Sharpen Your Ax and Improve Your Management Tools

Management spends a great deal of time manually reviewing documents, such as sales orders, to make sure there are no errors or price discounting. Purchase orders are often delayed waiting for a manager to find the time to approve them.

Because of these delays, products may not be purchased in time and customer orders may not ship in time. These manual processes slow down your business operation and lower your customer service levels, both of which incur costs to your company.

A solution that offers tools for management by exception and a comprehensive look at the business can help improve your processes and reduce your costs. Here are some examples of how management tools may help you control costs.

Business Workflow Rules: Set up rules for your sales orders, purchase orders or other transactions, such as an acceptable range for gross margins and an acceptable percentage for manually changing prices. Then structure an automated Approval to allow all sales orders that fall within the rules to immediately be processed without intervention. Management receives an alert only for those exceptions that pose a potential problem and require management approval. This will greatly improve your order processing time and free management for more important tasks.

Data Driven Alerts: You can use data driven alerts to remind you of an important event or data exception. For example, on a daily basis the system can send you an e-mail alert of all products that have reached their minimum stocking quantity and require purchasing or a reminder of an important event, such as a scheduled meeting, customer return call, etc. You can receive an alert reminder so that nothing falls through the cracks.

Key Performance Metrics: Establish summary performance metrics that provide easy drill down and benchmark reporting so your business decisions are made on facts not conjecture. A strong reporting function measures via roles based portals, including profit per technician, machine or customer and other related departmental metrics and assessed your company’s performance in comparison to the competition.

Turn Your Potential into Reality with Metrics

Businesses are difficult to manage.  Poor information or detail overload can make it challenging to make a speedy, reliable assessment of your current situation.  Solutions that leave you guessing about key performance issues are ineffective and counter productive.

To make confident business decisions quickly, you must have a comprehensive understanding of your business performance and where your organization and employees stand in terms of productivity, efficiency and profit contribution to business success.

Using key performance metrics can benefit your business by:

• Presenting summary performance metrics via roles based portals, including profit per technician, equipment or customer and other related departmental metrics.

• Providing easy drill down and benchmark reporting into metrics calculations and details.

• Sending business alerts to instantly highlight changes in key business metrics.

• Evaluating employee performance within the company.

• Comparing your company’s performance in comparison to the industry and your competition.

A comprehensive dashboard with these capabilities will ensure your business decisions are based on fact, not conjecture.

Eliminate Your Islands of Automation

Islands of Automation are not a System

Eliminate Your Islands of Automation

As companies grow, they quickly discover that their accounting system does not handle all of their business activities. Many companies find they are using spreadsheets, manual processes, or multiple applications to fulfill their needs. This creates remote islands of automation with information scattered in many places.

To evaluate meaningful financial information and reports, employees must consolidate this information. Entering the same data multiple times in different applications leads to a waste of valuable time. It also allows for manual typing errors and a lack of data integrity. Finding and fixing the errors across multiple applications or spreadsheets requires even more time and creates employee frustration.

Instead of finding a different software application for every business process—accounting, customer-relationship management, etc.—you need a single, integrated solution to handle your business processes. With an integrated solution you will eliminate errors and duplication, save time and money, and improve efficiencies and profitability. Here are some examples of the benefits you can realize with an integrated solution.

• Your staff will be more productive as they will learn one application faster than several applications

• Employees save time by entering data only once

• You will reduce the potential of errors caused by manual typing into multiple applications

• Employee frustration will be greatly reduced

• Financials and reports are much quicker and easier to produce, and contain information that is complete, reliable and accurate.

Many companies find that replacing their “Islands of Automation” with an integrated solution provides more than the obvious benefits. They find that an integrated solution pays for itself in a very short amount of time.

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Business Costs – only when You Know Your Costs can You Control and Reduce Them

Business costs have a large impact on your bottom line. Many companies are not aware of their exact costs. Simplified accounting systems provide financial information after the fact. Often a financial statement that shows your bottom line is not available until 30 days or more after the end of the month or the year. Changes in your financial position do not show up until after they have occurred and it is too late to stop costs and eroding margins from eating away at your profits.

In order to control and reduce your costs, you need to know exactly what they are. A business solution that provides immediate, accurate and complete executive information on your costs and profits is critical. Here are some examples of how you can have better visibility to your costs and take control to reduce them.

•    A more robust business solution can provide you with an alert of a critical condition that will affect your financial position at the time that it occurs. This allows you to correct the problems as they occur.

•    Real time financial information that displays in an executive dashboard or portal allows executives to monitor your financial standings. This allows you to take immediate action and make changes before a problem affects your profits.

•    Automatic approvals and order holds can be set up to stop sales that fall below an acceptable margin before they occur.

•    Products or raw materials can be set up for approval when a cost has risen beyond an acceptable percentage.

Getting control of your costs is a major source of new profitability today and for the future.

Worth a look – Simple, Powerful, Online Database

We ran across a new business tool recently – TrackVia.    TrackVia is definitely worth a look.  It has great functionality – turning an MS Excel spreadsheet into a fully functional database in just a few minutes.  See the demo at http://www.trackvia.com/index.htm

Improve Your Contract Management and Cycle Billing

Contract management and cycle billing is the life blood of a service business.  With your bottom line dependent on quality customer and equipment management, relying on an ineffective spreadsheet or manual entry system is no longer an option.

Automated data capture of meter clicks, cost per X billing and inventory management requiring minimal manual entry will ensure timely and accurate cyclical billing.

An effective contract and cycle billing system provides:

• Customer self service with meter entry via the internet or mobile device.
• Renewal contracts automatically generated based on contract expirations.
• Effective and easy invoice generation for contracts and meter billing.
• Automated machine to machine communication for meter reads.
• Business alerts if meters read with suspect conditions.
• Remote technician read functionality to cross-reference billing and/or rebilling.
• A single invoice regardless of the configuration, including multiple meters on multiple machines.
• Cost per X revenue allocated to labor, parts or consumables.
• Consumable management and profitability assessment.

Integrate Your Service Management and Remote Technicians

Coordinated service management and service dispatch is important for managing technical departments, maximizing service revenues and ensuring customer satisfaction. Solutions that allow service issues to slip through the cracks or prevent technicians from accessing critical customer service history can destroy productivity and profitability.

Integrated service and dispatch management, combined with remote technician communications, can maximize service revenue, customer satisfaction and technician productivity; and is vital to growing your business.

An effective service management solution:

• Allows a service dispatcher to quickly access customer service history, contract details, and account information.
• Includes the automatic dispatch of remote technicians via the internet or mobile device.
• Provides business alerts that notify service management of preventive maintenance situations and late service issues.
• Will reduce the number of call backs due by calling attention to frequency of visits, parts issues and suspect conditions.
• Measures the number of clicks between calls, by equipment, and by technician.
• Understands the billing parameters of your equipment.
• Ensures full reimbursement for warranty parts with effective equipment and parts management.
• Provides effective measurement of technicians for better management and training purposes.

Lost & Found – Quicker Collections, Quicker Profit

In this Lost & Found, we will look at the problems you encounter with your AR Collections and how it affects your cash flow and your profit. Even in good times, many customers are slow to pay. With the current economic situation, you may see collection times lengthening even more as your customers begin to conserve their cash.

Many companies’ collection process consists of reviewing customers with past due balances on an aging report at month end. Time is needlessly spent looking at all the current AR trying to find what is past due. Calls are then made to collect these balances. Invoices that became past due early in the month, may already be up to 30 days old.

What would the benefit be if you could reduce the days of outstanding past due balances? With tools such as an automatic alert, you could be notified every morning of the past due invoices as of that day. This could greatly reduce the time it takes to collect the cash that is due to you.

There are many other ways to improve your cash collections, but how does that affect your bottom line? Fill in the blanks below and see how much your company can increase your profit by improving your cash collections.

Variable	Example	Your Business
Current Annual Sales	$2,000,000	$
365 Days Per Year	÷ 365
Average Daily Sales	$ 5,479	$
Current Days Outstanding	x 60
Total Current Cash Outstanding	$ 328,740
Average Daily Sales	$ 5,479	$
Anticipated New Days Outstanding	x 10
Anticipated Cash Outstanding	$ 54,790
Total Current Cash Outstanding	$ 328,740	$
Total Anticipated Cash Outstanding	- 54,790
Total Improved Cash Collections*	$ 273,950*
Annual Return (Current Prime Rate)	x .07
Improved Annual Profit	$ 19,177	$

*This is additional cash that will be liberated from your AR.

Lost & Found – Dollars Lost in Inventory

In this Lost & Found, we will look at optimizing your inventory turns to reduce the amount of inventory on hand. An item whose inventory is sold (turns over) once a year has higher holding cost than one that turns over twice, or three times, or more. Increasing inventory turns is beneficial in three main ways:

• Reduce your holding costs so you spend less money on rent, utilities, insurance, theft and other costs of maintaining a product. This reduction in overhead costs will improve net income.

• Free cash trapped in excessive inventory by optimizing your on hand inventory.

• Items that turn over more quickly increase responsiveness to changes in customer requirements while allowing for the replacement of obsolete items.

There are many other ways to optimize your inventory besides increasing your turns. Fill in the blanks below to see how much your company can increase your profit by improving your inventory turns.

Variable	Example	Your Business
Annual Cost of Goods Sold	$1,500,000	$
Average Current Inventory Value	÷1,000,000
Current Inventory Turns	1.5
Annual Cost of Good Sold	$1,500,000
Anticipated Improved Turns	÷ 6
Anticipated New Inv. Value	$ 375,000
Average Current Inventory Value	$1,000,000
Anticipated New Inv. Value	- 375,000
Total Inventory Reduction*	$ 25,000*	*
Carrying Cost (10% industry average)	x .10
Improved Annual Profit	$ 62,500	$  _

* This is additional cash that will be liberated from your excess inventory!