Operational Intelligence and the distribution industry.
WHAT IS OI?
Distribution and warehousing isn’t the easiest job in the world. You’re dealing with hundreds of products, thousands of customers, many suppliers, multiple locations, multiple countries and currencies. The margins can be low, so little errors and inefficiencies can add up to a lot of lost profit.
That’s why you need to find ways to work smarter.
Operational Intelligence sounds like a buzzword, but it just means having business data and day-to-day processes at your fingertips, so you make fewer mistakes – and much more money.
GET SMART
Automation and accuracy are key to OI. A smart system like MYOB Greentree lets you automate processes and reduce mistakes - or at least fix them before they affect your customers.
For example, an OI system could let management know if a sales rep puts in an order with an unusually low margin, an order is taking too long to move through the system, or one picker has a particularly high error rate.
It’s about reducing those annoying human errors so staff don’t need to go back and spend time resolving them. It also improves service delivery, which keeps customers coming back. And surely that’s the ultimate goal for a distributor.
Shareen Stewart, of high-quality kitchen supplier Parmco, explains. “We now have excellent visibility and analysis capability for our entire service call function and MYOB Greentree has given us the ability to develop a range of KPIs to drive the business forward. We’re no longer battling a complex manual system; we can do proper reports on damaged stock, we can see so much more than we could before, and we’re learning more about its capabilities all the time.”
With Greentree, Parmco can now assess the warranty issues around its various products, the effectiveness of its service agents, and much more.
Call centre staff were delighted to switch from paper to electronic handling of Incident Reports through MYOB Greentree’s Workflow desktops.
“It’s so much faster and the customised fields are worth their weight in gold. Plus with Approvals & Alerts, we’re eliminating entry errors.”
DECISIONS, NOT GUESSWORK
Everyone in the business makes decisions every day, big and small, important and not so important. With accurate, up-to-date data, making the right decisions becomes much easier.
MYOB Greentree tracks stock holding, DIFOT targets, revenue vs costs, and customer buying patterns, and lets you see all this info on a single dashboard.
This means, for example, that your purchasing team can see price points, forecasting, and buying patterns in one place. This helps them make better purchasing decisions so you have the stock you need when you need it.
It’s about giving people the tools they need to do their best work and dishing up the information they need without having to go and look for it.
Brent Stanton of ACME Supplies, who is the exclusive New Zealand importer and distributor of major international brands of quality office products and hand tools, puts it like this:
“It’s a great tool. We can see what sales orders need to be picked and dispatched at any time. It takes the guesswork out of what’s outstanding or what extra resources are needed to fill the orders for the day – it’s all on the screen in real-time.”
WORK SMART WITH OI
Operational Intelligence looks different for every business. In distribution, you might need to see accurate stock levels over 15 warehouses, set different margins for customers all over the world, automate stock forms for complex orders, track orders across your system, or all of the above and more.
“Our inventory management is more efficient now; in fact within six months Verde has helped to halve our stocktake variances. Verde provides the latest technology available and the platform to develop our business over the next 5-10 years.”
Victor Yukich - Managing Director, Eurotec
WHAT YOU NEED TO GET STARTED
MYOB Greentree is fully integrated, so you’ve ticked the first box – all your departments will be able to share data and talk to each other across the system. It is so inherent in what MYOB Greentree does that there are a large number of our customers that already have a high level of OI without actually putting a label on it.
While there is no prescription to what OI looks like, there are a couple of essential building blocks:
MYOB Greentree’s BPM is one of the key weapons to truly drive exceptional business performance and increased business returns in a mid-sized organisation. Historically many new technologies have failed to deliver significant benefits to mid-sized companies as they have often been expensive to purchase and maintain, inflexible and difficult to implement, resulting in a questionable ROI.
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Increase the day-to-day productivity of your business. MYOB Greentree’s Approvals and Alerts can help automate the daily processes in your business using specifically designed workflow tools that allow your organisation to ensure critical transactions, documents, or records are monitored and approved through the appropriate chain of command - automatically.
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Now you truly can have your finger on the pulse of your business. Always having an instant snapshot of real-time key business information live at your fingertips is vital to any organisation striving for improved and streamlined business processes. The MYOB Greentree Workflow Desktop module provides countless dynamic desktop views with information updated to all relevant desktops across the organisation instantaneously.
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eDocs slashes the time it takes for you to receive, route, code and approve documents – from invoices to remittances, statements and expenses, you’ll be amazed at what you’ll save.
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If you are looking for a better way to run your business, talk to us. We’re confident we can make things faster, more efficient and easier to keep track of. Give us a call now.
