We’re going to explore the Boyum cloud platform and the Inspect product. Who can take advantage of this product, and how can it solve problems customers are facing today.
In previous posts, we talked about our other cloud-based apps: Produce and Build. You can, of course, listen to the podcast anytime on our podcast channel.
Let’s start with the term Boyum cloud because people keep asking, what is it? Is it a product? I think there is some confusion on what is Boyum cloud.
Yes, absolutely. Boyum cloud is not a solution, not an app, and not a product. It is a technical platform for our current and future cloud apps.
We are building different apps on this platform. And inspect is one of them.
How many products have we developed on this new platform so far?
So far, We have three different products: Build, Produce, and Inspect. Each product supports a different persona, a different department in the company.
Those apps have the best user experience to solve problems in executing the main tasks. The apps have a speedy delivery within one day. So it is just a plugin, and you are ready to use those applications.
What is Inspect?
Well, inspect is a quality control product for SAP Business One. So basically, once it has a connection to your SAP Business One, you have a quality control solution for your ERP system. Any customer who does quality control can use this application.
As the Quality control feature is missing in SAP Business One, you gain full functionality to quality control features when connecting to our Inspect application.
So if I would like to have more than what SAP Business One provides around quality control, I can connect to Inspect and perform my quality checkups in the cloud?
That’s correct. Inspect will be connected to your database. Depending on what logic you have set in inspect, it will look at your database and start creating your quality control orders.
Which customers are going to use Inspect? What problems does it solve?
Well, anybody who does quality control in this day and age. I think all the companies do quality control. I talk to many customers, and today they perform quality control manually on paper.
They’re running around with Excel spreadsheets. They’re running around with word spreadsheets and doing it manually, and then they have to file their paperwork.
So really, with inspect, you can automate everything. You can put in the logic, as I mentioned earlier, and automatically create an inspection order.
Then you can go through a terminal on a tablet and execute those inspection orders. You now have paperless quality control and have everything in a cloud.
And is it industry-agnostic? Usually, when you talk about quality control, you think about manufacturers. Still, you said before many companies can use it. So can I be, for example, a retailer that’s doing inspections for the goods he receives, and then he can use inspect as well to fill that gap in functionality?
Absolutely. Anybody who does quality control can use it. You can set it up according to your needs as it is very flexible.
You put in the parameters that you need. When do you want to do inspection orders? Do you want to do it in a good receipt? Do you want to do it after production? Do you want to do it during production? You set the logic app.
Like the B1 usability package, you put in the logic, and the system does it for you. It creates it for you. And that’s the beauty of it.
You do not have to create UDFs and type the results in SAP Business One or put it on a piece of paper. You have it all electronically.
Let’s talk about functionality for a bit. I want to start with something that most customers are asking themselves. Where will the inspection orders be set up? As you know, SAP Business One doesn’t have inspection orders as a feature.
With Inspect, you have two different licenses. You have a manager, and you have an operator. On the manager application, you can set up as many inspection plans as you want and make them fit your business.
There is nothing we have set in stone. You are the one who decides what inspection plans you want to set up. Okay. And that’s the beauty of it. You have complete flexibility on what you want to set up when running inspection plans.
And that information on the inspection plans will remain in Inspect, but will there be any visibility in SAP Business One to that data?
So since SAP Business One doesn’t have anything like this, it is all captured and backed up on the Inspect cloud-based app.
What you will see in SAP Business One are the results of your inspection orders. Let’s say you execute an inspection order for item ABC. It either failed, passed, or was placed in quarantine.
That data will be pushed into SAP Business One to create dashboards with the B1 Usability Package or create your certificate on SAP. Whatever you would like.
Am I able to create sampling plans automatically or only manual?
Yeah, we do have the sampling feature set up in Inspect. You can set up the sampling plans, just like the inspection plans, the way you want them.
You can do a fixed plan and say that no matter how many items are received, Inspect will sample 5 products. Or, you can do samples by a percentage.
Let’s say if I receive between 1-100 items, I can set up Inspect to sample 10% of them. If I receive 100-200, I do 20% samples, and it will calculate it for you.
It will create as many samples as you’ve set in the sampling plan. Again, you don’t have to do it manually. The logic is there. Inspect will calculate it for you.
As a quality control manager, can I see what has been worked on by one of my operators?
Yes. In Inspect, you have the manager and the operator. So the manager has the list of inspection orders. They see what is being worked on.
They can see the progress of the inspection order. If a particular item passed or if it failed. They can always click on the inspection order and see a detailed view of exactly what was going on. How many samples fail, or the percentage of failed items if they want to measure something.
Was it a little over the ideal measurements, or was it a little under? They see everything.
As the manager or the operator, you can see who works on the inspection plans and what triggered them. For example, an inspection order came from a goods receipt, or this inspection order came from production order.
For example, I’m an operator working on a particular inspection order. I have 10 samples that I’m just going through, and I’m on my third sample. The manager logs on and looks at this inspection order. He sees that I’m on my third sample.
Inspect is a real-time cloud-based app with complete visibility.
Now I have another question for you. How does inspect handle batch numbered items?
Yes, Inspect support batch number and Serial number items.
It’ll tell the operator when an inspection plan was created for a batch item, and he will even see the batch number.
Let’s do a good receipt again. Let’s assume SAP Business One is configured to bring my batch items into my system as locked because somebody has to inspect them.
Now, if you don’t have a solution like Inspect, those batch items are brought in as locked, then somebody has maybe run a report and see which batch items are locked, then I have to inspect them. Then they have to go into SAP Business One and unlock it. It’s manual work and consumes lots of time. As you know, time is money.
With this inspect app, you can say, okay, when I receive this item in, I know that it will come in as locked, but if my inspection plan passes. Hence, the operator goes through, and it passes. It will release that batch automatically in SAP Business One.
So nobody has to go to the batch in SAP and manually release it. It’s all done automatically. And that’s very powerful. It’s automated, no more paperwork, no more running or switching screen in SAP.
It does it all for you because you have it configured exactly as you need it. The configuration of Inspect is very flexible.
Before, you mentioned the B1 usability package for reports and dashboards. Does Inspect have any reports available in the application?
Yes, we have one report available, the quality certificate. It is an excellent report with a great design.
As the inspection manager, you can click on a button to download the quality certificate. However, it is important to mention that we are pushing the data back into SAP Business One. So customers can do some reporting on it. For example, to query defect codes. If something fails, you can filter by defect codes and see the results of failed inspections by defect code.
So I don’t have to have the B1 Usability Package to run the reports. The B1 Usability Package will give me the illustration and the friendly dashboards. But you can still run it within SAP?
Absolutely. You don’t need to run B1UP to create reports for Inspect. But I always mentioned the dashboards because many of our customers run them. They like that they can maybe do an inspection dashboard by pulling that data. You can also use the SAP Business One query manager to create those tables.
The dashboards of the B1 Usability Package are amazing and make the business come to life. So definitely is recommended
In the B1 usability package, we have the web dashboard. So think about it. You build a dashboard with specific data and display it on a big screen in the quality control area, so they know what’s going on.
So, is there any limitation on how many inspection plans I can set up? Sometimes you see subscription plans that limit the number of transactions you can do. Is there any limit within Inspect?
No, I have not run into this. We have customers with many inspection plans, so there is no limit on the inspection plans.
Is there any connection between the three apps? Do they talk to each other if I implement all of them?
Excellent question.
So we have the Built app that helps you build the bill of material and then do cost calculation.
Then we have Produce app, which is a complete shop floor management, and you know, precisely what’s going on, who is working on what production order and so on.
And then we have Inspect.
Let’s say you have the Inspect quality control app, for example. Now, you want to do an inspection order before starting production, before starting the operation, or maybe every 30 minutes to create a sample on this particular operation.
Produce would be your solution because that’s your terminal. You log on, and those two apps will be linked.
If you do a production inspection order, you most likely want a terminal anyway. So you can start your operations, then stop it and register time and material.
When you say have a terminal anyway, what do you mean?
On our Produce app, we also have manager and operator licenses. I call the operator license a terminal because many people can relate to that.
Operators see all the released production orders and the operations, and they say, okay, I’m going to start this operation. Then the time starts ticking.
In the end, depending on how you have it configured, you register the time and material. And then, as the clock is ticking, I may have to do an inspection configured for every 30 minutes. The inspection order will be created automatically.
To clarify the point, if I’m a company doing production orders with Produce and now want to and quality control features, I can buy Inspect? And those two apps will talk to each other.
Absolutely. And that’s the way to go. I just had a customer actually that looked at Inspect, and then I said, well, how do you do your production? And he said, well, we do it manually. We receive it via SAP. I’m like, why don’t you use Produce? Because as soon you finish a production order, let’s say you have an inspection plan set up for after production. As soon as I finish a production order, it automatically will create the inspection plan.
So we sidetracked a bit to discuss the integration of the three cloud-based apps, but what are the license requirements for Inspect?
You need a license for the manager or the operator. Still, you also need an SAP user-based indirect license because that connects to the database. That’s all you need.
Suppose you already have an SAP license, a professional, or a CRM license. In that case, you don’t need to buy another license. For example, the operators usually never go into SAP Business One. They’re just executing the inspection plans. So all they need is a user-based indirect license for SAP Business One.
Are there any e-learnings available for our cloud-based apps?
Yes, we have e-learning available for our cloud-based apps. However, we do not have Inspect available right now. It will be coming soon.
You can check all our e-learning for our cloud-based apps and if something is missing, write to us.
You can also check our YouTube channel. We have recorded webinars, where we go through the flow, how to set up inspection plans, sampling plans, and so on. So we have a lot of material out there already on YouTube. So please check it out.
If partners or customers would like to have a one-on-one chat about the cloud apps or see a demo, what’s the best way to get a quick answer?
Feel free to contact us. We’re here for you. We want to show you our products and if you want a demonstration, just write to sales@boyum-it.com.
