|
Tight Budgets? Do More With Less
We all know the story and all of
our businesses have been impacted to some degree: the
economy is in recession and personal and business
spending is down. For some businesses that means painful
layoffs and cutbacks but for all businesses it means
belt-tightening and doing more with less. When it comes
to your Microsoft Dynamics accounting system, there’s
probably untapped capability that you’re not taking
advantage of. Untapped potential waiting to help your
business work smarter, save time and money, and do more
with less.
New features
If your business is like most
businesses, you have been upgrading your Microsoft
Dynamics software but may not be taking advantage of all
of the new features. If you haven’t upgraded, now may be
the time, there may be new features available that could
save your business time and money. In your Dynamics
installation folder or on your software CD/DVD you
should be able to find a Summary of Changes document
that outlines all of the new features and capabilities
in the newer version of your software. Note, the
documents are not always cumulative, so you may need to
find the SOC document for the last few versions.
Newer versions of Dynamics have a
lot of new capabilities like the ability to email
invoices, automatically pay subcontractors when you are
paid, improved material requirement planning, just to
name a few. Carefully review these new features, there
are sure to be some that you can begin using with little
to no setup or implementation time that could have big
benefits for your business. And while you’re at it, take
a look at even old functionality that you may not be
using. For example, if you’re not using project costing
capabilities, now may be the time to implement projects
to get a handle on project expenses and employee
utilization.
In virtually every implementation
there is at least one time or money saving new feature
than can be implemented, and since you have already paid
for this new functionality, you only have to invest a
little time or maybe a few hours with your reseller to
begin reaping the benefits.
Automation
There is a lot of automation
capability that you may not be taking advantage of.
Simple automation steps could save your company big! By
automation, we’re referring tousing technology to perform or
eliminate a repeating, labor intensive task.
One example of this is our new
Consolidated Invoice add-on for SL. For an investment of
a few thousand dollars in software and implementation
you could recognize tens of thousands in savings. A
large Fortune 500 client implemented Consolidated
Invoicing and cut their number of invoices from 10,000
per month to 3,000 per month. Resulting in an annual
savings of $30,000 per year on postage alone!
A great product independent
automation tool is KnowledgeSync by Vineyardsoft Corp.
Visit
http://www.knowledgesync.com
This tools works at the database
level and allows you to build queries to check for
various database conditions. When a condition is met,
the software automatically launches one or more tasks
that you configure: generating reports, sending emails,
sending text messages, running SQL statements or
external programs, and much more. For example, you can
set a query to watch for any customer whose balance goes
over their credit limit, and then automatically send an
email notification to the credit manager. You could take
this one step further and generate a statement report
and automatically email that to the customer. The
potential here is large and savings can be significant
with a modest investment of time and money.
Business Intelligence
If you are not taking advantage
of some kind of Business Intelligence product, you could
be missing important data and key insights into your
business. Businesses with a modern accounting and ERP
system accumulate mountains of data. Add in a CRM system
and the amount of data increases significantly. The
competitive advantage lies in being able to harvest and
analyze the data.
There are a large number of
Business Intelligence products available for the
Dynamics family: BIO, FRx, SharePoint, SQL Analysis
Services and others. For additional information on these
Business Intelligence products, visit
http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/businesneeds/business
intelligence and reporting.mspx.
For example, if your customers
typically purchase every 90 days and your system can’t
tell you which customers are approaching that 90 day
mark so that your sales people can follow up with them and make
sure to get their order, there is a chance they could
purchase from someone else. Even if this only happens to
1% of your customers in a year, if you have 1000 customers
and the average profit from a sale is $1000, that’s
$100,000 in lost profit in a year. A Business
Intelligence solution could alert you via dashboard, report or email when a
customer has hit the 90 day point without placing an
order, allowing you to act proactively to engage the
client.
This is just a small example, but
Business Intelligence can have that kind of impact on
your bottom line. The key is to start thinking about the
biggest vulnerabilities in your business: cost of goods,
employee utilization, repeat sales, what could have a
big impact on profitability with just a small percentage
increase. A BI solution can allow you to monitor those
variables in near real time and react accordingly. The
cost of a key component increases; you can find out
instantly and increase your selling price to protect
your profit margin. Utilization of a particular employee
drops; reassign the employee to another project. The
data is already in your system, BI lets you harvest it
and put it to use!
When it comes to your Microsoft
Dynamics solution, chances are there is a lot of
potential in your software waiting to be unlocked,
potential that can have a big impact on your bottom line
with minimal investment of time and money. In this
economy, that just makes good business sense.
|
