ERP

Blog

16th Strongest Growing Company
Entrepreneur of the Year 2010 Finalist
Overall Best Computer Services
Ranked #138 in the USA, #15 in Texas.
Best Company to Work For in Texas.
Celebration of Enterprise.
Chicagos 101 Best and Brightest Companies.
Dallas 100.
Deloitte 2007 - Technology Fast 500.
Frisco Chamber of Commerce Awards.
Inc 500.
Top 2007 Business.
Tech Titans/Titan Fast 50.
The American Business Awards.

Effective Employee Collaboration Platforms

July 27th, 2010 by Bharath Lanka

In today’s business climate, many companies have employees scattered across many states and time zones. Keeping employees informed and engaged even though they are geographically distant can bring increased employee performance and innovation to your company.

Businesses can implement effective employee collaboration platforms with the many online tools available. Some examples are internal blogs, software that encourages real-time status updates for specific departments, knowledge management documents, podcasts, RSS feeds, communication facilitation and professional networking opportunities.

Recruiting, training and retaining quality employees entails development of an effective employee “lifecycle” which spans the entirety of an employee’s time with your business.

Oftentimes, finding new employees can be accomplished through the networking ability and referral of contacts from current employees. Using these resources can cut the time and cost of finding new talent that may better match your current corporate culture.

“Onboarding” is a relatively new term that defines the process for incorporating new hires into the company quickly and effectively. A successful onboarding program can help to reduce employee turnover and increase new hire success. Onboarding includes automated information routing, new hire information, new employee development plans, effective communication of company goals and expectations, and onboarding process tracking.

Employee networking is an important benefit for the company and for the employees. Although companies spend a large part of their training budget on formal training programs, the greatest amount of information sharing is usually much more informal between employees. Companies will realize a greater return on their training dollars when they help to facilitate ways for employees to network internally and exchange ideas.

Developing employee profiles help to foster a sense of community among your employees, whether they share a physical location or are separated by wide geographical distances. This workplace community in turn fosters increased communication, a sense of shared corporate memory, and a way to form partnerships through internal social networks.

One of the most valuable assets a company possesses is its human capital: its employees. The success of a business depends on the success of its employees, and businesses are increasing realizing the value of “talent management”. Successful businesses implement platforms that tie their training programs to the goals of their organizations and design ways for their business units to meet their performance goals. Human resource departments realize that they should address the issues of their Generation Y employees as well as those employees who are nearing retirement. Employees value being offered effective career development plans; businesses benefit by identifying those employees who can be positioned for future leadership roles.

With today’s online hosted conferencing solutions and communications platforms, companies can provide all of the benefits of personalized training and seminars while simultaneously reducing travel time and expenses. Real-time training sessions and business unit collaboration meetings can be supplied to specified groups of users based on employee position, department location or communication needs. These same sessions can be recorded for access at any time with permission-based applications.

With effective and ongoing employee collaboration practices, business performance can be tracked and enhanced throughout all areas of a company in a time-efficient and cost-effective manner. Employee collaboration service providers design and implement unique approaches that are flexible and match your companies current workflow and business process and practices.

Posted in Applications, Business Processes, Hosting, Outsourcing, SaaS | No Comments »

Benefits of Customer Relationship Management

July 22nd, 2010 by Nitin Bidi

The most valuable assets of any business are its customers, without which there would be no business. Customer relationship management (CRM) business practices help companies retain their best customers and attract new customers effectively through sales, marketing and support interactions.

CRM applications are used by companies to focus on productive sales activities such as planning and forecasting, contacts, opportunities, product and service configurations, pricing, contracts, procurement, and orders.

Marketing activities are more effective when paired with intelligent business decisions. The data gathered through CRM applications enable companies to analyze, develop and implement the processes that will maximize customer interaction.

Customer retention depends on customer satisfaction and support in the areas of contract management, logistics, installation and maintenance, return and repair maintenance, call center operations, and multi-channel delivery options.

Effective CRM applications also help companies reach new customers and enhance relationships with current customers through sales, marketing and services activities provided through the Internet. ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications can be deployed directly integrated with CRM functionality to increase e-marketing, e-commerce, e-service and customer analytics.

Communication processes with current and prospective customers can be improved with effective business communications management and CRM integration and implementation. Today’s customers expect to be able to contact your company by phone, text, chat, email, and fax, and CRM applications can facilitate the routing of all types of communication to the right person in your company whether that person works locally or remotely.

Customer relationship management is an integral component of your company’s total business operations; increasing your return on investment for your sales, marketing, and service and support departments.

Posted in Applications, Hosting, Outsourcing, SaaS | 2 Comments »

Systems Integration Solutions

July 20th, 2010 by Bharath Lanka

Systems integration is a critical solution for the business management sector, bringing together the various components of other subsystems in a company’s information technology system to function as one unit. Each subsystem has its own interface that must be integrated and interlocked so that the capability of the entire system adds value to the combination of the parts. The task of bringing together the disparate subsystems falls to a system integration engineer who has a wide range of skills including hardware and software engineering, knowledge of interface protocols, and problem-solving . There are three main types of systems integration, each with its own function.

Vertical integration involves integrating subsystems by their function into specific entities. Vertical integration is usually a quick and relatively inexpensive method of initial integration. The overall cost of ownership for a vertical integration implementation could be higher because each scaling of the system involves a new integration.

Horizontal integration is also known by the name Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and involves dedicating a specialized subsystem that facilitates communication between other subsystems. When the ESB translates the interface connection from one subsystem, the costs of the integration decreases while the flexibility of the system increases. Horizontal integration can completely replace one subsystem with another similarly functional subsystem while transparently exporting different interfaces.

Star integration entails interconnecting subsystems. This method is also called spaghetti integration because of how the system integration appears in a diagram. Although more flexible than vertical integration, star integration is more expensive to design and implement, especially if the exported systems contain proprietary interfaces. The addition of each subsequent subsystem increases the cost, but also the flexibility of the overall system integration.

Systems integration is a complex undertaking and is comprised of several layers of expertise including initial conception, implementation, delivery, upgrades and ongoing project management. Experienced systems integrators will work with you and your company to complete your integration project based on clearly defined specifications for time period, cost projections, and performance benchmarks.

The work of system integration engineers begins before the actual development and implementation of an integration project. There are many consultations and discussions with the stakeholders of the company to ensure that any and all conflicting issues and requirements are addressed. The resulting project plan will results in a systems integration that works with all the present and subsequent components and development processes.

Development and implementation of a turnkey systems integration project involves risks, but throughout the process, the quality and quantity of the support services offered by the service provider can reduce the risks for your company. Ongoing and rigorous testing of each of the individual components of the new or upgraded system will assess how each part works with the other parts and with the system as a whole.

Systems integrators for IT work to successfully combine a company’s various systems used to input and process data. IT solutions also may include integrating inventory tracking systems, document management systems, unified messaging systems, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and data storage systems. The goal is to create an overall effective IT solution for the customer.

Posted in Outsourcing, SaaS, Systems Integration | No Comments »

Business Process Outsourcing

July 5th, 2010 by Bharath Lanka

Outsourcing for enterprise organizations comes in many forms. Many people first think of outsourcing in terms of IT third-party service providers, but another type of outsourcing is becoming more and more common.

Business process outsourcing (BPO) entails hiring another company to handle specific types of business activities for your company. BPO can consist of payroll services, employee benefits management, call center services, customer services activities, human resources, accounting, and other “non-core” functions.

Depending on the strategic business plan and the size of the company, BPO contracts can run for multiple years and cost millions of dollars. But companies utilizing BPO also can realize savings in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars over the life of the contract through savings over implementing the outsourced activities in-house.

The typical traditional corporate structure in the last half of the twentieth century was to build companies as large as possible with all business functions kept within the company. The bigger, the better. Today, however, “lean and mean” is more of the norm, and taking advantage of service providers that specialize in certain business functions often makes better sense for many corporations; helping companies of all sizes stay more competitive in the present business environment. When deciding whether or not outsourcing is right for your company, however, means taking the time necessary to ask the right questions and putting the right internal processes in place first.

Michael Motonen, a vice-president at the Gartner Consulting Sourcing Team, and the BPO lead principal, offers several tips:

Develop an outsourcing life-cycle model and strategy first. Garter has four phases.

1. The sourcing strategy phase considers questions such as: “What are the risks for our company?” “Why are we considering outsourcing?” “What kind of relationship are we looking for with our service provider?” “Will the resulting partnership be enhancing our current processes, or will it be transformative–helping our company change by driving cost savings or increasing revenue?”

2. Selection phase: Evaluate several prospective companies and make the final selection.

3. Contract phase: Develop and finalize the contract.

4. Sourcing Management phase: Included here is the service level agreement (SLA) for milestone benchmarks and other mutual assessment tools.

Take into consideration all aspects of contract duration. BPO contracts are often long-term for a reason. Strategic changes in business functions and relationships with BPO providers take time. A balance is needed between the short-term assessment of results and long enough to meet the stated goals. Most BPO contracts last for three to five years or more. Montonen recommends shorter contracts that allow for periodic reviews and renewals rather than tying yourself into long-term contracts with ten year time frames. It is also recommended that you include in the contract policies and procedures for bringing the business activities back in-house if necessary.

Identify, assess and evaluate any potential risks.

1. Ensure that your vendor is actually able to provide the services within your contract and SLA, and

2. Retain a certain amount of control and internal oversight for the entire process and project.

Ensure that compliance procedures are stipulated in the contract. Your service provider should be able to prove that what compliance regulations apply to your company can be applied to the entire project.

Keep the lines of communication open. On-going and open communication is important for the success of the BPO relationship; not only with your vendor, but also internally with everyone concerned in your own company. Outside vendors often make employees nervous. Proper management of all types of external and internal changes is critical to the overall success of the project and overall company morale.

Posted in Business Processes, Outsourcing, SaaS | No Comments »

Application Hosting Options

June 30th, 2010 by Bharath Lanka

Application Hosting. According to several business dictionaries, the definition of application hosting is “…the rental or outsourcing of business applications from an applications service provider, rather than installing the software internally…”

Many enterprise businesses have traditionally hosted and maintained their own proprietary software applications on their own servers. Today however, many of those same businesses are looking into the benefits of outsourcing some or all of their enterprise-application software to third-party services providers. Companies are finding out that in addition to freeing up time and monetary resources, they realize additional benefits such as department-level or company-wide training, secure data backup, and application upgrade services. Known industry-wide as the SaaS (Software as a Service) model, these off-site hosted applications integrate easily with a company’s existing data and IT systems. Additionally, because customer demands and sales may fluctuate frequently during a specified accounting period, implementing SaaS applications provides the flexibility large corporations need to quickly respond to economic conditions and industry demands.

Some of the open source software applications offered by service providers include:

● CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

● PM (Project Management)

● VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) for Call Center Management

● DMS (Document Management Solutions)

● CMS (Content Management Solutions)

● E-commerce solutions and integrated shopping cart applications

● Mail Server Solutions

When deciding whether to transfer some or all of their applications to a third-party service, many enterprises have to deal with several questions first. The number one concern seems to be security, since SaaS applications are stored online “in the cloud” and therefore outside of exclusive company control. Other questions that should be asked of a service provider before deciding on deployment include:

Can my company have my choice of programming language and application platform?
Will my company have to change basic IT infrastructure such as the operating system and current deployment environments?
What are the contract requirements of the provider?
Is there an upfront investment? If so, how much?
How quick is the response time for spikes and lulls in customer demand and application loading?
What is the experience of the third-party provider with issues such as global deployment, redundancy and resiliency?
What provisions are in place to keep my data secure?

Another important consideration for enterprise concerns with IT environments is managing the various compliance and regulatory data management and reporting requirements. This is another area where hosting your applications with an experienced third-party service provider can assist companies and help to mitigate the risks involved with meeting government reporting deadlines and data recovery processes.

It is the responsibility of a company’s CIO (Chief Information Officer) to ensure a company’s regulatory compliance and infrastructure security, but this is another large area that can be successfully outsourced to the carefully screened and chosen service provider. A disaster recovery plan is also required for most businesses and must include redundant backup systems. Off-site application hosting solutions will help to ensure that your applications and your business can continue to operate even when your main IT environment fails due to man-made or natural disasters.

Posted in Applications, Hosting | 3 Comments »

Physical Inventory for Microsoft Dynamics NAV

January 19th, 2010 by Bill Martin

There are few things in the world that management and staff of an organization dread more than taking a physical inventory. While it is an expensive and time-consuming process, it remains absolutely necessary to achieve accurate balance sheet information, efficient use of sales resources and effective inventory management. Physical inventory is a particularly important process for most manufacturing and distribution businesses. It provides an opportunity to clean up inventory, identify discrepancies and make any adjustments to align what is on the books with what is in the warehouse.

As we developed our roadmap for creating add-on modules to address functionality gaps in Microsoft Dynamics NAV platform, improving the physical inventory process emerged as a key area for investment. While we can’t remove all the pain associated with the physical inventory process, we have addressed several key areas that allow enterprises using NAV to shorten and simplify the process. American Unit’s Physical Inventory for Microsoft Dynamics NAV assists organizations in increasing the accuracy of their inventory balances, system quantities and purchasing amounts, driving a minimization of inventory holding costs, identification and rectification of possible theft issues and a more accurate reflection of balance sheet asset values.

Having assisted a number of discrete manufacturing companies over the past several years with the Microsoft Dynamics NAV implementation, it became clear that an enhanced physical inventory capability could provide significant value. This led to the investment in developing an add-on module to augment NAV’s existing inventory management functionality. American Unit’s Physical Inventory module eases the creation of physical inventory cards and physical inventory tags for each location, control table and work center. It also makes it easier to assign tags to employees for the physical count of items. The objective in developing the module has been to ease data reconciliation, improve data auditing and simplify the posting of adjustments to physical inventory.

The Physical Inventory module is the fourth release in the American Unit manufacturing suite. More information can be found here.

Posted in Microsoft Dynamics NAV, Physical Inventory | No Comments »

Engineering Change Management for Microsoft Dynamics NAV

January 5th, 2010 by Bill Martin

Change management continues to be an important process in the engineered product environment. It has great potential to deliver material benefits but also great challenges in getting it right. Managing engineering change has always been hard as well as a source of inefficiency, but in the ever-escalating pace of business driven by an increasingly global market, it is more critical than ever to improve the process.

Historically, engineering change management has focused on cost control and increasing process efficiency. Competitive pressures are now driving a new agenda for change management, one that targets a reduction in development lead times and, secondarily, the ability to quickly respond to quality issues. This is a very real change in perspective as companies are beginning to realize that a more optimized engineering change management process can provide top-line benefits in addition to reducing costs. In today’s dynamically changing marketplace, speed-to-market can allow companies to overtake, and even leap-frog, their competition.

The other key driver of this new view of engineering change management is the need for an accelerated response to quality issues. There are also the changing market requirements as competition, globalization and concept of “mass customization” have created a demand chain with the customers driving any number of product permutations. Change management’s ability to positively impact quality is important in both the initial product launch and in ongoing product management.

Through our work with discrete manufacturers of all sizes, American Unit has experienced the value of optimized engineering change management. That led to the investment to develop an add-on module designed specifically for that purpose that augments the functionality of Microsoft Dynamics NAV solution. American Unit’s Engineering Change Management for Microsoft Dynamics NAV can handle different types of engineering change requests including bill of material changes, routing changes, and released production orders which are in shop floor and updates these changes automatically. This add-on module is fully integrated with Dynamics NAV’s manufacturing.

The Engineering Change Management module is the third release in the American Unit manufacturing suite. More information can be found here.

Posted in Engineering Change Management, Microsoft Dynamics NAV | 1 Comment »

Inspection Management and Quality Control for Microsoft Dynamics NAV

December 22nd, 2009 by Bill Martin

One thing that we at American Unit have discovered as a result of our work with many manufacturing enterprises is that most modern quality control programs continue to rely on inspection management systems to ensure product and process quality. As a Microsoft Dynamics NAV solutions provider, we have viewed the lack of that specific functionality in the NAV platform as both a challenge and an opportunity. To that end, as part of our investment in building a unique vertical solution for manufacturing, we have developed a new add-on module for Dynamics NAV to address this gap in the solution. Our application, Inspection Management and Quality Control for Microsoft Dynamics NAV addresses the constant pressure on manufacturers to reach increasingly higher levels of quality.

Working seamlessly with Dynamics NAV, our solution delivers key process benefits that include more accurate inventory listing with individual item inspection information, reduced sampling time, automatic routing of rejected items back to vendor, reduced shop floor scrap, and use of historical vendor quality data to select the appropriate supplier for specific items.

As an example, Item Inspection using Inspection Management in Microsoft Dynamics involves the measurements, tests, applied to certain parameters in regards to an item with or without sampling techniques and skip logic rule. Inspection processes are determined by various characteristics including the timing, duration, and intensity of the collections and the details of the past processing treatment. Poor choices of these Inspection parameters can lead to poor Inspection performance. Proper choices of these parameters can make it easier to integrate the various Inspections into the overall service process. An Inspection is the use of a measurement in an intelligent fashion to drive some corrective action. Inspection might be one of shape, size, or even weight. Inspections need not be restricted to product characteristics.

The following screen shows inspection list that needs to be inspected and created automatically at the time of received.

Vendor quality performance is useful to determine the appropriate vendor for an item. This is a statistical measurement and it uses historic information. The following screen shows item wise vendor quality performance.

More information on this latest add-on module for Microsoft Dynamics NAV can be found here.

Posted in Inspection Management | No Comments »

Release of Shop Floor Control Add-On for Microsoft Dynamics NAV

December 10th, 2009 by Bill Martin

American Unit is committed to creating very robust vertical industry software platforms built upon Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Dynamics AX solutions. To that end, we have been investing in building IP to fill in key gaps in Dynamics NAV’s manufacturing industry functionality. Our strong background and continuing focus in the manufacturing ERP market, as well as our years of experience in Dynamics NAV, provides a strong capability for executing on this strategy.

This week, we are formally releasing our first module, Shop Floor Control, to the market.

This new Shop Floor Control module allows employees to register information in one easy-to-use system, providing greater fidelity and speed. The system supports the use of bar codes for even faster input of raw materials consumption and time used per individual task as bar codes are automatically printed on all relevant production reports. The solution can further reduce time spent on data input by designating a team leader to manage team member’s registrations. This feature simplifies the process and lowers the risk of data entry errors. Microsoft Dynamics NAV Shop Floor Control also enables the bundling of operations to reduce registration even more. Employees working on several operations can register their time spent on all operations at one time.

The primary benefits of the new module, improving the efficiency of shop floor operations and automating collection of employee time and attendance are enabled by a number of key features and functions that we believe existing customers and prospects will find attractive, including:

Collection of Employee Time and Attendance Information
Advanced time profiles for both groups and individual employees
Automatic profile search
A work planning tool for setting up shift schedules
Handling of personnel absences
Collection of machine time
Notice Board with individual messages and receipt feature
Two-step validation procedure available to check time
Calculation/approval status
Configurable registration forms
Password-protected validation
Direct integration with the production modules
Overview of the production situation
Simulation of when operations should be completed based on time allocated

Our goal with Shop Floor Control for Microsoft Dynamics NAV is to significantly decreases the time spent performing administrative tasks, while increasing the reliability of employee time and attendance data and we are confident that the module represents a significant enhancement to the functionality of the Microsoft Dynamic NAV solution while also being very user friendly.

Find more detail on our Shop Floor Control add-on module here.

Posted in Microsoft Dynamics NAV, Shop Floor Control | No Comments »

Shipping Shape with Dynamics NAV

October 8th, 2009 by Bill Martin

One of the critical challenges enterprises of all sizes face is how to realize the potential of their ERP investment. One avenue towards accomplishing that is to leverage existing customer data resident in a company’s financial system through integration with key external business services provider operations. One such example is for package shipping. UPS WorldShip offers companies the opportunity to integrate their enterprise system seamlessly to make the generation of shipping labels and other shipping forms much simpler.

Once integrated, passing enterprise customer data between the WorldShip application and Microsoft Dynamics NAV occurs in real-time, avoiding additional data entry on both sides of the transaction. Once processed by UPS within WorldShip, shipment data is automatically updated in the NAV sales document. This allows a shipment via UPS to be tracked within the NAV system using the unique UPS tracking number.

Beyond the obvious savings in time and resources, this type of integration increases the speed and accuracy of shipping activities, provides the exact shipping charges for each transaction, eliminates manual data entry and errors, and automatically communicates key delivery information to customers.

Establishing the integration between WorldShip and NAV requires the following steps:

Install UPS Software, NAV ODBC software and MS-Access on the system. A system DSN should then be created from the ODBC data source and the created data source database should be connected using the NAV license (license should contain ODBC granule)

Create tables in NAV to store the shipment-related dat required by UPS. Transfer the data in the tables into MS-Access and write the queries to send the required field data to the WorldShip system. Then, create MAPS in UPS WorldShip to import the data into the WorldShip application and export the data back to the NAV system. Map the UPS fields to the Navision fields.

To import data, write a query with customer-required conditions which when triggered, pass the information to the WorldShip system. Data will be imported automatically into UPS WorldShip by either batch import or keyed import depending on the specific situation and enterprise need.

To export data to the NAV system, the shipping department selects “End of the Day” in the UPS Worldship system and complete orders will be processed with tracking numbers generated for every package. The generated tracking numbers, shipment cost, shipment address, number of packages, and all other shipment information are automatically exported to the NAV sales database using a MAP which is created specifically to export data from UPS WorldShip. E-mails are then be sent to the customer’s address with tracking number and a pre-defined template.

Leveraging an enterprise’s investment in Microsoft Dynamics NAV can be made much easier by integrating with some of the many software platforms that have been developed by business service providers across all of the key business processes the comprise the modern business.

Posted in Microsoft Dynamics NAV | No Comments »