Using Business Intelligence to Improve Business Processes

Posted on February 23, 2012 by Site Administrator

If you do not have a transparent view of your functional teams and how they are performing against key functional metrics, how do you know where to start making business process improvements? Your starting point to attack this priority is to measure your performance against agreed upon benchmarks. As Stephen Covey says, “the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”

Identify your “main thing” for each individual department by focusing on the top three to five initiatives the team needs to achieve over the next year. Be sure each department bears in mind the top three to five business objectives of the company, so they can determine how they can help the company succeed. Once the top initiatives are selected, determine benchmarks that will demonstrate the initiative has been achieved or exceeded. Then measure your success against recognized external or internal benchmarks. This is typically the most difficult step; however, by tying the objectives and benchmarks with a Business Intelligence tool, you get instant visibility of where you stand and can easily track your progress. Once you have this visibility, it’s simple to retain focus on your main thing, as you have real-time information on performance against your benchmarks and you can start to make proactive and constructive interventions. Best of all you can easily demonstrate where you stand to upper management or stakeholders.

As an example, take a look at accounts receivable. Cash is king, and in these economic times the more quickly you get paid, the less it costs you. Debt collection processes need to be efficient and effective. You must have clear targets on outstanding accounts and always know when you can expect cash flow. Do you have a metric set for the length of time invoices are outstanding? Do you know the impact of not achieving these targets on your cash flow report? Setting these key metrics up is the starting point, but then accurately measuring and reporting on them is vital to the lifeblood of your business—cash.

You can start by analyzing what your debt ratio looks like today! Paying attention to your accounts receivable age analysis will reap rewards as you will be able to easily identify collectible debt, which will boost your cash flow immediately, but then why stop there? You can go a step further by setting targets for your business that give you very visible metrics that allow you to measure how successful you are at collecting cash on a daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis. All businesses differ, and some may be more cash driven than others, but if you start by using a simple table of key performance indicators or a graph, as illustrated, you will get a much clearer picture of where you need to focus your efforts to collect your debt—and the better you perform, the better your cash position. For any business—small, medium, or large, the age old adage of “what isn’t measured isn’t managed” applies, and losing control of your cash flow is a surefire way to add sleepless nights when you start to be on the receiving end of your creditors’ calls.

Learn more about improving your business processes by watching this video.

Posted in Business Intelligence (BI), March 2012, Newsletter | Leave a comment

When is Sales Tax Nexus Created by Visiting a State?

Posted on February 7, 2012 by Site Administrator

Some states provide more time leeway than others when it comes to temporarily working in that state. For example, many permit you to go into the state for up to 30 days without creating nexus. Other states have a lower threshold, of around 14-16 days. Still other states have no threshold at all. Hawaii and Texas both claim nexus after just a single day within state borders. Texas law provides that if you attend a trade show and do nothing more than offer free information you have established nexus for tax purposes.Here are just a few more states that have very restrictive in-state activity requirements:

  • California – 16 days in state at trade shows/year will create nexus
  • Texas – 1 day at a trade show = nexus
  • Michigan – 1 day’s work in state = nexus
  • Minnesota – 4 days in state = nexus
  • Massachusetts – simply sending out credit card offers equaled nexus
  • Illinois: One appearance at a show may be enough to create nexus for use-tax purposes.
  • Massachusetts: Soliciting sales at a show for three or more days subjects vendors to use-tax collection.
  • Texas: Based on a recent ruling, actual sales (as opposed to solicitation of orders) are subject to franchise tax.

If you take orders in a state, regardless of the number of days you spend at the trade show that could create nexus.  If you take the order and deliver product at the show, you’re going to have nexus.

Learn more about managing your tax liability by watching this 4.5 minute video.  Then, take the free Needs Assessment Survey courtesy of our 3rd Party Sales Tax Automation Partner, Avalara, to see if you are in compliance with Sales Tax collection and reporting.

Posted in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), February 2012, Newsletter | Leave a comment

Tips, Tricks & Tutorials: Purchase Order Requisitions & List Reports

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Site Administrator

Video tips, tricks and tutorials help you become more productive with your Sage Accpac ERP and SageCRM systems. Featured this month:

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Purchase Order Requisitions

Sage ERP Accpac gives you a number of options for creating Purchase Orders.  You can enter them directly, import them, create them automatically by setting up reorder quantities, create them from sales orders and finally, create them from requisitions. In this tutorial, we focus on creating them from requisitions and demonstrate the basic requisition workflow.
Duration : 6 min 49 sec

List Reports

SageCRM has an easy to use reporting tool that lets you edit and create reports.  In this tutorial, we build a report that lists our contacts along with some selected details and groups them by Territory.
Duration : 11 min 55 sec

Posted in CRM Videos, Customer Relations Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), ERP Videos, February 2012, Newsletter, Tips & Tricks Videos | Leave a comment

The Future of CRM in 2012

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Site Administrator

What does the future hold for CRM systems? CRM analysts and industry experts make the following predictions for the year ahead:

  1. Mobile Access will Become the Standard.  It’s hard to ignore the flurry of press releases announcing the latest mobility features for CRM applications. Accessing CRM apps via iPhones, iPads and other devices will become the standard in 2012 because users expect ubiquitous access to corporate systems anywhere, anytime on any device.
  2. Social CRM will go Mainstream.  Expanding customer profiles to include Twitter activity, LinkedIn profiles and other social information will become a required capability for sales organizations in 2012.  The ability to add direct customer social interaction to a customer service queue is essential to effect proactive service.
  3. Getting Their Marketing Game On.  In addition to integrating social media into CRM platforms, companies will redouble their efforts to improve the effectiveness of social media marketing. This will include “gamification”, or the integration of game mechanics into marketing activities to drive customer engagement and participation.
  4. Focus on Data Quality.  Improved data quality and availability will become a major focus in 2012. Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) and Master Data Management technologies will generate more and better single views of the customer – to improve experience throughout the customer lifecycle and make data more available to the CRM as a repository of knowledge.
  5. Leveraging Trust.  Expect to see buyer/contact profiles augmented to include not only “who you are” and “what you are interested in” but also “who do you trust.” This is increasingly important because of the rise of social media. Understanding the many social identities of a buyer or customer will become extremely important this year.  As CRM systems start incorporating these identities into the standard contact profile, there is an opportunity to also develop a better understanding of the network of people the contact “trusts,” which can be leveraged in many areas of a customer lifecycle.
  6. CRM Insight.  The emergence of “insight solutions” will combine dynamic data drawn from structured and unstructured sources with some predictive intelligence to produce the kind of knowledge that leads to customer insight.
  7. Convergence between systems.   Expect increased convergence between Web, CRM and ERP systems in 2012.  Moving beyond monolithic systems into truly understanding people; streamlining, adapting or eliminating entire business processes and defining a new world of business analytics that includes social/viral (influence) and transactional (business impact) intelligence.

With the overall focus on engaging customers by learning more about them, you can expect increased competition for your customers business.  Will your company be poised to compete against the early adopters of these strategies? Learn more by downloading our free whitepaper “The Future of Customer Relationship Management”.

Posted in Customer Relations Management (CRM), February 2012, Newsletter | Leave a comment

Automating the Human Resources Function

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Site Administrator

In many organizations, the HR manager faces a dilemma. You’d like to spend more time truly improving the overall work environment for your employees. You want to help company management find ways to save on workforce-related costs, find and hire better talent, and improve existing talent through training and development. But most days, you are stuck doing paperwork. The routine administration involved in day-to-day HR operations drains most of your available time and energy. On average, over 50% of a human resources department’s time is spent processing employee information and answering questions. If you’re like most HR managers, you face several business challenges:

  • Succeeding with limited HR resources—Many small and midsized businesses have limited staff and resources. You alone, or a small team of colleagues, may be solely responsible for benefits administration, payroll, routine HR administration, and more. You need better tools to track important employee information, and to automate HR and benefits transactions so that you can devote more time to your most important duties—employee relations, fostering a good work environment, and providing employees with training and career opportunities.
  • Managing compliance and risk of litigation—It’s difficult to stay on top of the myriad of state and federal workforce laws, regulations, and reporting requirements to protect your company from fines and penalties. You need to communicate with and train both managers and employees so that the company is not at risk of expensive employee lawsuits.
  • Ensuring accurate, timely payroll—Paychecks that are late or have errors cost your company money, hurt employee morale, and undermine your credibility with employees. Federal, state, and local payroll taxes are complex and missing the filing and payment deadlines can incur fines, late fees, and an increased chance of audits for your company.

A recent survey discovered that employee compensation, including benefits, accounts for 35% of operating expenses in a typical organization.With so many company resources dedicated to maintaining the workforce, it is necessary to identify ways to improve results, increase efficiency, and lower costs. Human Resource Management Systems (HRMS) help you find such opportunities and capitalize on them.

Implementing HRMS eliminates much of the routine paperwork associated with HR. HRMS automates the most manual and time-consuming human resources functions: Payroll, new-hire processing, benefits and compensation management, employee development, internal analysis, and government reporting. This automation frees up valuable time that you can spend on employee relations, compliance analysis, or training.

Without HRMS, most HR managers rely on paper to manage employee processes. It’s a struggle to track employee information using a combination of homegrown spreadsheets and office file cabinets. Hiring information, payroll records, benefit plan elections, and training certifications for a single employee might be stored in four or more different locations. This invites errors, as information becomes lost and outdated. You must replicate each change to an employee’s data across several files. It becomes tedious, if not impossible, to create timely reports and analysis.

HRMS improves accuracy and saves time by helping you keep all employee data in one place. It also provides standardized processes that you can adopt, giving your organization more structure than you may have previously enjoyed. Because the data in an HRMS is centralized, there is no need to duplicate the data in order to use it for multiple tasks. An HRMS standardizes many HR administrative processes, including: Adding a new hire; promoting, disciplining, transferring, or terminating an employee; tracking Family and Medical Leave and Leave of Absence; assigning or changing benefits; changing salary or grade of an employee; safety reporting; and more.

Creating timely, comprehensive reports for management becomes easy with an HRMS. Most contain a number of predefined standard reports, as well as a custom report writer. Security features, such as audit trails, allow you to control and monitor who has access to sensitive employee data, or who has changed data in the system.

So how can you prepare and defend a proposal focused on automating the administrative functions within HR?  Watch our pre-recorded webinar to Build a Winning Strategy for Improving the Human Resources Function in your business by automating their outdated, overburdened, ineffective paper management systems.

You don’t have to work in a large company to know that the expense of managing benefits alone can be extremely costly. It is becoming more and more important for HR to have effective management tools for maintaining compliance and employee morale, and controlling costs. Automated systems reduce errors, provide multi-user access to critical business information, and when a system is chosen well, it can be a very cost-effective administrative processing tool.

Posted in February 2012, Human Resources (HR), Newsletter | Leave a comment

ERP Upgrades on the Rise

Posted on February 1, 2012 by Site Administrator

Most big companies rolled out their first ERP systems more than a decade ago. Now it is estimated that one in four businesses plans to upgrade or roll out a new ERP system, as their old systems reach the end of their useful life.  Driven in part by the race to beat the Y2K deadline, many systems implemented in 1999 had been designed for a time when mainframes and minicomputers were the norm.  Since then, many software companies have abandoned the architecture these systems were built on.  Worse, many organizations find that their original ERP vendor has been swallowed by a competitor, and support for its legacy product has come to an end.  Most computer programs need to be upgraded or replaced every seven years.  However with the sad state of the economy for the last 3 years, many of these upgrades or replacements were put on the back burner.

Now ERP is experiencing a mini-boom born of necessity– and not just for big enterprises looking to refresh legacy systems. Roughly one out of four SMBs and enterprises plans to either upgrade their existing ERP solutions or implement a new one over the next 12 months.  Many of these are companies that have been getting by for years with QuickBooks or Peachtree but now need to take managing their businesses to the next level.  Their businesses are becoming more complex, they may be growing very fast or have operations in more than one country, and they need to bring more discipline to their business processes.

So how do businesses know where to go from here?  The best way to start is by understanding what you want enterprise resource planning (ERP) to do for your business? As more businesses come into the enterprise orbit, ERP applications are being investigated and demonstrations of the software are on the increase. There is of course an application module for just about any business task you can think of. The enterprise software system reaches into every industry and its applications platform can be as robust as you want it to be. The placing of application modules will depend to a great extent, on the type of business you are in. There are ERP systems for businesses as diverse as accounting, manufacturing, architecture, construction, sales, marketing, distribution, professional services, government, utilities and more. So, what’s your need?

Once you have an idea of what your needs are, you can work with an enterprise software business partner to develop a platform for the appropriate application modules you need. Your working platform will be integrated as well as automated, so that you not only have consolidation, but speed as well when processing business tasks. That is one of the major differences with the enterprise software system – an integrated platform that allows communication between all application modules – and the ability to swiftly process business tasks. What’s more, you also get clear, real time visibility into operations, so that you can see what’s going on and where it is taking place within the enterprise. There are also modules for connections to suppliers, partners and customers.

All of your application modules and tools are stored in just one repository or communications hub. You will also have a set of diagnostic tools included for making reports, preparing analysis and business intelligence to help management in the decision making process. The applications are accessible to all staff or, all designated staff. The information and data provided will be easily accessible to all, in real time.

ERP applications will help you to work smarter, while at the same time increasing productivity.  If your organization is the one of four that plans to make a change this year, start by watching A Big Step Forward, No Steps Back!
The Secrets to Mid-size Business ERP Success – a pre-recorded webinar.  Then contact Axis Global Partners to start your big step forward. steroiden

Posted in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), February 2012, Newsletter | Leave a comment

How to get Business Intelligence into the Hands that Need It

Posted on February 1, 2012 by Site Administrator

Also, don’t miss our FREE BI Webinar – see below for details!

The Empowered Executive

Mark, President of a Corporate Services company, arrives early on Monday morning, as he knows he needs to get a head start on the week since they operate in multiple countries and time zones.  Providing services in many areas of international business for law firms, accountants, individuals, trusts and banks; the company depends on high-level data reporting.

As soon as Mark turns on his computer, he is presented with his customized KPI (Key Performance Indicators) dashboard, which helps him keep track of the pulse of the business. He first checks to see if any of his offices have flagged any areas of concern. Clicking on the highlighted flag for the India office, he reads the message left by the Client Manager, alerting Mark to a temporary power issue in the region.

Clicking the sales funnel icon, Mark drills down into the sales department’s new business report. This three-dimensional graph called a cube, shows him what volumes of business by service line are in the various stages of the sales cycle. Drilling down further into the detail for the 75% and above close probability opportunities, Mark finds five opportunities that he thinks can be closed in the next 48 hours. He accesses the proposal file for each of these five opportunities to view the details of the potential clients.

Mark opens his email window to send a message to the sales executive, Joan, to take a look at the potential clients on her own dashboard. He also “encourages” Joan to take aggressive action to close the five ‘hot’ opportunities.

Next, Mark looks at the cash flow meter on his dashboard. He is concerned that the cash balances are a little low. Drilling down into the open receivables, he checks on who has significant payments due. Correspondence files are attached to the records, so that Mark can see what letters or emails have been sent about payments. Mark sends an email to his Vice President of Finance asking her to follow up on a couple of accounts.

The customer satisfaction meter on Mark’s dashboard has dropped since he checked the same meter on his smartphone last night. Drilling down into the detail to determine what happened, Mark finds that a frustrated customer logged a complaint about response time in the India office. Mark sends a personal reply to the customer apologizing and explains the temporary power issue, and arranges for another office to respond.

The Reality

Your company has ERP and sales automation systems. You know the data you need is in there somewhere. You just can’t get to it. When you go to your IT department, they spend weeks or months and a big chunk of your budget to prepare a special report for you…if they even have time to do it in the first place. Or, you spend hours culling through reams of standard ERP data dumps to get the numbers you need and then reenter them into a spreadsheet that you spend more hours to build. Does it really have to be so hard to get the information you need?

The fundamental capability which enables Mark’s dashboard and his ability to drill down into the details is data integration…a special kind of data integration that is normally very hard to achieve because the information comes from diverse and incompatible sources. For effective executive dashboards, the underlying data might reside in the accounting system (cash balances, accounts receivables), sales force automation files (sales funnel, CRM), email and word processing files (correspondence, customer proposals), spreadsheets or custom databases (quality control information, customer requirements).

Imagine the programming effort to integrate this information to produce the management reports in the many required formats. Further, imagine how hard it would be to replicate and customize the information and reports across the breadth of accounting, ERP and CRM systems in use in today’s businesses, worldwide. Further complexity is added when users want the information in their preferred format, such as graphs, tables, cubes, and so on.

Now add the requirement for this data to be updated in real-time for timely decision making, and demand that all this information be accessible on the Internet and under strict security protocols.

For these and other reasons, the ad hoc reporting and management dashboards implied by this scenario are considered to be expensive wish-list projects for many executives. Aren’t these reasonable requests and real needs for informed management? Most would say yes, and the good news is that they exist today, and can be implemented quickly without high cost.

Free Webinar

Join us for our free Business Intelligence Webinar on Thursday, February 23rd at 9:00 central/10:00 Eastern to learn more and see a BI solution in action.

Posted in Business Intelligence (BI), February 2012, Newsletter | Leave a comment

3 Tips to Ease your Physical Count

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Site Administrator

You have counted your entire inventory, posted your variance report and made all the necessary adjustments…and it only took a month to do it.  We hear that scenario from distribution companies all the time as they struggle to complete their physical counts.  They pull in employees from every level, provide fresh doughnuts and pizza then settle in for a huge amount of data entry. However, it doesn’t have to be that difficult.

We have learned a few tricks over the years to help ease the pain of a physical count.  Whether you count your inventory every week or once a year, you will be able to gain something from these simple strategies.

  1. Assign Locations. There is a saying that goes, “Everything has a home” and that kindergarten lesson carries into your warehouse space as well.  Determine which items you sell the most and store them closest to your shipping and receiving areas.  Make sure that your employees know exactly where an item belongs and record that location in your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software.  It’s unrealistic to think there will always be enough room in that location so assign overflow bins as well.  These bins can be buckets, shelves, pallets or even aisles depending on the size of the items you inventory.  The location should be labeled with a picture so that it is easy for even your newest employee to place inventory in the proper location.
  2. Divide and Conquer. Segment your warehouse and assign sections to a team of people.  Each person should know the exact area they are counting to minimize duplicate efforts.  Spend time planning who will be in each section and make sure a supervisor is in each team to handle any questions that arise during counting.  The supervisor should be familiar with the inventory being counted.  This will reduce the amount of time your people are stopping the count to find out the answer to a question.  Also devise a system that will show which items have already been counted.  Some of our customers utilize a tag counting methodology while others simply place a sticker on a box once to show that it has been counted.  Use whatever system works best for you.
  3. Consider Automation. People, even at their best, are not perfect.  Barcoding systems have come a long way in helping small to medium sized businesses complete a physical count quickly.  Studies have shown that barcode scanners can reduce physical count time by 75% or more.  They do this by eliminating errors and data entry.  A manual count is generally an easy process but the data entry can get overwhelming.  It often involves many trips back out to the warehouse to check a count that seems off or to verify a possible handwriting error.  An automated system lets you simply scan all of the items in your warehouse then post that count directly to your ERP system.  Variances are checked and the count is updated without any tedious data entry.

Interested in more tips for increasing the efficiency of your warehouse?  Download “Warehousing- The Foundation of Distributor Profitability.”

Posted in January 2012, Newsletter, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

CRM Returns $5.60 for Every Dollar Invested

Posted on January 12, 2012 by Site Administrator

In a recent article on the Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch.com, Nucleus Research finds that The CRM investment is worth it even on second-, third-, and fourth-generation investments.  Their research found that Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications deliver a high return on investment (ROI), averaging $5.60 for every dollar spent. It also found that further investment throughout its life-cycle and deploying secondary applications greatly increases the ROI. With employee productivity increased, improved business forecasting and an increase in sales, investing in CRM is a smart business strategy.

Click here to read the article.

Posted in Customer Relations Management (CRM), January 2012, Newsletter | Leave a comment

Keeping Our Heads in the Cloud

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Site Administrator

Axis recently attended the Information Technology Alliance (ITA) Fall Collaborative to learn about the direction of the information technology industry.  The mission of ITA is to provide a collaborative environment where leading IT professionals share information and build relationships that significantly enhance the way they, and their clients, do business. Axis partners, Manny Buigas and Tony Chiodo, met with their peers and learned some fascinating insights.

The buzz at the event was all about cloud computing and the freedom it gives to you, our clients.  We will be sharing information and our views about the cloud in a three part series. Today we will answer the question, “What is cloud computing?”

Cloud computing is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet (click here for a white paper on the industry standard definition of “Cloud”). There are three distinct things that differentiate cloud from traditional computing:

  1. It is available on-demand. Most cloud solutions can be purchased and activated almost instantaneously as long as customization is not involved.  Even a full scale CRM system can be up and running within 24 hours of a purchase as long as you use the standard product.  This can be a huge benefit to companies that have been bogged down by long implementations.
  2. It is elastic. You can use the software as little or as much as you would like without any change in the monthly fee.  Let’s say your ERP is hosted in the cloud and you use it for all of your accounts receivable and accounts payable transactions.  If you have an extraordinarily busy month and your users are accessing the system twice as much, it will not affect the performance or the charge.   Regardless of usage, the fee structure is locked in.
  3. It is fully managed by the provider. Cloud applications are available to you as long as you have internet access.  The provider handles the servers and maintenance of the application without any of your intervention.  It is their responsibility to automatically upgrade your application with the latest fixes and feature enhancements.  You will simply log-in and find the new features ready to use.

Cloud computing basically allows your business to expand capabilities and increase capacity without investing in costly IT infrastructure; your applications and files are on the internet, not your local devices Of course, there are always additional considerations you need to be aware of with this model, and new cloud offerings are springing up every day.We will explore these and share the ways you can take advantage of the cloud in the coming weeks.  Up next, “What are the types of CloudComputing”

In the meantime, view this on-demand webcast “ERP in the Cloud: The untold story of simplicity, flexibility, and ROI” to learn about:

  • Modern ERP solutions that address top business drivers that lead to positive ROI
  • Choosing the right solution or deployment option to cut costs and complexity
  • Deciding factors, including implementation time, data security/availability, upfront/recurring costs, and much more
Posted in January 2012, News, Newsletter | Leave a comment