Improving Business Efficiency and

Geoff Skinner

16th October 2012 Roger Overell

Sage 1000 / L500 – Business Efficiency

• Reporting / BI

• Spreadsheet optimisation

• Line of business enhancements

• Automation of repetitive tasks

• Sage Projects and additional modules

• CRM and Marketing

• e-Reqs

Reporting / Business Intelligence

• The more you understand your business data, the better decisions you’ll make– Understand your costs and margin

– Understand revenues and profit

– Identify key operational data

• Empower users to prepare their own reports and take the stress away from the finance department

• Automatically prepare board report packs saving time

• Latest and greatest– Dashboards

– Mapping

Spreadsheet Optimisation

• There’s nothing wrong with spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are a great tool for understanding business data.

• Beware if spreadsheets are becoming an essential line of business application

Line of Business Enhancements

• Line of business application integration

• Form Control Extensions allow you to add business logic to the Sage client

• You can add processing to forms and fields, as well as have dedicated FCE buttons present on these forms

• FCEs allow you to call specific line of business developments, depending on a user request, or specific values on forms, such as quantities and prices

• FCEs can read values that users have entered and access internal or external data to perform calculations and ultimately populate form data

• Examples :-– Rounding order quantities up or down based on a pre-populated carton quantity

– Establishing prices based on CRM quotations

– Provide complex information from Sage as well as external systems

Automation

• Autoq allows automation of Sage 1000/L500 processes, but cannot implement any logic, or react to unexpected events

• Sage automation can run Sage 1000/L500 processes through the Sage client, and can react to field values, the particular form that has been displayed and any popup dialogs

• Automation can have an immediate ROI in terms of the manual time it can save

• Automation examples :-

– Batch posting

– Inter company transactions

– Printing

Sage Projects and Additional Modules

• Projects• Currently 136 Projects currently available.

• Credit Management• Account status code

– Define an unlimited number of account status codes, which will be applied to Accounts Receivable customer accounts.

• Customer credit information– For each customer account, record additional credit control information, including:

• Account status.• Next call date.• Free text fields.• Additional contact information.• Promised cheque values and dates expected.

• Diary management– Automatically generate ‘to do’ lists by credit controller based on outstanding balances and overdue days.

• Process ‘to do’ lists– From one integrated option, carry out the following tasks:

• Review the ‘to do’ list on screen.• Select a call and automatically display the full account details on-screen.• Review the original order.• Record details of the call, including free format text, next call date and promised cheques with dates, and update the

customer status if required.• Print an instant statement to be sent to the customer.• Review reminder letter history for an item.• Print an instant reminder letter.• Print a report showing the current status of the account and the call history.• Review previous calls relating to an item.• Flag an item as disputed and record the reason for this.

• Reporting– Promised cheques report. List all promised payments, presenting them as a simple cash flow.

CRM

• CRM is not just a contact management system

• Managing and understanding your sales pipeline will enable you to plan your costs, cash and operational resources

• Effective service is essential today, with customers demanding SLAs to trade with us

• CRM provides a vehicle for taking and managing inbound calls (including emails) and enforcing SLAs

• Integration with ERP means sales people will be fully furnished with all information they need

– What’s been bought and when

– What is owed

– What problems have occurred

Marketing

• Social networking is a new and cost effective route to market

• Our key business partners will have pages on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube

• We need to understand how these work, how we should interact with them and how we should deploy our own pages

• Our pages should link to those of our key suppliers and visa versa

• The holy grail is to make your way to number in the Google rankings (a black art in itself !)

• This is not to be underestimated – imagine having an advert on this man’s page !

Web Sites

• All businesses have web sites these days

• The key to climbing up the Google ladder is change, clicks and links

• Regardless of Google, our web sites should be relevant to our customers

• Customers expect an amount of self service

– Order tracking– Case tracking

• Blogs are all the rage

• Clean and simple presentation is the order of the day

http://www.k3fds.com

e-Reqs

• e-Reqs is a web based purchase requisition solution which integrates with Sage Line 500 and Sage ERP 1000

• Provides a simple to use web interface to raise and authorise purchase order requisitions, through user configurable workflows

• e-Reqs reaches out to an extended ERP community, empowering departments to serve themselves, automating the approval flow and reducing the dependency on the central finance function

Features - General

• Simple to use web application

• Single web interface to any number of Sage companies

• Extensive configurability to turn features on and off

• Interfaces to Standard G/L, Project Costing and Vi Contract Costing for budgeting

• Role based security to control ability to create and authorise requisitions

Features – Workflow (1)

• Requisitions are created as a particular requisition type

• All requisitions must be approved via a workflow, which is configured against a requisition type and target company

• A workflow can have any number of approval stages, with each stage having a monetary limit. The requisition must be approved at every stage in turn, until it reaches a stage where the limit exceeds the value of the requisition

• Optionally, a mandatory final approval stage can be configured

Features – Workflow (2)

• Can define a list of users who can approve particular requisition types within a company, at particular stages/monetary thresholds

• Can define holiday delegates

• Requisitions can be accepted to move to next stage of workflow or …

• … rejected directly back to the requestor, or to an earlier stage

• After final stage, purchase order is created in Sage company

• Emails are sent to notify request for approval, rejection or purchase order creation• Web service available for linking external systems to approval/rejection process

Features – Requisitions (1)

• System can be configured to accept one supplier and multiple delivery location, or one delivery location and multiple suppliers

• Wizard like navigation makes it simple to use

Features – Requisitions (2)

• Products (services only) are selected based on cost centres

• Enter quantity, cost and date required (currency determined from supplier)

Features – Budgeting & Posting

• System can be configured for no entry of project codes/cost centres …

• … project codes and cost centres from project accounting …

• … or contract codes and cost centres from VI contract costing

Features – Requisitions (3)

• Special Instructions

• Document attachments

Features – Budget Checking

• Determines budget from G/L, Project Accounting or Contract Costing

• Takes into account commitments, if commitment accounting is turned on

Features – Authorisation

• User who has authorisation role has a list of authorisations

• Authoriser can accept or reject the requisition

Features – Receipting

• User who has purchase ordering role has a list of purchase orders

• Can fully, part or short receipt by quantity or by value

Features – Coming Soon !

Business Efficiency

Thank You

Enjoy the Casino