BusinessCore

Ever since its inception, ERP or Enterprise Resource Planning software has been of great assistance to organizations. Over the years, they have become more powerful and feature-rich, encompassing several key business applications like supply chain, HRMS, finance, and performance management. However, they have let go of their specialization and precision in doing so. 

Modern ERPs score high on customizability and integration, but most of them have become generic and unfit for niche business functions. While modern ERPs try to tick many boxes at once with features for all business functions combined, they fail to capture the core customizations and configurations required for specific business verticals.

Critical business functions like finance, supply chain, HRMS, and CRM require special emphasis, configurability, and know-how, which are difficult to provide in a generic ERP suite. Hence, many organizations have to choose between specialized solutions for managing specific business verticals and all-inclusive ERP solutions with limited emphasis on individual functions.

As a result, businesses that use either of the two alternatives have limited control over process intricacies and miss out on holistic organizational growth and synergy.

The above problems have baffled businesses for years, with no resolution. However, today, we have a new breed of ERPs that help combine the best of both worlds, offering specific yet integrated solutions for various modules. This review will focus on — BusinessCore ERP Suite, an innovative and integrated enterprise solution with highly parameterized modules for:

• CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
• POS (Point-of-Sale)
• HRM (Human Resource Management)
• FAM (Finance & Accounting Management)
• SCM (Supply Chain Management)
• EPM (Enterprise Performance Management)

The above modules of BusinessCore ERP are able to perform both single-handedly and as a group, while sharing data and resources among them, benefiting businesses of all types and structures. To offer an in-depth understanding of the software, this review will focus on the following points:

• Introduction to BusinessCore ERP
• Key Modules of BusinessCore 
• Our Final Verdict

So let’s get right to it, shall we?

Introduction to BusinessCore ERP

BusinessCore ERP is a modern-day enterprise management suite designed to empower organizations, reduce their workload, and improve efficiency. It features several specialized modules that take care of a company’s finances, human resources, customers, supply chain, staff performance, and much more.

Available as a cloud-based, SaaS solution or on-premise solution with perpetual license options (with dedicated mobile apps), BusinessCore ERP offers an end-to-end data management solution with data backup and a cloud data center located within UAE. In addition, it offers a variety of modules that can function as standalone applications or work in tandem, sharing data and resources. 

BusinessCore ERP offers a fully managed hosting facility and allows you to purchase a license for the software. Its architecture is designed for SMEs and enterprises and can handle multiple users in multiple companies as a truly multi-tenant application architecture.

BusinessCore ERP is perfect for handling operations in MNCs since it can separate users according to the business entity, division, location, and associated projects. It also allows you to provide different types of access – screen and function level access as well as data, division, and location) level access to employees.

The application offers dynamic reports and separate data instances to save time, computing resources and performance and improve decision-making. It allows you to create business divisions and entities to map with your company, making it easy to manage and control multiple processes simultaneously. 

Now that we know what BusinessCore ERP is let us look at the key modules that separate it from its contemporaries.

Key Modules of BusinessCore ERP

i. SCM (Supply Chain Management) Suite

BusinessCore’s SCM suite is created to help organizations of all sizes streamline their supply chain (procurement, inventory & warehousing, and logistics through the automation of business-critical processes, improved visibility, and accurate forecasting. 

It allows you to easily configure and manage multiple products, purchasing and pricing groups, brands, items, and storage types for normal, temperature-controlled and hazardous items for smooth business dealings and better accountability.

The SCM module has multiple access and approval levels based on a user’s role, business entity, division, price, and location. Its ‘Customer Master’ allows you to map inventory with buyers based on the project, category, contract, and more for easy calculations and better oversight. In addition, the application enables you to assign different pricing to items based on location and helps you configure different types of storage based on the type of inventory present.

BusinessCore SCM helps you keep track of each item in your warehouses and instantly find out who created, viewed, and modified it. Additionally, it allows you to add details like parent items, reservation status, acceptable shelf life, stock type, and storage category of your inventory to find out the stock you need instantly. 

The application lets you create multiple suppliers and online partner profiles and add conditions, delivery schedules, stocks, and locations for easy discovery and faster operations. What’s more, you can account for material transfers between your organization’s locations as stock transfers or between your companies as intercompany sales and purchases, with proper approvals, using this tool.

BusinessCore allows remote locations to receive inventories directly on behalf of a central warehouse with proper control. This becomes very handy for businesses like retail, which receive perishable items in sales locations.

BusinessCore SCM uses advanced forecasting and modeling to create an efficient inventory strategy. This ensures that demand and market fluctuations do not affect your products’ life cycles. In addition, its simple and user-friendly interface allows you to view your supplies, orders, and logistics in one place, enabling you to make management decisions based on real-time data.

Apart from dealing in multiple currencies, BusinessCore SCM completely automates the flow and access of financial, logistical, sales, and inventory data between your distributors, suppliers, and customers, reducing the possibility of errors. Moreover, it allows you to instantly create, process, and modify purchase requests, quotation requests, and purchase orders and configure terms and conditions, storage criteria, taxes, and quality checks. 

ii. HRM (Human Resource Management) Suite

BusinessCore HRM is a comprehensive HR and payroll management solution that encompasses all processes involved in an employee’s journey within your organization, from recruitment to retirement. This suite is developed keeping international standards in mind and can simultaneously comply with multiple local and regional requirements. It is suitable for organizations of all sizes and types and scores high on customizability and integrations.

Besides offering complete lifecycle management of employees, this innovative suite improves engagement levels and strategically aligns employee goals with organizational objectives. Apart from being able to manage core HR functions, BusinessCore HRM also features an employee self-service portal where your staff can view and update their information, make requests and get approvals. 

The BusinessCore HRM suite allows you to create talent profiles, manage and categorize employee assets and create approval setups corresponding to each staff member and request type. Its sophisticated payroll management system also enables you to set up work hours, pay periods, overtime charges, salary benefits, and attendance punching policies for different business entities, teams, and locations.

The BusinessCore HRM suite also features specialized recruitment, performance, and learning management systems that are suitable for organizations of all sizes. What’s more, it provides your HR personnel the opportunity to conduct HR audits, training, evaluations, and appraisals for different user roles directly from the system based on company, department, and location.

BusinessCore HRM supports capturing attendance from biometric devices, including portable devices with built-in batteries and SIM cards to capture attendance from remote or temporary work sites. BusinessCore mobile app supports attendance capturing using employees’ own mobile application with geo-tagging of location for better control of mobile workforces.

The suite’s efficient employee tracking, monitoring, and analytics also help improve productivity and effectively manage incompetency while reducing staff turnover. It can also manage recruitment pipelines for multiple business entities and teams through succession planning and improve ROI across all HR functions.

iii. CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Suite

BusinessCore CRM Suite is highly specialized in managing operations related to campaigns, clients, projects, finances, customer service, and sales. The BusinessCore CRM module is fully configurable and offers superior visibility over clients throughout their journey. BusinessCore CRM Suite also features a mobile application that lets you keep track of your contacts, communications, products, lead status, and activities while moving.

The BusinessCore CRM module allows you to multiple conversion stages for leads and opportunities and adds or modifies their information until they reach the final conversion level. Besides processing and working on multiple leads and prospect inquiries, the application helps you qualify and segment them skillfully. You can also view customers purchasing histories and view or download this information in the form of reports or dashboards.

Different individuals can access BusinessCore CRM within an organization, and each user/user group can view separate screens based on the access they have. Based on the user’s role, designation, department, and business entity, you can provide either view-only access or access to modify information. Additionally, it allows managers to keep track of all activities performed by staff and assign serialized codes to leads, opportunities, orders, and quotes.

The CRM suite enables you to create leads on your own or bring them from an existing sales pipeline, like contact request forms on your website. You can also manually configure discounts, terms and conditions, and pricing for clients individually and define the services to be provided to them. This cloud suite offers several in-built templates that can be customized for client communication. 

BusinessCore CRM lets you revise quotes before finalization and check their internal and external (client-side) approval status. The suite also comprises sub-modules that take care of the following:

• Order and Contract creation
• Proforma (Advance) invoicing
• Sales order amendment
• Order tracking
• Pending sales orders
• Delivery & credit note creation

The BusinessCore CRM module allows you to categorize customers based on the terms of payment. For example, while customers dealing in cash have zero credit limits, clients who deal in credit can be configured with individual credit limits and payment terms, and upfront payment is kept optional from them.  The system also helps you schedule orders based on supply and automatically creates a delivery note on the creation of each invoice.

Since different customers can have different billing cycles for contracts, the CRM suite lets you define billing cycles for automatic invoicing. Post invoicing, the system lets you create contracts and link projects to them, which helps you know about the costs incurred and sales associated with them.

BusinessCore CRM also has a dedicated ticketing system to deal with customer issues and resolve them rapidly. You can create tickets using customers’ email, assign them to select personnel, and track escalations easily through this module. Additionally, the tool allows you to create survey questionnaires and send them to customers in bulk via email or SMS link based on their demography and location.

Another important function of BusinessCore CRM is marketing automation. Organizations can create customized email or SMS broadcast groups and send personalized campaigns. They can also check how many such emails have been opened, how many customers have clicked the link, and how many likes/follows your posts get on social media.

Apart from the above features, the CRM module automates the quotation generation process. It also has provisions for customer loyalty points and business accounts that facilitate quick sales (for cash-based customer transactions).  Finally, it allows you to design custom region-wise reports (based on templates) and configure dashboards to understand customer information properly.

BusinessCore CRM is suitable for both – B2C and B2B operations. The loyalty management system allows you to create various membership tiers, and customers can earn and redeem points on the system. BusinessCore CRM’s promotion management functionality allows retail businesses to create various schemes and promotions based on days and times of the day.

iv. POS (Point-of-Sale) Management Suite

BusinessCore’s POS Suite is created to help retail, hospitality, and catering businesses manage multiple orders, recipes, customers, and kitchens, along with their finances and sales. It can easily be integrated with your existing CRM software or as a standalone tool.

BusinessCore’s POS module offers end-to-end management of over-the-counter transactions. It has provisions for extensive cost reporting, bill management, food production and order management, cost reporting, compliance management, and forecasting. In addition, the system allows you to manage table orders, deliveries, and takeaways efficiently while collaborating with online partners.

POS counters typically consist of a manager, cashier, and service personnel who together manage a store/outlet. This is why BusinessCore POS Suite has provisions for different user roles and approval configurations and allows for transactions via cash, cheques, vouchers, coupons, cards, foreign currencies, and electronic payments.

The POS suite works with barcode scanners to identify items from a given list, or users can also search them manually from their database in the event that a barcode is not being scanned properly. The application also allows you to register entries for the return/exchange of items,  damages, sales declaration, and receipt correction. The system can also suspend receipts, hold bills in case of online deliveries and declare sales reports for cashiers.

Since most hospitality units have different outlets to cater to, the POS solution can be installed locally with a local database. This reduces the business’ dependency on an internet connection, and billing operations will continue without any disruption in case of connectivity loss. In case of a local system loses connectivity with the central system, BusinessCore POS ensures that data is stored locally and synced whenever internet connectivity resumes.

BusinessCore was the first company in the middle-east region to create a self-barcode-scanning solution for customers in 2014. This system can be deployed using industrial-grade, rugged PDT devices with a built-in laser scanner or as a simple mobile app that customers can install on their own smartphones and can scan product barcodes using mobile cameras. Customers can use this app to manage their loyalty accounts where. They can earn and redeem loyalty points, discounts, and offers.

BusinessCore’s retail POS offers features like managing scalable item handling, which is quite a must-have for businesses that deal with fruits, vegetables, meat products etc. On the other hand, BusinessCore’s hospitality POS offers quite necessary features like KOT – kitchen order ticketing for printing paper slips for meals to be prepared or an advanced version of it in form of KDS – kitchen display system where the chef can see orders to be prepared and interact with the system using small keypad attached to the screen.

The application allows you to group meals, manage table placement via a virtual representation, and manage floors and kitchen orders. For restaurant businesses, BusinessCore POS has created two separate applications:

1. A mobile app for waiters, using which they can place orders
2. A guests-only mobile app where customers can view menus and place orders

The POS application enables restaurant managers to choose delivery personnel, check order status, modify orders, and refund or cancel bills. Lastly, it allows you to view sales reports per shift and per day. Sales summaries and reports can also be generated by department, category, payment type, and location. The application also has automated invoicing and automatic credit card payment functionalities for customers.

v. FAM (Finance & Accounting Management) Suite

BusinessCore’s FAM Suite is a complete finance and accounting solution that can help you manage the finances of multiple companies together. The suite can easily be integrated with external databases and modules and offers in-depth financial insights into the finances of multiple business entities.

Business ledger charts (CoA) can be enormous in size, often resulting in accounting nightmares. This is why The FAM suite lets you create sub-accounts for grouping payments, which simplifies the need for a ledger account for each sub-cost or sub-revenue. It allows you to instantly create reports and journal vouchers, which can be uploaded into the system for multi-level approvals. It features a color-coding system for ledger entries, making it easy to understand their status.

BusinessCore FAM suite makes it easy to understand the source of each transaction and the entities, projects, or employees they are linked to. It also helps you manually and automatically create invoices based on your preferences and auto-generate tax amounts.

The integrated suite offers multiple features for consolidation, amortization, remote auditing, cheque management, and bank/ customer/ supplier reconciliation. Moreover, it enables you to create cash management records and helps you streamline your budget and revenues. It has also recently introduced daily P&L reports and project expense reports for managers.

Advanced budgeting tool helps businesses to set up a comprehensive budgeting plan for each entity/ company, division, department, location or project on monthly basis for the whole year and keeps matching budget versus actuals and generates automated variance reports. 

The FAM suite allows you to go through transactions and manage cashbooks, receipt vouchers, and cheque calculations. It also lets you create inter-affiliate accounts to transfer amounts between group companies. Additionally, the system can match reference numbers and cheque numbers to verify cheques.

The suite also assists accountants and managers with customized AP reports, supplier reports, outstanding customers’ reports, customers’ aging reports, and several other advanced reports.

vi. EPM (Enterprise Performance Management) Suite

The EPM Suite from BusinessCore is designed to measure, monitor effectively, and improve staff performance. It seamlessly integrates the top level of a company with its bottom level to ensure that organizations are aligned with personal objectives. 

The suite features an end-to-end strategy management system with milestones, balanced scoreboards, KPIs, dashboards, and strategic initiatives to help you optimize staff performance and output. In addition, the application allows you to view performance through several criteria and perspectives and helps you find out the progress of each project in real time.

The system has a dedicated sub-module for creating the following types of KPIs:

• Positive KPIs – For objectives to achieve
• Negative KPIs – For objectives that should be avoided
• Bi-polar KPIs – For range-based KPIs
• Binary KPIs – For absolute KPIs

BusinessCore EPM allows you to create a formula/equation for assessing employees’ performance. The SQL query can be configured within the system (with ‘elements’ that factor in the performance score) and connected to your databases to calculate the scorecard of employees.

The EPM suite allows you to view staff scorecards for a given period and compare it with their previous performance score reports to understand how they have grown over time. Moreover, each KPI can be assigned a separate weightage and can have multiple initiatives contributing to that KPI based on the organization’s objectives.

vii. LMS (Learning Management System) Suite

The LMS module lets you create customized learning courses for employee training and development based on an organization’s needs. In addition, it allows you to create different types of assessments for different user roles, and determine the passing score, the number of attempts, and weightage for them. Employees have also been notified of their scores and progress reports through system and email notifications.

LMS supports various types of course materials such as audio, video and text-based content and can create online exams with options like objective-type questions with single /multi-select or descriptive answer patterns. Alternatively, attendees can submit/ upload their written work and evaluators can assess it and give marks or grades.

LMS has the feature of generating mark sheets and certificates as per custom-designed templates. This module has very high potential to be adopted by enterprises and professional training organizations to conduct courses via online channels, including Zoom integration, after the era of the new normal due to the covid pandemic. 

The Final Verdict

BusinessCore’s ERP modules are highly customizable and specialized to meet the needs of various enterprises. Each module works as a standalone application that can automate processes for their respective verticals, boosting efficiency, accuracy, and productivity.

BusinessCore ERP has the potential to completely change the face of integrated ERP solutions in the coming years, which makes us give the application a ‘perfect ten’ in our review.