Never before has so much information been available for businesses to analyze, and companies who learn how to use it to their advantage will come out on top.  The quantity of information collected by Facebook and Google alone is too much for most organizations to handle. But harnessing the power of big data will help you maintain your competitive edge.

Translating big data into insights creates big results. It allows you to truly know your customer – their expectations, desires and buying preferences. It also lets you identify areas for improvement within your own organization – imagine if all your processes and operations were designed and aligned with a higher strategy. The ability to meet and predict customer demands combined with industry-leading performance and a customer-centric organization will differentiate your business and keep you ahead of the game. By tapping into the benefits for both your customers and your business, it can improve your bottom line from both sides.

Taking control of big data and making it useful requires the right Business Intelligence and analytics tools. While some organizations can afford to have entire departments dedicated to manually slicing and dicing vast quantities of data, it’s much more cost effective – and sensible – to implement BI software that will do it for you. The beauty of these systems is their ability to give you multi-dimensional views of data and present it in a way that helps you make decisions, instead of spending your time trying to manage spreadsheets and pivot tables to figure out what you’re looking at. As a result, it provides increased visibility across all areas of your organization, which gives you the opportunity to create an agile supply chain and stay ahead of changing market needs.

Don’t overlook the value of big data just because it seems overwhelming. Standing at the foot of the Himalayas is daunting at first, too, but with the right tools and preparation, we can help you get to the top. Contact us today to learn more about the value Business Intelligence can bring to your organization.

For most organizations, becoming more agile will involve full-scale organizational change. In some cases, the biggest obstacle to change isn’t always people – it’s the rigid, uncompromising processes within the company. If you truly want to transform into a customer-centric business, it will take more than just talk – it takes data, agile processes and leadership.

Business Intelligence (BI) is the catalyst to achieving business agility – it allows you to make quick, course-altering decisions based on real-time, accurate customer needs and trends, followed by putting the wheels in motion, and providing complete visibility so that everyone can see the status of each step. For example, let’s imagine what this would look like for a business with multiple locations that makes and distributes baked goods. Data from each store location is collected at the company headquarters daily, where BI tools slice and dice the information – providing insights on store profitability, the type of products sold,  which promotions were most effective, inventory and forecasting needs, and identifying high value customers, to name a few.

By also applying predictive analytics to the data, decision makers can do more than uncover trends– they can anticipate the future demands of the marketplace. For example, when a projected increase in oatmeal cookies is determined, the agile supply chain can dynamically adjust to meet the new requirements and kick off the rise in quantity. Thanks to visibility throughout the supply chain, individual store managers can tell customers exactly when the new items will be available, and promote them in advance.

Increased Agility = Increased Profits
How do you achieve this kind of agility? A few things are required:

• Data Insights – Reliable data about your customers makes it easier to identify new opportunities, create new product lines, and improve existing products or services to increase customer satisfaction. This is how agility directly increases your bottom line.
• Agile Processes – Without agile operations and procedures, your competitors will be at the finish line while you’re still tying your shoes. Investing in agile business technologies like Dynamics AX will create a good foundation for future agility.
• Leadership and Execution – Without this, everything else is just talk.  Transforming a company into a customer-centric organization will take committed leadership from the highest level.

At OmniVue, we’ve been focused on creating business agility for years. Our mission and values revolve around it. Putting the customer at the center of your organization will be imperative to success with today’s empowered buyers, and we can help you create a plan to achieve this. Contact us today to find out more about creating an agile supply chain.

The PSTL contains specific tools that can help you update and change data efficiently, without compromising the accuracy and integrity of your information.  It includes finance, purchase, sales, payroll, inventory and system tools to help you modify, change or combine account information with fewer manual processes.

Contact OmniVue to find out how you can take advantage of the PSTL. If you have recently installed the latest version of Dynamics GP, it should be ready and available for your use with no separate registration key required. For previous versions of Dynamics GP, please contact us for assistance with installation.

Meet the Challenges of the New Value Chain
Imagine what your organization would look like if it was truly customer-centric.  Every area of your business would be intentionally designed with the customer in mind – research, product development, service, sales, marketing, internal processes, operations and the whole supply chain would all be retooled to focus on the customer and meet their expectations.

But what are their expectations? To align yourself with market demands, you need to know everything about your customer – their buying preferences, opinions on products or services, and what they expect from you. With so many sources of consumer data readily available for analysis, how will you make sense of the information tidal wave? This is where Business Intelligence (BI) can help.

Business Intelligence allows your organization to meet these challenges and become more customer-centric. Through powerful multi-dimensional tools, BI can distill large amounts of information into insightful, understandable reports that show you what’s really happening along all points in the supply chain.  Business Intelligence gives you the capabilities to gather, analyze, store and interpret the wealth of customer data required to make the right decisions in real-time. After all, what good is information overload if no insights can be gleaned from it?

To get the most value from a BI solution, take a look at the current state of your data and your organization’s ability to be agile and responsive to changes in demand. While BI can help you improve in both these areas, it’s a good idea to have a few fundamental things in place before you invest in BI software:

Customer Relationship Management – While many companies are already collecting data on their customers, it is often located across multiple systems that don’t interface with each other. This results in disjointed, incomplete reports that are not helpful in making decisions. A good CRM system such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM is one of the best ways to get meaningful, real-time customer data. Using BI and CRM together will provide more insight than either one alone.

Agile Business Management - BI tools will help you make decisions about what to do next, but they cannot reshape an entire supply chain by themselves. Consider an agile ERP solution like Microsoft Dynamics AX, which is inherently designed to adapt when demands change. Once a decision is made, you must be able to act on it quickly, even if you are a global company with multiple warehouse locations.

Organizing around your customer’s desires is a sure path to success. Business Intelligence will help you draw the map to get there.  When used in conjunction with other agile systems such as CRM and ERP, BI can provide true real-time visibility throughout your supply chain. OmniVue can help you become more customer-centric by taking a strategic, holistic look at your organization and putting you on the road to success. Contact us today to talk through how to put your customer at the center of everything you do.

At the highest level, the biggest responsibility of business leaders is to uphold the competitive advantage of their company.  Regardless of whether you’re a small to midsize business or a large enterprise organization, every successful business has a unique differentiator – maybe you offer the lowest price, best service or fastest delivery.  But how do you know if you are succeeding? This is where the value of Business Intelligence (BI) comes in.

Business Intelligence provides the tools needed to succeed in this new reality. It refers to technology tools and applications that help companies make better decisions based on real-time data, reporting and analytics.  It can provide insights into practically all areas of your business – customers, products, services, revenues, locations, inventory, distribution, etc.  BI solutions use cubes, which are powerful tools that analyze data in multi-dimensional formats so it can be viewed in any combination.  With the ability to put large amounts of complex data into more intuitive formats and view it from all angles, you can see what’s really happening throughout the supply chain instead of what you think might be happening. This empowers businesses to make timely, informed decisions with reduced risk and increased efficiency.

Some companies already recognize the value of BI software and are spending hours equal to that of a full time resource to slice and dice data through manual formulas.  Instead of your CFO spending half his time sifting through complicated piles of information, it’s more cost-effective to invest in a BI solution that can do this for you and provide even greater insight.  In some cases, it may be helpful to consolidate your data into a single source before implementing a BI solution.

Before evaluating BI software, think about a few points:

• Strategic goals – Before buying any software, you should have a clear vision of how it fits in with your overall goals. For most businesses, the long term strategy should include becoming more agile to meet the challenges of a customer-led value chain.
• Agile processes – Once you have access to the insights provided by BI, what will you do with them? Are your operational processes agile enough to act on your findings?
• Data integrity – If you know your data is inaccurate, the value of BI software is highly diminished. Depending on the BI tool you choose, you may also need to create a data warehouse before it can be effectively sliced and diced.

Business Intelligence can show you what is and is not working in your organization.  Why continue to prepare for the unknown, when you can prepare for the known?  To maintain your competitive advantage in the future, it’s essential to put the customer first, take control of big data and improve your business agility.  At OmniVue, we can help you decide if your company is ready to take the first step.

The good news is that a lot has changed since 1996, when Graham retired. He couldn’t have imagined the solutions on the horizon, such as Microsoft Dynamics NAV, GP, and AX. In fact, his early work set the stage for the forecasting tools available today.

True seasonality is the Holy Grail of forecasting — once you’ve nailed it down, you’ve got the best predictor of future orders you can get this side of a time machine. The larger the percentage of your sales that stem from seasonal and intermittent large purchases, the more valuable it is to be able to separate one from the other. When a trend is accurately identified as seasonal, you’ll know when you can allow the inventory levels to drop low (or to zero), and when to build levels back up in anticipation of the next wave of demand.

Graham’s formula was a simple one; he said that an item is seasonal if 80% of its sales over a year’s time take place in just six months. This isn’t a bad formula, but the data needs to be run through a few more tests to separate out spikes from other factors.

For example, a distributor may see an uptick in baseball mitts in July. Common sense suggests that yes, baseball mitts are a seasonal item, but forecasting software plugs in a series of formulas to test that assumption. In this case, the forecast agrees that the mitts are seasonal in general, but that the July spike was unusually high. A quick phone call reveals that the local team sponsored a “free mitt” day last year, but they have no plans to repeat the event.

Some cases are more straightforward, like the demand for cut evergreen trees in December or American flags leading up to Independence Day. But identifying seasonal trends can also be tricky, as illustrated in that example. Just because an item is seasonal doesn’t always mean that there aren’t other factors influencing demand as well. That’s why a multitude of formulas is employed, parsing your sales history in a number of different ways to make sure you don’t order for a demand which won’t be there, or get caught short when it turns out that the demand was seasonal, after all.  While there will always be a few cases that require a human judgment call, those cases should be a mere handful, not number in the thousands.

A lot of guesswork is taken out by thoughtful customization of your forecasting solution. Many formulas have been developed with specific industries in mind, and choosing the right ones will result in more efficient inventory management. Having a powerful forecasting solution will also improve the value of business intelligence and analytics that are essential for maintaining your competitive edge.

Interested in learning more about how to incorporate substantive, relevant forecasting into your business management solution? Contact OmniVue to see if you’re eligible for VueFinder^TM, our unique approach to help distribution companies uncover and solve fundamental business challenges.

One of the main takeaways from Convergence 2012 is Microsoft’s pledge that Dynamics ERP solutions will run seamlessly on mobile devices, including the iPad. This means companies no longer have to weigh software decisions based on the mobile capabilities of a particular solution, because every product in the Microsoft Dynamics ERP family, including Dynamics CRM, will have the ability to run on your device of choice. This makes it easier for small and midsize businesses (SMBs) to reap the benefits of a cloud-based solution and spend more time growing the organization instead of working around technology limitations.

These are promising developments for OmniVue clients and others who currently use Microsoft Dynamics solutions, because these innovations are a direct result of Microsoft’s commitment to research and development. By staying ahead of the game and designing solutions based on future business needs and trends, Microsoft Dynamics users can trust that these products will help maintain a profitable competitive advantage for their organization, both now and in the years ahead. For Microsoft partners like OmniVue who already provide hosting capabilities, the commitment to mobile enhancements will add even more value to the offering.

Microsoft announced a few key dates for cloud-enabled Dynamics ERP releases:

• Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 will be available globally in Q4 2012. It includes industry enhancements as well as SQL-based business intelligence capabilities.
• Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 will be available in Q4 of 2012. The beta release for Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 is expected in May 2012.
• Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 will be available in Q4 of 2012.

Both Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 and GP 2013 will be cloud-enabled for Windows Azure and tailored toward the needs of small and midsize businesses.

Microsoft explicitly stated its commitment to simplicity and agility for the Dynamics solutions family at Convergence 2012.  To learn how OmniVue’s cloud offering can benefit your business, read What ERP in the Cloud Means for Small Business or contact OmniVue to find out how we can help.

To solve this problem, you would ideally have a business management solution capable of handling multiple formulas for different sets of inventory – regardless of whether some items use an EOQ formula or another type of reordering policy. This means your purchasing manager wouldn’t have to stay in constant contact with the warehouse every time an order is placed, because everyone would be able to see exactly how much is in stock and when it will be replenished. If you run a Microsoft Dynamics solution such as Dynamics NAV, GP or AX, it can provide this type of functionality and will benefit your business in several ways:

Increased visibility – Imagine having access to real-time information about your inventory throughout all stages of the supply chain. You will always know the status of each item in stock – plus, better visibility creates a solid foundation for valuable Business Intelligence and analytics.

Multiple formulas – When you have different sets of inventory with their own unique reordering policies, Microsoft Dynamics solutions let you manage this more accurately with multiple formulas. It can also adapt to unexpected changes and make adjustments to reflect real procurement requirements.

Improved cash flow – Since inventory is usually the largest expense for distributors, being able to forecast accurately means you only order what you need, when you need it – which reduces carrying costs and increases your margins.

With the advancements in forecasting technology, you can now rely on automated solutions for inventory tracking and forecasting. There are flexible forecasting tools available through Microsoft Dynamics solutions that allow you to make better decisions about your inventory based on historical usage, lead times, seasonality, and even customer-provided forecasts. Since Microsoft Dynamics solutions are capable of using multiple formulas, different reorder policies can be applied to different sets of inventory. With access to the flexible forecasting tools available today, you can create a realistic picture of your inventory needs while reducing dependence on manual processes.

Interested in finding out how you can improve forecasting for your business? OmniVue can take a look at your current systems and processes, and identify inefficiencies that may be costing you money. We use our unique

VueFinder^TM approach to define what success looks like for your business; then we create a plan to get you there. Contact us to learn more about how we can help streamline your inventory management processes.

Bringing Your Data Together  

Moving your organization toward a single system may not be practical for all companies, but there are still ways to improve the value of business intelligence.  Imagine having a data warehouse, where information from several different databases can be stored and organized.  Then, you can generate meaningful reports in whatever form works best – graphs, charts, spreadsheets or applications. You may want to view those reports in other formats such as Excel, or share links to the relevant information via Outlook or integrate the reports into your SharePoint platform.  Once the initial hurdle of compiling that data into one warehouse is overcome, managing that information becomes much simpler.  This creates a “best of both worlds” scenario – you still benefit from the unique capabilities of your customized solution, while also having reliable reporting and analytics from across your organization.

Advances in report writers themselves are also driving the single-reporting movement. Where it was once necessary to understand the source code in order to create the queries and generate a certain report, the best report writers now use wizards to guide the user. By asking the right questions, these wizards generate the necessary queries behind the scenes from the user’s responses. The technical hurdles to report generation are wiped out by a good wizard.

Getting From Chaos to Cohesion

How do you move down the path from chaotic reporting with disparate systems to a single reporting source?  If different areas of your organization are committed to their own unique ERP, CRM or accounting system, you need a way to provide timely, accurate reporting without having to reconcile the data from those multiple systems.

Here are a few steps to consider if you’re looking for ways to achieve this:

Comprehensive solution – The first consideration should always be to consolidate your disparate systems into one business management software solution. If that’s not workable, there are other alternatives to achieve single source reporting.

Data warehouse – Building a data warehouse is a good option for compiling information across disparate systems. When disparate data is managed in one place, it means your BI reporting tools can do their job more efficiently and accurately.

Report writers – Modern report writers do not require understanding of high-level programming languages; wizards do much of the work. This empowers your managers and end users to create new reports without assistance.

Data access – A single source of reports can push information out in any number of formats useful to your organization.

Generating reports, analytics and Business Intelligence for your organization should not be the most difficult task that you accomplish each day, because it’s one of the most important.  If time was money, ask yourself how much you are currently spending on this.  To learn more about how single source reporting can help consolidate your data and improve your reporting processes, contact us today.  By increasing visibility into your organization, we can help you make better decisions about your business and maintain your competitive edge.

Aside from this, you also have to buy and maintain the hardware required to run multiple systems.  What happens when your business needs to ramp up to meet increased demand? You end up buying more hardware to accommodate the necessary bandwidth for additional employees and higher production. But when times are tough, you’re stuck paying for the same expensive hardware and increased overhead that you’re no longer using. So how can companies reduce the cost of maintaining multiple applications, while being flexible enough to stay competitive?

A good way to alleviate this problem is to have one comprehensive business management solution instead of multiple systems that do not interface with each other.  You pay one vendor instead of several, and there’s no arguing over who’s responsible for fixing the problem – if you only have one vendor, they will always be the ones held accountable. Managing one vendor will allow your IT staff to proactively focus on business needs instead of constantly putting out fires and playing the blame game with multiple vendors.

Choosing a vendor that offers both on-premise and cloud deployment options can further reduce your cost. Instead of spending money on the hardware required to maintain multiple applications, you can host all or part of your technology portfolio in the cloud. This means you only have to pay for what you actually need, and it gives you the flexibility to expand and ramp up quickly when customer demands rise. In an unstable economy, this is a key factor for maintaining competitive advantage, because it means your business can adapt quickly to sudden changes.

Here are a few fundamental benefits of moving from multiple disparate systems to one comprehensive business management solution:

• Save money – Simply put, you will spend less money on software maintenance, upgrades and training when you work with one vendor instead of many. You can also save money on hardware maintenance and data storage by choosing to leverage the cloud.
• Increase agility – Your business can respond to changes in market demand more easily when your systems are synchronized and operate efficiently together.  Choosing to host all or part of your systems in the cloud can boost agility even further, because you can scale your technology as needed to match the changing needs of your organization.
• Improve data access – Using one system of record will increase visibility across all areas of your organization and allows managers to make better decisions based on accurate, real-time information.

How do you move your business management software down the path toward a single system without losing important functionality that helps you stay ahead of the competition? The best way to achieve this is to start with your existing processes – document how you currently operate, and identify areas where things can be streamlined or improved. We believe technology should reflect the way you actually work within your organization, and not the other way around. And it should support the best practices that are essential to success in your specific industry, allowing you to achieve your strategic business goals.

At OmniVue, we can help outline a roadmap to get you from where you are today to where you want to be. Our VueFinder^TM process is designed for this exact purpose. Contact us today to learn more about reducing the amount you spend on your business management solution.