08.11.11 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.

08.03.11 Converting 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 counterproductive.

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.

07.29.11 New Live Portal Order Entry!

Exerve, a SouthWare Certified Reseller, recently posted this great graphic showcasing SouthWare’s new live portal order entry to their blog, Exerve Ignite. We liked it so much we thought we’d share it on our blog, too!  

The new live portal order entry is faster, more accurate and easier to use than ever before.  We’re very proud of the improved functionality, but don’t take our word for it.  Read what Exerve has to say about it here.

07.27.11 Certified Reseller Profile: Don Ewing

Company Name:   Haruspex, Inc.

     

07.21.11 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 cin 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.

07.12.11 Running @ Efficiency

Last month, SouthWare Certified Reseller, Haruspex, Inc., posted a blog entry entitled #1 Tip for running your system at 100% efficiency.  In it, they make a great point – no matter how much you’ve streamlined your business, there’s always room to improve efficiency.

Case in point: product ordering is significantly more efficient than it was 20, or even ten, years ago.  Still, if you’re taking orders via fax, phone and email you still have many opportunities to streamline ordering and speed time-to-market.  Find out how Haruspex helped one of their clients reduce manual orders and increase efficiency by reading #1 Tip for running your system at 100% efficiency. 

07.07.11 The Cost of Doing Business: When You Know It, You Can Control It

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.

07.01.11 Have a Happy & Safe Holiday!

Happy Fourth of July from your friends here at SouthWare.  We wish you a happy and safe holiday weekend as we celebrate freedom and our great nation.  God Bless America!

06.22.11 Hello World!

Welcome to the new SouthWare blog! 

We launched this blog as a means of keeping you informed about our business, but we expect it to do much more than that. Our objective with this blog – as with the software we develop – is to help you grow your business. 

So we’ll be sharing a full gamut of content here – from cost-saving tips to an insider’s look at the people who make our products hum with efficiency. All with the goal of keeping you informed about the things that impact your productivity most.

I invite you to visit often, make suggestions and offer ideas. This is your space as much as it is ours. We look forward to sharing with you!

All the Best,

James Clemens

President, SouthWare