Articles
5 Ways to Accelerate and Improve Your Companys Cash Flow
The average collection time for a small to medium sized business is 19 days. According to CashEdge’s recent 2011 Small business Payables and Receivables survey, the majority of the 405 businesses surveyed indicated that they wanted to reduce the time to collect by 50%. How can your business achieve this lofty goal? ERP systems have a series of powerful tools that can aid the collection process. Here are five easy ways to utilize existing tools with your ERP system to increase cash flow:
Inventory Management Systems
When is the right time to invest?
Any business, regardless of their industry, has the need to manage their inventory on some level. If you are manually entering inventory data into your accounting system, you may be limiting your ability to achieve the rewards of a solid inventory control process. If you have: long physical count times, over staffing, shipping errors, delayed receiving, or error-prone data entry it might be time to look at a barcoding solution. Adding barcode data capture can dramatically increase efficiency, yet many businesses mistakenly believe that this is outside their ability or budget.
Advanced Inventory Webinars Available Online!
Did you miss any of our Advanced Inventory Webinars? You can now view them on-demand by clicking here.
Lead Your Business to Higher Profits:
Through Business Intelligence
Businesses must react faster to changing profitability and customer trends, and to do that you need the ability to access and analyze critical data about your business quickly. You need up‐to‐the‐minute information about your income, costs, and customers in order to make the best possible decisions. In many businesses, collecting and analyzing this information is challenging because different departments store the data in non‐integrated systems and provide varying levels of reporting. In order to get the information you need, you must rely on the IT department to sort out the data you need, or ask individual employees in each business unit to create reports. If IT is busy or employees are unavailable, you don’t receive reports.
Tips & Tricks
One of my favorite tricks in Microsoft Dynamics NAV is CTRL E. Before I learned this trick I frequently reentered numbers in a spreadsheet or keyed them in a calculator. Of course, I frequently made mistakes (my 10 Key skills aren’t great). CTRL E to the rescue. Simply press CTRL E in NAV to send the current document or ledger to Excel. Now you’re ready to add, sort, analyze or review your data immediately. What a great tool. Click here to learn more about NAV 2009 Enhancements.
Empower Your Sales and Marketing Teams
Ten Things You Can Learn about your Sales and Marketing Efforts from Your CRM System
Customer relationship management (CRM) vendors often claim that their software can do practically anything, from revealing which leads work (and which don’t) to who your best customers are; to which products are the most or least profitable. But what do business owners have to say? To find out if CRM systems really deliver on what they promise, dozens of business owners and managers were asked what they can learn from their CRM systems. Here are the top 10 responses:
Lean Manufacturing – Part 4
Value Stream Mapping
Value Stream Mapping is a snapshot of the current state of a segment of the business at a 20,000 foot view. It helps to visually see where to tackle your next project improvements and challenges the paradigm of every member of your team. Part 4 of our Lean Manufacturing Series will help to address the basics of Value Stream Mapping so that you can fully understand how this powerful exercise can benefit your organization.
Lessons Learned from the Amazon Outage
The primary concerns over Cloud Computing have revolved around privacy, security, and reliability issues. Last month’s Amazon outage brought the reliability issue front and center, and brought it home for some Sage SalesLogix Cloud customers. With service down for 4 business days, the initial reaction was to question the feasibility of Cloud Computing. However, we have a different take on it and feel that Cloud Computing, as a whole, will be stronger for it. There are also lessons that can be learned from the Amazon outage for any company – on the Cloud or not.
Sage Pro 2011 is Here!
Sage has been hard at work adding new features and functionality to Sage Pro. No matter how you use the system, you are bound to find some exciting improvements. Here’s a quick highlight of all you can expect to see in the Sage Pro 2011 release:
Lean Manufacturing Insights – part 3
Part 3: Seven Forms of Waste
By Ron Ketterling, President BASM
In continuation of our series on Lean Manufacturing processes, one of the primary focuses is on reducing waste, which can come from seven areas including: transportation, inventory, wasted motions, waiting, over-production, over-processing, and defects. Here is a tip to help remember these seven wastes – use the acronym Tim Wood – look back at the bold letters to see what it means.
