Without an efficient and trusted business information system, you are probably generally aware of existing problems, but have difficulty in focusing on specific issues.  Therefore, you cannot formulate a good plan to address cost overruns. 

If you are receiving this newsletter, you are probably using SouthWare to manage your business, but are you using it to its full potential?  Since Revision 11 with the introduction of Portals, the ExecuMate Statistical Analysis module has become an extremely powerful and effective management tool.  Without this, information can often go undetected for many months.  Effective use of the Portals and summary information can bring a rapidly changing situation to your attention in time to deal with it.

If your Accountant provided you with information that told you that your costs for a certain product group had increased by 10% two months ago, would you be able to remember any event that may have caused this?  If, however, reviewing the Portals on a Monday morning indicated that last weeks costs had jumped 10% in that product group, you could easily talk to people in your organization about any event that happened last week.  If this was something that could have been addressed, reacting within a week of the problem can save months of losses. 

This is just one example of effective use of the tools at your disposal to manage information.  Information is only useful if it is used on a TIMELY basis. It has to be both timely and trusted to allow you to make effective management decisions. 

Please talk to us if you would like us to review your use of some of these effective management information tools in order to improve productivity in these difficult times. 

Tips for the Month

1. Did you know that the Action Scheduler could be set to run routine tasks, updates or reports automatically after hours without involving any of your staff?  

• For example: running the end of day for inventory sales frees up people from a routine task and ensures a consistent time of day when updates are run. Call us we can help! 

2.   Do you use the built in calculator in SouthWare?   If you enter a calculation while positioned at a SouthWare field, exiting the calculator with <F1> key returns the final calculated result to the position you were in the program.  Try this it will help you!

3.   If you have large receivings and the receiving document is not sorted in your normal P.O. sequence, did you know that you can re-sort it in the graphical review mode just by clicking on the column heading (i.e. Stock # or Stock Description).  This dramatically speeds up receiving on large documents.  Call us we will walk you through this!