Distribution, fashion and manufacturing businesses benefit from BPA Platform for SAP integration
Codeless Platforms today revealed that BPA Platform has become an integral part of B1 Solutions’ toolkit, helping the business secure new contracts and generate new opportunities. Bespoke coding is no longer a requirement, meaning that B1 Solutions, a certified SAP Business One partner, can easily deliver eCommerce, EDI and warehouse integration, as well as business process automation, to its distribution, fashion and manufacturing customers.
“BPA Platform is a tool that sits in the middle and enables our customers to easily integrate all their business systems with SAP Business One. I think it’s fair to say it’s become a more regular part of the kitbag and become part of our core offering now. It is leading to new opportunities and helping to secure new contracts. We have a couple of prospects that we hope to sign up fairly soon, and BPA Platform is central to those projects,” explained Ian Forsyth, Managing Director, B1 Solutions.
B1 Solutions was founded by Ian Forsyth in 2007 with a vision to use emerging digital business solutions to empower smaller, aspiring businesses to work more productively by increasing business insight, improving ways of working and exploiting new opportunities with best of breed technology solutions.
“When we started, the original focus of B1 Solutions was mainly fashion companies. We have an add-on that we developed ourselves for fashion businesses, mainly because that was my background before I got into SAP Business One. Therefore, quite a lot of our customers are in that industry. Julie Knowles, our Business Development Manager, joined and brought in a wealth of manufacturing knowledge with her. Therefore, we now also have a production manufacturing focus.”
With many of its customers hailing from the fashion industry, it’s no surprise that the majority of the projects B1 Solutions’ customers are using BP Platform for is eCommerce integration or warehouse integration. However, it is only recently that many have recognised the value of business process automation.
“Personally, I’ve had an interest in BPA Platform for a long time, it’s just that not many of our customers really believed it was going to help them. Fashion businesses, traditionally, are quite conservative when it comes to technology and they didn’t really see the benefit of business process automation. However, the recent COVID pandemic has changed that attitude a lot. They soon realised that it’s a lot cheaper than keeping people on crunching numbers. A few of our customers have come out of the woodwork in the last 12 months, ones that hadn’t spent money with us for years, and realised it could be a massive benefit to them. So that’s been really good for the business.”
Having the ability to integrate many platforms together into the core of SAP Business One is one of BPA Platform’s key selling points. It’s this capability that often makes it a key component for any project offering.
“Personally, I love the product. It’s such an easy tool to use. Our staff love it too. Prior to BPA Platform we’d have to write some code to complete these projects, so not having to bespoke anything is brilliant. We just don’t have to get into that side of things. We have done in the past, for our fashion add-on, which we outsourced to some developers in India. However, pushing this type of development out there – having to write it, test it etc. – can be quite challenging. BPA Platform just removes all that hassle.”
“Prospects can now come to us requesting integration between, for example, an EDI system, their website and warehouse software, and it’s not a problem for us. We can easily say that we’ve got a tool that will do it for them. It makes it an easy sell because I know BPA Platform can do anything that they want it to do. They don’t want to know the technicalities. They simply have a problem that they want us to solve and we can turn that around quite quickly with BPA Platform,” said Forsyth.
As well as providing BPA Platform, Codeless Platforms also offers the availability of Applications Platform to its partners, enabling them, in turn, to offer apps and web portals to their customers, providing another source of revenue and opportunity.
“We have a customer who’s just about to sign up for Applications Platform to build a quoting tool that will integrate into SAP Business One using BPA Platform. I’m quite looking forward to working with this customer on that project. There’s definitely opportunities with our customer base for supplier portals, particularly because they buy products in the Far East, so that is something that I’d like to start pushing more,” concluded Forsyth.
About Codeless Platforms
Founded in 1999, Codeless Platforms is at the forefront of business process automation and rapid application development. We have a proven track record of developing and delivering agile, flexible and robust next generation software solutions, empowering businesses to get the most from their data as well as the ability to respond to the rapidly changing business demands of today. Our knowledge of the marketplace and channel has grown in line with this development and established us as a highly experienced and reputable software company, working closely with partners and software vendors, such as Access, Epicor, Infor, Microsoft, Sage, SAP and SYSPRO. With over 450 global partners, more than 8500 customers use Codeless Platforms’ software solutions, ranging from diverse global organisations to the small local enterprise. The company is headquartered in Poole, UK, with representative offices throughout the world.
