and check if the topic has been submitted already. If you find open IRs and wish to support, just vote for those IRs.
   Your votes help us to prioritize requests that we will consider for development.


2. Submit Your Own IR
   If you cannot find an IR that matches your need, use the “Submit Improvement” button to create a new IR. Find this video and pdf for guidance.
   Please check required functions against most recent version of our product.
   Once your IR has been submitted, other users can find it via search functions and vote for it.
   Please submit your IRs in English only. SAP Business One has customers and partners in more than 170 countries so we operate the Customer Influence site in English to maximize participation and collaboration. If other languages are used, the basic principles of the site such as voting won't work.


3. Wait for Review
   IRs that reach the voting threshold of 25 votes are guaranteed to be reviewed during the following review cycle. Reviews happen on a regular basis twice a year.
   See the June 2018, the February 2019, and the November 2019 results.


4. The Review Cycle

• During the review, our team of Solution Managers review all qualified and eventually selected other IRs (like side-components/areas of lower interest, even below voting threshold) and use this input for our prioritized backlog and implementation planning.
  Your votes help us to prioritize IRs, but other important selection criteria are:
  
  
  
  • Positive impact for as many customers or partners as possible
  
  
  • Global relevance of the improvement
  
  
  • Reasonable time and effort for realization
  
  
  • Alignment with business and product strategy
  
  
  • No architectural constraints or technical dependencies
  
  
  
  

Therefore, please understand that reaching a high(er) number of votes does not guarantee a realization.

• After the review cycle has ended, a blog is posted with detailed information on the results.


• If we are not able to make a final decision on the IR during the review cycle, the IR will be included in the following review cycle.


• Although we welcome all IRs and will review each of them according to the voting threshold, some topics are more relevant to our current work than others.

Some additional notes:

• All above is also valid for related products of SAP Business One, such as Cloud tools, Extensibility topics like Integration framework, the intercompany integration solution.


• If you are interested in knowing more about our focus areas for the upcoming releases, visit the Product Road Map for SAP Business One.


• We are absolutely committed to transparency and try to create realistic expectations. Therefore, we must reject requests if we do not see a realistic chance to realize those directly in this overall context. This is especially true for IRs with very few votes. Even if we are not very strict so far, but we will have to close valid IRs too, when having very few votes within the last years. Therefore, please don’t be too disappointed when we close IRs, this helps to prioritize the backlog and ease of navigation among the 1.900+ open ideas.


• A description of the different Status for IRs is given on the fourth page on our session homepage.


• See also this blog Three short tips on using the SAP Business One Continuous Influence session

How are other matters to be addressed?

1. Please address product bugs via support incidents to your partner/SAP, see SAP Note 722980


2. Consulting related questions are handled via our SAP Community


3. To address legal requirements please follow SAP Note 1028874


4. On translation corrections partners/customers are supposed to create incidents by choosing the translation component “SBO-CRO-TRL“. This is the only and designated channel. Just refer to my statement here in any case of discussion or problem with that direction.

We really appreciate your collaboration, this helps further improving our product and our mutual success.

For questions, suggestions, or issues of administration you can also contact me directly.

Best regards,
Peter Hartwich, SAP Business One Solution Management