Customer Service

The standard of service that you provide your customers makes all the difference in building solid relationships and gaining the competitive edge. This requires keeping track, not only of customer sales-related information, but also details of internal or external business relationships. To make better business decisions about expected customer, product and market activity, you need to have information in appropriate formats and at different levels of detail to carry out analysis.

SYSPRO's Contact Management allows for multiple contacts to be assigned to organizations and individuals that you deal with. These can include your customers and suppliers, as well as entities such as charities and government departments. You can group contacts for related entities and record details regarding interactions such as phone calls, emails and visits against the contact. Integration with Microsoft Outlook allows email correspondence to be sent and updated as an activity within the Contact Management system.

Your ability to deliver quality products faster, with more customer-specific features, and at stable or even reduced prices differentiates you in a discerning market place. Features such as available-to-promise and customer delivery performance reporting, provide information to help you improve your customer service levels, and the Customer/Stock Code Interchange function gives you the flexibility to allow your customers to order by their part number.

SYSPRO enables you to keep a history not only of sales data but also individual customer-related product activities, so you can easily identify buying patterns and preferences, and quickly create repeat orders by copying and amending previous ones. SYSPRO Forecasting uses sales history to identify trends and seasonal components of demand, thereby assisting you in calculating more accurate forecasts, which in turn leads to better planning and improved customer service levels.

Simple, extended and contract pricing mechanisms give you flexibility to apply one-dimensional pricing and discounting, or tailor these requirements to individual customers. Where customers are large organizations—such as original equipment manufacturers (OEM) or retails chains—with whom prices are negotiated on a contract or volume basis, more complex pricing is required. SYSPRO's pricing, trade management and sales analysis facilities enable you to provide acceptable pricing terms and delivery targets to large customers without sacrificing profitability.

Understanding the true cost per transaction of doing business means identifying contributing elements, direct and indirect, across the entire organization. These include not only the cost efficiency of operational activities and their interrelationships, but also the time spent on manual and redundant processes, reconciliations, paperwork and reporting, as well as the cost of lost opportunities from a lack of agility in responding to the global marketplace.

SYSPRO provides essential integrated visibility to your accounting, distribution and manufacturing operations, thereby enabling you to easily identify and track your cost elements and to target areas of waste for improvement programs. Additionally, it facilitates the automation of many processes that have traditionally been labour-intensive and time-consuming, such as operational-to-financial reconciliations and communicating with trading partners.

It offers Standard, Average, Last, FIFO and LIFO costing methods flagged at warehouse level, thereby providing accurate operations-focused inventory valuation, which in turn supplies accurate input for product pricing and profitability. Comprehensive multi-level costing of manufactured items is provided through the Bill of Material and Work in Progress modules, with the Product Configurator and Quotations and Estimating modules providing additional tools for assemble/make/engineer-to-order environments. Lot traceability, serial tracking and return merchandise functionality, along with SYSPRO's inspection systems, provide tracking of product defects, thereby helping you mitigate costly recalls.

SYSPRO's cost rollup and implosion functionality, along with user-friendly costing queries, provides fast access to reliable information on which to base pricing and profit margins. In addition, its extensive what-if costing features enables modelling and comparison of the cost effects of alternative inputs, such as raw materials, production routes, labor rates and subcontractor rates.

SYSPRO provides work-in-progress tracking, enabling evaluation of detailed actual-versus-expected costs, as well as targets for cost savings and continuous improvement programs. Used in conjunction with the Projects and Contracts module, it facilitates comprehensive project job costing. Visibility to production scheduling, along with what-if sequencing and scheduling tools, enhance manufacturing agility and competitiveness and help to prevent lost sales in unpredictable demand environments.

Excess inventories tie up valuable resources both in terms of cost and warehouse management. SYSPRO helps you optimize, manage and track your inventories through its multi-warehouse Inventory, Material Requirements Planning, Purchase Order and Work in Progress modules. In addition, the Purchase Order and Landed Cost Tracking systems provide a more accurate estimate of the full landed cost of imported goods, with the GRN matching and reconciliation features facilitating electronic reconciliation of supplier deliveries and charges.

Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable and Cash Book provide comprehensive balancing and reconciliation tools, as well as credit and cash flow management capability. Additionally, efficient administration of customer accruals, rebates and deductions is facilitated through the Trade Promotions Management module. Commitment accounting is provided through the Accounts Payable and Purchasing modules, while the Assets Register ensures accurate maintenance and depreciation costing, and asset profit and loss realization.

SYSPRO's General Ledger module provides powerful queries with drill-down from journal to transaction source, as well as at-a-glance financial and activity ratios. Processing time is greatly reduced through features, such as sub-ledger integration and reconciliation, journal copy, journal import, automatic weighted transfer of costs and G/L analysis.

Furthermore, SYSPRO's ease of ledger consolidation across complex businesses, along with its XML-based financial reporting features, enables prompt web-based deployment of financial reports to SYSPRO and non-SYSPRO users alike.

SYSPRO's flexible user-defined stationery formats, along with SYSPRO Reporting Services (SRS), precludes the need for pre-printed stationery for invoices, delivery notes, order acknowledgements, dispatch notes, purchase orders and statements. In addition, SRS provides considerable savings by reducing the need for paper-based audit trails and reporting. Its automatic scheduling tool precludes the need for resource-intensive supervision of periodic and month-end reporting. Furthermore, the archiving feature provides for the electronic storage of reports as run, thereby enabling users to view them on-line to discern actual print requirements.

SYSPRO's Office (SOI), fax and email integration saves time, postage and paper by enabling you to deliver transactional documents, such as purchase orders and statements, directly from their point of extraction via secure electronic means. Additionally, SOI facilitates direct queries of key operational data from the desktops of enterprise-wide users and trading partners, without the need for the desktop installation or licensing of SYSPRO.

The capability to extend electronic communication, so as to automate the acceptance and acknowledgement of orders on a 24/7 basis, is provided via SYSPRO's e.Net solutions, Document Flow Manager and Web Applications. Furthermore, SYSPRO's e.Net Solutions tools afford non-proprietary and version-independent integration to mobile devices and best-of-breed applications, such as shop floor control and quality monitoring systems.

The ROI of implementing SYSPRO is rapidly realized through full visibility to an integrated picture of your business operations and the resultant reduction in operational costs, processing time and human resources.

SYSPRO's Inventory Optimization and Forecasting modules enable you to minimize forecast error and manage seasonality, thereby helping you to reduce your inventory investment, and improve order fulfilment performance. This is further enhanced by features such as Available-to-promise and various time fence indicators, which give sales and production staff a reliable view of what they can promise to customers and when.

SYSPRO's Material Requirements Planning gives you clear visibility to the integrated effect of current and future supply and demand, thereby enabling you to make better purchasing and production decisions and reduce excess and obsolete inventories. The inclusion of sources of supply and demand is configurable and various reports and related review programs enable easy potential oversupplies and seamless execution of suggested actions. In addition, order policies by stock code at warehouse level enable you to implement lot-sizing rules for purchased and manufactured items.

In make-to-order environments, where a full material requirements planning run may not be required, features such as Advanced Trial Kitting provide full visibility to replenishment requirements for multi or single-level jobs. The purchase order to job link enables purchased or subcontracted materials to be receipted directly into specific jobs.

Standard reports such as the Inventory Exception and the MRP Potential Oversupplies report help you identify excess inventories and possible problems with your lot-sizing techniques.

In an industry where the requirement for customizable end-products is common, flexibility, speed, and accuracy in meeting customer demand is essential to remaining competitive.

SYSPRO enables you to improve your time-to-market performance and streamline constituent processes through its rules-based Product Configurator. Not only does it provide streamlined order-taking by non-technical staff, it facilitates the automatic generation of factory orders and purchase orders, with all the relevant detail such as materials and operations required to make or assemble the correct customer-specific configuration of the product. In addition to releasing technical staff from the order-taking process, the Configurator mitigates the need for manual input or additional bills of materials to cover all product permutations and drastically reduces the margin for input errors. New permutations may be saved for future orders making it easy to recall at order entry time.

Additionally, for complete engineer- and design-to-order requirements, SYSPRO speeds the processing of inquiries through its estimating and quotations functionality, with estimating providing an accurate view of both standard and non-standard material and labor costs, ensuring accurate profitability projection and quoting. Furthermore, SYSPRO's powerful factory scheduling features enable you to quote accurate lead times and delivery dates based on capacity and existing loads. Once a quote is accepted by the customer the conversion to a factory order is a simple automated process.

Particularly for component and material suppliers of original equipment manufacturers (OEM) synchronizing supply with customer demand is a key requirement to prevent costly line stoppages in assembly plants. This involves not only automating order processing and other processes in the supply chain, but also executing production plans using LEAN principles.

SYSPRO Blanket Sales Orders and Releases provides you with the tools to record contracts with your OEM customers and provides you with an accurate means of tracking and reconciling cumulative release quantities and converting them into sales order quantities. SYSPRO Blanket Sales Orders enable SYSPRO customers to easily update call-off schedules for their OEM clients, as well as reconcile the cumulative position against their OEM contracts.

Confirmed customer schedules, in turn, become an input for demand planning and ultimately, production and purchasing requirements linked to the relevant schedule requirement dates. SYSPRO's Requirements Planning and Factory Scheduling provide you with the tools to implement LEAN principles, manage the replenishment process and ensure that you meet your OEM contract service levels.

Streamlined electronic collaboration with your OEM customers is facilitated through features such as Document Flow Manager, SYSPRO e.net solutions, EDI, Office Automation and Messaging, fax, email and various Business-to-Business import and export functions, thus reducing response time, margin for error and penalties associated with disruption to OEM production lines.