Learn about the power of Sage CRM E-marketing. Join our free webinar to get the full scope of how the combined tools could positively impact your emarketing success. Everyone who attends the webinar will receive our whitepaper on “The Benefits of Email Marketing as a Cost Effective Marketing Tool”.
Top 5 issues for SMBs to consider
Is the Cloud the answer?
The gas prices at today’s pumps will make any consumer stop in their tracks and wonder why they bought that big SUV. There will be intense family discussions about the value of keeping the vehicle, or if they should trade-in for a smaller, gas-conserving model or even go with a hybrid.
The comparisons are there with some of the management decisions that small and medium-sized companies are facing in today’s economy and what direction they need to take with their ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems. This is a market that has come under the microscope with the introduction of many cloud solutions, alleging to be the key when it comes to saving company dollars.
The ERP solution of ten years ago that was going to carry the company to business success mayor may not have realized its potential, but the marketing hype and glamor-ads of today all suggest that you will get more MPG with less work by moving to a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) alternative, placing your data and effectively your business in the legendary cloud.(There are really three options to consider; on-premise, hosted, and SaaS, but in this article we’re only looking to discuss on-premise versus Saas).
But is the reality that simple, or are there hidden considerations that can cause you to hesitate? “Once bitten, twice shy” so says the familiar idiom, and firms who had unpleasant experiences with their ERP project may not want to face similar upheaval and problems again.
It’s nice to have choices
Which model is right for your organization? What are the factors to consider when reviewing your options? Here are 5 considerations that should help at least determine if a full assessment is needed.
One size does not fit all
When an IT question is asked, the answer is invariably, “It depends.” The cloud / on-premise evaluation is no different, and indeed there is even a case for the hybrid approach that can allow for exceptionally dynamic business needs. Don’t make the decisions in a vacuum. Seek outside counsel from business partners and consulting firms who specialize in guiding organizations through these types of projects, and make the right decision to match your business needs for the future.
Video tips, tricks and tutorials help you become more productive with your Sage 300 ERP (formerly Sage ERP Accpac) and Sage CRM systems. Featured this month:
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Sage Business Intelligence is now included with Sage 300 ERP and offers several optional components including the Report Designer. The Report Designer is an Excel-based extension that allows you to generate financial statements in seconds and edit or create financial report layouts using simple drag and drop functionality. In this tutorial, we provide an introduction to the Report Designer, so that you’ll be able to access it, run reports and understand its editing capabilities.
Duration: 12 min 39 sec
Sage CRM version 7.1 and above includes Sage E-Marketing, an integrated system that makes it easy to setup and track your email campaigns. In previous tutorials, we’ve shown how to create your list of recipients, import your email template and how to insert merge fields and hyperlinks for personalization and tracking. In this tutorial, we show you how to setup an E-Marketing Campaign and send an email blast.
Duration: 5 min 55 sec
In Version 6.0, the standard set of account groups that come with Sage ERP Accpac have been modified.
To use the sample reports that come with Financial Reporter with your own data, your accounts must be assigned to the same standard account groups.
To use the new “snapshots” that are available in the Sage ERP Accpac Portal (samples below), all your accounts must be assigned to account groups and all account groups must be assigned to group categories. If you don’t want to use general ledger data snapshots, you don’t need to remap existing accounts to new account groups.
If you have not used account groups previously, note that the Account Groups form appears only if the Use Account Groups option is selected in the G/L Options form.
New Group Categories
Group categories organize your accounting information especially for presentation in the Sage ERP Accpac Portal. The new Income Statement and Balance Sheet snapshots retrieve data from group categories that are linked to your general ledger accounts through account groups.
If you plan to use the general ledger snapshots, you must first:
New Financial Reporter Sample Statements
Financial Reporter includes a set of sample statements that now use the new account groups.
If you want to use the new sample statements with your own data, you must ensure that your accounts use the new standard account groups. (If you use different account groups, you must customize the report forms so that they use your account groups.)
If you do not want to use the new set of sample financial statements, you can continue to use the statements that shipped with earlier versions.
If you know someone who could benefit from our blog, or from our other resources such as the Success Newsletter or our Tips & Tricks Videos, then please forward this article to them or refer them to our website at www.axisgp.com.
The ability to manage information is playing an increasingly central role in competitive strategy. In most industries, companies can no longer achieve sustainable competitive differentiation simply on the basis of the performance characteristics of their products alone. The pace of technological development means that any product innovation a company makes today is likely to be quickly copied by competitors and become a standard feature tomorrow. Coupled with this, globalization is exposing companies of all sizes to unprecedented levels of competition.
As a result companies are increasingly being forced to look at how they can increase the value they provide by tailoring their offer to customers’ individual needs whether that is through customizing the company’s core product or adapting a range of supporting services (e.g. billing, shipping, customer support etc). Such an approach not only serves to provide a basis for short term differentiation, it also has longer term strategic benefits too.
The more a company learns more about a customer’s individual needs and tailors its products and services accordingly, the greater the value the customer receives. Similarly, the greater the value the customer receives, the more important the company becomes to them. Progressively, the customer faces the prospect of ever greater disruption were they to consider switching to an alternative supplier owing to the time it would take any other company to acquire the same understanding of their needs and deliver a comparable tailored service.
Consequently, even though there may be other companies providing a comparable core product, such a strategy enables a company to develop strong relationships with its customers and an enduring hold over the revenue they generate. Indeed, in business-to-business markets, a company can find its relationship with key clients becoming so strong that it almost becomes an integral part of their businesses.
Learning about a customer’s particular requirements and marshalling the resources of the company to deliver tailor-made solutions is increasingly the only way for companies to avoid being drawn into commoditized price-based competition. For more and more companies, the integration of the front and back office is thus becoming a strategic necessity with the ability to capture and manage information effectively a critical core competency.
Help your company realize the value of customer data by downloading “Assembling the Jigsaw- Realizing the value of data”.
Increasing Value for Customers and Shareholders
With costs and competition rising faster than ever, only businesses that find ways to increase value for their customers and shareholders can thrive in today’s market. The value chain concept holds that certain activities within a business represent opportunities for adding value to the product or service the business provides. In general, these activities are profit-generators that can be distinguished from the overhead and support functions of commercial distributors and company warehouses.
Value-adding functions often relate directly to the specifics of the individual business. Following are some value-adding functions that are common to most business and should be familiar to anyone who depends on their warehouse as part of their critical operations:
Warehouses are traditionally seen as purely cost-centers and not a potential area for value creation. Yet progressive businesses are turning their warehouses into a significant competitive advantage. Of the value-adding functions listed above, inbound and outbound logistics relate directly to wholesalers, distributors and distribution center operators. In addition, the quality of receiving, storing, and delivering product can affect production, marketing and sales, and services both positively and negatively.
The “True Tales of Warehouse Efficiency” whitepaper addresses the areas that are directly involved with the value-adds and ROI opportunities in automated warehouse processes. Specifically, this paper focuses on how progressive companies can keep mistakes at an acceptable minimum, improve efficiency, maintain compliance, maximize personnel utilization, and maximize inventory investment through effective use of inbound and outbound logistics and warehouse operations.
In a modern, automated warehouse management environment, these activities take place in a smooth, uninterrupted flow. Whether in a distributor or wholesaler model or in a dedicated distribution center serving a dispersed chain of retail stores, the process begins with receipt planning and execution.
So said Mark Twain after hearing his obituary had been published in the New York Journal. Is ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) facing the same instance of misreporting, when we read that traditional implementations have run their course?
If you track the internet feeds and industry blogs, then you will have seen a trend over the past couple of months that is reporting ERP systems to be “still alive’, “not going anywhere”, and remain fundamental to the way that most small and medium-sized organizations (SMBs) manage their businesses.
With this reaffirmation of faith to the once almighty ERP system, what should you do, if anything, to nurture that relationship again? After all, don’t most companies have their systems running smoothly, to the point that it is part of their daily routine and they don’t have to give it a second thought?
Well here’s another quote to consider – Familiarity breeds contempt, while rarity wins admiration – so said Apuleius, Roman philosopher back in 124 A.D. Has the success of the ERP system in managing and integrating business processes made SMBs become complacent, and could they be taking advantage of the agility of those systems to help them maximize the investment they have already made? The admiration award goes to those firms who continue to challenge themselves by changing the way they do business to outwit their competition. What may also need to change is the way they evolve their use of ERP systems to effect that change.
If you are one of the thousands of firms who implemented ERP only for accounting and financial management, when was the last time you reviewed your configuration to determine if it could do more? It’s likely that your original evaluation matched feature and functionality to specific business requirements, and once the implementation project was completed you have never given a second glance at what else the software could help you accomplish. Overtime, the business may have evolved and grown so that you now have increased reporting requirements. For example, through mergers and acquisitions, you now need to consolidate across entities or locations, and you’re not sure how or even if, your current system can accommodate this. So you continue to struggle with how to enter intercompany transactions, wasting a lot of your precious time.
It’s time to reverse the thinking; let’s put the proverbial screws on your ERP system and challenge it to do more. We’re in tough economic times, when everyone is trying to manage costs and get their expenses under control. Isn’t this the perfect time to take a second (or maybe it’s the first) look at streamlining your processes and determine if there are opportunities to improve?
So don’t believe everything you read; the demise of ERP seems to be only in the pundits minds. Maybe business owners should have a different approach – use it more effectively and efficiently, and evolve the software as their business evolves, rather than jumping on to the ‘next best thing so soon’.
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions have always offered powerful capabilities for managing operational data and improving business efficiency. Today’s organizations realize that ERP solutions are critical to helping them serve customers throughout their lifecycle and providing the accurate, up-to-date information they need to make better decisions more quickly. And modern ERP solutions are delivering these capabilities with greater ease of use which further improves their benefits and ROI.
The best ERP vendors today are meeting customer demands by upgrading their solutions with a wide range of capabilities that improve usability. Read the “Improving ERP Usability” whitepaper which details the business impact of modern usability enhancements which include visual processes, dashboards, an intuitive user interface, a common look and feel, configurability, SOA architecture, mobile interfaces, eCommerce integration and business intelligence. ERP solutions that incorporate these capabilities reduce training and implementation timeframes to deliver faster ROI, reduce total cost of ownership, improve productivity, improve staffing flexibility and enhance collaboration.
Today, organizations are looking to ERP solutions to help more types of users more efficiently and effectively perform their everyday activities of driving business change and improvement. Strategic companies are demanding that ERP solutions help expand traditional business processes to support the complete customer lifecycle—from first contact to contract to cash to care.
To support this new approach, ERP solutions must provide staff across the business with accurate, up-to-date information in a format they can easily access and disseminate. ERP solutions must also help organizations improve their ability to analyze information to make better decisions and make high-risk decisions more quickly and accurately. Users are no longer willing to spend time digging through reports or struggling with hard-to-use solutions.
For decades, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software has provided organizations with essential integration of information between business functions, allowing for a single repository of data from a variety of applications. ERP serves as the circulatory system for your organization, keeping everything moving and ensuring that every department has access to the data it requires. ERP is also a treasure trove of corporate DNA, storing data that can be used to measure, analyze and improve efficiencies between departments and overall organizational health.
Researchers are discovering that our DNA holds significant clues about medical risks and opportunities, strengths and weaknesses. Increasingly, doctors can use DNA markers to predict disease and help patients implement preventative therapies. Business Intelligence (BI) can do the same thing for a company. BI is a means of unlocking vast stores of data within ERP software and quickly extracting crucial nuggets needed to adapt and improve performance. BI can be used to help business recognize cost-savings opportunities, to discover new paths to growth, and proactively address market shifts.
Any organization with growth expectations should give serious consideration to the value of BI in extracting more from the data within ERP. In an Aberdeen report on the connection between ERP and BI, analysts stated that “ERP can transform data into information but BI tools are required to complete the transformation from information to intelligence.”
SMBs looking for this type of intelligence don’t need a Fortune 500 solution to get meaningful results. There are several BI solutions available, priced for the mid-market. This category of BI tools is easier to learn and use, and produces data in a format that everyone can understand. To deliver value, a BI solution must include these key features:
The best way to approach the implementation of a results oriented BI tool is to ask the right questions. In an article on CIO.com, Gartner analyst Patrick Meehan suggested that “corporate executives should formulate two or three strategic business questions that need to be answered on a persistent basis and then determine what data must be regularly gathered and analyzed to answer them intelligently.” Well-implemented BI analytics can offer a significant advantage in today’s increasingly competitive business climate. The answers to your organization’s biggest questions are waiting to be discovered within existing ERP systems; let Business Intelligence be your map.
In 2012 the names of many of Sage’s core accounting and ERP lines will be changing. These products will be identified with a numbering approach where higher numbers denote increasing levels of product capability or sophistication. The new product numbering sets will include Sage 50, Sage 100, Sage 300, and Sage 500. This will also bring the Sage naming system in North America in line with the Sage naming structure worldwide.
For our clients, Sage ERP MAS 90 and MAS 200 are becoming Sage 100 Standard ERP, Sage 100 Advanced ERP and Sage 100 Premium ERP. Sage ERP MAS 500 is becoming Sage 500 ERP. Sage ERP Accpac is becoming Sage 300 ERP, and SageCRM is becoming Sage CRM.
The market for sales and use tax solutions is harder to navigate than Times Square on New Year’s Eve. With all of the flashing lights, glitzy billboards, and noisy street vendors, it’s almost impossible to separate fact from fiction. On one side of the street you find shop after shop of desktop solution providers, and on the other, you find cloud application vendors. And it doesn’t stop there. On the next corner, you have to choose between single purpose tax providers and large conglomerates promising solutions for every imaginable business problem. Should you stick with established brands or boutique shops? And what about doing it yourself? Is that still a viable option? It’s enough to make you dizzy.
Finding the right sales tax solution doesn’t have to make your head spin. Read our whitepaper “Ignoring the Hype: How to Find the Right Sales and Use Tax Solution for Your Business.”
In this guided tour, we’ll help you eliminate the hype and separate fact from fiction so you can tell the difference between a real solution and a cheap knockoff. With proper information, you can be sure you won’t drop the ball on this important area of tax.
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