Increased pressure to cut costs, international competition, ever increasing labor costs, and restricted credit or no credit has made it difficult, if not impossible, to be a manufacturer in today's economy.  It was tough to begin with and then add the pressure of a global economic slowdown and suddenly there is more red ink than black.

It really does not matter if you are a process or discrete manufacturer.  Whether you make to stock or make to order.  You are going to have the same pressures. You need to reduce your operating expenses and optimize your resources in order to stay competitive.

How can we increase customer satisfaction or loyalty?  How can we improve our partner and supplier relationships?  How can we improve employee productivity now that we have reduced our work force?  How can we be more responsive?  Bottom line, how can we make it easier to work with and do business with our company?

There is always going to be errors when humans are involved.  It is a fact of life.  Reporting errors, incorrect or late shipments, time consuming tasks.  How can we plan and improve our scheduling?  Was our forecast information incorrect or did we just run the orders when they hit the fax machine?  Which person actually knows what the production schedule is and will they be able to tell management if there is enough capacity to handle a rush order without making all the other orders late?

Okay, we shipped the order on time, but did it meet our quality control tests and by the way the customer needs a copy of our certificate and we do not know where the information is located.  We are not even sure we are making our minimum profit on some orders.

We constantly struggle with warehouse and inventory control issues.  We have seasonal demand.  When was the last time the physical inventory matched the perpetual book inventory?  We know how to figure out how many items to make for our customer orders, but we constantly guess for our stock orders.

Our communication with our customers and suppliers is weak.  It takes a long time to execute a new business process.  It would be nice if our system notified us about critical issues.  We need better planning.  We need automation and the efficiency it creates.

Manufacturing key concepts:

• • Reducing operating expenses
  • Optimizing resource management and planning
  • Improving inventory control and material management
  • Increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty
  • Improving partner and supplier relationships
  • Improving employee productivity and overall company responsiveness

Cash flow is constrained. If you are reading this you already know that fact.  Every business knows this and is constantly adjusting their business to meet demands.

Management needs quick access to financial statistics so they can make intelligent decisions.  What money is owed and when is it due?  How can we expedite collections?  Who owes us the most and for how long?

Our suppliers are pressing us for payment and our customers are lagging behind.  Overworked credit managers are juggling accounts and senior management is waiting for reports.  Have you missed critical customer credit issues?

Would three-way matching between purchase orders, accounts payable and invoices really help with efficiency?  What if my system actually told me there was a discrepancy between my purchase order and what my supplier just billed me?  How many times have I been overbilled?

The standard reports are okay, but what we really need is an easy to use report writer so that we can see the information that is important to us when we need it.

The right software solution either alone or integrated with all the other modules in your system to give you an accurate financial snapshot with supporting background details.  Why use Finance software? How are you functioning without it?

Not only do we need an easy to implement and fully integrated E-commerce solution, but we also need to integrate our supply chain, empower our sales force, and communicate with our customers more efficiently and in a personalized way. We need to collaborate in order to make faster decisions. We need to strengthen our relationships with our customers and trading partners.

Employees, Trading partners and Customers need a consolidated and organized way to easily access the information they need when interacting with our solution. 

Portal components: Commerce, Customer, Executive Information System (EIS), Supplier, Mobile Salesforce.

Commerce Portal - Intuitive, easy to manage, easy to understand shopping cart application that will enable customers to purchase from an integrated solution that is always up-to-date.  Capture the online market that our competition is taking away from us.

Customer Portal - Improve responsiveness to customers.  Customers are demanding 24/7 access to product information, account status, summary aging, open invoices, payment history.  If a customer wants a copy of an Invoice at 10pm, then they should be able to get that information right then, they should not have to wait.

Executive Information System (EIS) Portal – Management needs to make better decisions, faster.  Employees need timely information that is tailored to their specific needs.  Address the need to quickly spot seasonal or recurring trends in our business metrics.  Identify which products and customers are profitable. Improve supplier relationships and take advantage of discounts and cost savings in order to improve our profitability.

Supplier Portal - Active participation between suppliers and partners.  Take advantage of the Internet as an information highway.  Suppliers need to be able to view open purchase orders, overdue shipments, receipt history, open invoices, payment history, and vendor performance statistics.  In today's business world it is critical to improve supply chain efficiencies by enabling suppliers to provide shipment quantities, delivery dates, and advanced shipment notices without buyer intervention.

Mobile Portal - Empower employees so they can reach new levels of productivity.  Improve customer service with real-time access to data.  Authorized employees need access to detailed customer information not only when they are in the office, but especially when they are in the field.  Customers need answers now, not later in the week.  Customers are demanding to know stock availability, pricing, discounts, delivery dates.

E-Commerce key concepts:

• • Supporting B2B, B2C, and Business-to-Employee business models-all on a single platform
  • Providing out-of-the-box readiness and complete adaptability
  • Leveraging the industry's most complete middleware platform for end-to-end integration
  • Increasing employee productivity through easy access to critical business applications and information
  • Fully exploiting the power of the underlying platform for maximum performance, scalability, and adaptability
  • The ability to utilize real-time inventory data to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty
  • Easily implementing and EDI solution with your trading partners

We have a web site and are starting to sell more over the Internet, but we have to manually update our systems.  We really take chances when we sell something retail that we have not over committed our inventory.  What we usually end up doing is overstocking our fast moving items so that we do not run out of stock, but that strains our warehouse staff and makes us run out of space for our other items. 

Sometimes the links between our systems are not working and we have to rekey orders from our web store in our order entry system.  Our Finance department has no idea where we are financially and a lot of times our customers go over their credit limit.

We hope that we are compliant with security standards, we have a firewall and antivirus software, but we hear so many stories about systems being hacked.  We have to run the credit cards through a separate system and that really slows us down.  Our checkout lines get long during our busy hours.  We have to double check everything.  Our customers must have a lot of patience.

We have to wait until the next day to know what our sales are for the day, week, month, quarter, or year.  We have no way of targeting our customers with promotions, because we do not know what they are buying.  Our purchasing department must manually add our retail sales to our system to get an overall picture.

We would like to sell gift cards, but do not have a system to manage everything.  Some of our customers would like to shop online, but also want to put their orders on account.  They take a lot of our staff time requesting copies of their invoices.  Our customers want to view their history online and we think this would make them happier and reduce our in house staff backlog, but our current systems just does not have this capability and even if it did, it would not include both in-store and on-line purchases.

Mobile Applications:

• • Order Processing
  • Proof-of-Delivery (POD)
  • Route Sales and DSD
  • Warehouse Management
  • Alert Messaging

Retail key concepts:

• • A consistent, reliable infrastructure that extends from the back office to the front of the store
  • A flexible and responsive supply chain process that helps you quickly sense changes in customer demand and react efficiently and effectively
  • The ability to utilize real-time inventory data to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty
  • The ability to leverage personalized customer loyalty rewards and promotions to drive sales
  • Improving employee productivity and overall company responsiveness

The goal of any Warehouse Management Software (WMS) will include monitoring warehouse activities in real-time mode minimizing entry errors, and help you measure the efficiency of your warehouse employees.

What are my people doing all day? Why do we have so many shipment errors? What is the cost of return processing and shipment charges and expedited replacements? It is no wonder my people seemed overworked, they are constantly handling returns instead of new orders.

We need to track inventory, but cannot afford more personnel. Would the addition of Radio Frequency (RF) devices and bar coding help? What will it cost to implement such a system? None of our shelving is labeled and our parts are all over the place.

Customer service is always calling the receiving department to find out if our orders have come in so they can answer our customer's questions. There ought to be a way for the system to tell them that in a timelier manner.

We are only sure about the stock status of an item when we are out-of-stock. Physical inventory takes too long and it is out of date the next day. What can be done to automate inventory and cycle counting? We lose inventory all the time. We are not sure if we should count boxes or pallets, because our system does not handle different units of measure well. We have no way of tracking the transfers between our warehouses. The system seems incapable of telling us what should be transferred.

Order processing is so time consuming. We are never sure if we picked, packed and shipped what the customer ordered. Our staff is picking orders one at a time and the manager is not sure who is working on which orders. They try to keep up with spread sheets, but they still are unable to keep up with demand. We have no idea who is being productive. Even if we do pick the right item, we often get the quantity wrong.

Not only do we struggle with these warehouse issues, our customers are now requesting Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) confirmations.

Our managers have to manually figure out how to load our trucks for delivery. Most of the time they do a pretty good job, but when they have a bad day, we get backed up and have to expedite replacements and send a second delivery which backs up production for the next day. Not only is our truck processing inefficient, we do not even pick our orders in the right sequence and we waste a lot of time.

Warehousing key concepts:

• • Having a more accurate and timely information
  • Reducing overhead
  • Optimizing warehouse space
  • Increasing inventory accuracy
  • Reducing shipping errors
  • Increasing productivity
  • Traceability and quality control

Do we sell a lot of products at little margins or a only a few at a high profit? Where are our sales made? Are there new opportunities and new markets available? What are our customers looking for? How can we be more responsive to our customers? Is it possible to give management the information they need to make intelligent decisions in a timely manner and feel confident those decisions are made based on facts?

Information is an asset and Business Intelligence tools enable management to analyze changing customer demands more quickly. Faced with thin margins and higher fixed costs, BI goes beyond the base reports to enable discovery of new markets and opportunities for growth.

Once considered complex and overbearing today's BI applications are sophisticated, yet simple to use and implement. Implemented correctly and integrated BI solution is yet another way organizations ensure their profitability.

Analytics key concepts:

• • Inventory Turns and GMROI
  • Customer Fill Rates
  • Forecasted Demand vs Actual
  • Picking and Shipping Performance
  • Receiving and Put-Away Performance
  • Vendor Performance

Tired of not knowing what is going on with your Salesforce?  How many leads and prospects are in the pipeline?  How can we forecast sales? What type of revenue can we expect this quarter?  How much time are we wasting chasing the wrong clients?

Why do our Salesreps have to contact customer service to find out what we have in stock?  What is our current pricing and availability?  Recommend related products, new products and promotions?

Why do our Salesreps invest so much time with paperwork and so little time communicating with their leads, prospects and customers?  No one seems to know what they are supposed to be doing or when they should be doing it.

How much time does it take to convert a lead to prospect, a prospect to a customer?  What is our average sale?    What is our conversion rate? What is needed to make more sales? Sales managers have no clear idea where we are against our objectives.  We have post-it notes and scrapes of paper all over the place. Who knows what is going on?

We currently have no easy way to integrate our order entry system with our service division. Their needs are not addressed by our current software. We have to manually take the billing information from their system and rekey it into our order entry system.

We do not have a good way to tell if when we are making a profit, if we have the parts available or our technician's schedules. We do not know how productive one person is versus another. Our managers are using spread sheets to manage our workforce and service calls. This information is not up to date or shared in our organization. We do not know for sure when we can commit to a request. We get scared every time our service manager goes on vacation.

Once we start on a service call we have no way of tracking the status as it progresses through the stages which means we are flying blind. When the technicians are working they have to call to find out basic customer information. We have so many delays between the end of work and when we actually bill the client. We have to wait for materials used, technician time, and travel time. It really hurts our cash flow.

Service and Repair key concepts:

• • A consistent, reliable infrastructure that extends from the back office to the front of the store
  • A flexible and responsive supply chain process that helps you quickly sense changes in customer demand and react efficiently and effectively
  • The ability to utilize real-time inventory data to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty
  • The ability to leverage personalized customer loyalty rewards and promotions to drive sales
  • Improving employee productivity and overall company responsiveness