How to Email Someone You Haven’t Talked to in Forever

How to Email Someone You Haven’t Talked to in Forever Rebecca Zucker, Harvard Business Review Although communication is more accessible than ever with today’s technology and instant access to multiple platforms, we sometimes lose touch with people who we’d like to be in our business or personal network.  Check out these useful tips on how to reach out to lost connections over a simple email that can effectively rebuild those connections.   read more

VAI Provides Sync-ed Marketing and CRM

The contact database in S2K Marketing Cloud Powered by ActiveCampaign and S2K Sales Force CRM are always in sync, so marketing can pass leads to sales and sales can pass customer information to marketing, without any manual entry.

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An all inclusive, integrated database is a key ingredient to successful and competitive business operations.

December Notes - 5 Daily Habits for on-the-Job Happiness

5 Daily Habits for on-the-Job Happiness Jeff Olson, Entrepreneur  According to a noted psychologist, we need a three-to-one ratio of positive to negative experiences to be happy in life, and research shows that happier people are more motivated, persistent, and outperform negative people.  Jeff Olson founder and CEO of a wellness products company, helps clarify what happiness is not and gives us five actions we can practice every day to achieve more happiness in our daily lives. read more

ERP Mentoring

Ask anyone anywhere who has accomplished anything, the proof is there, if you know what you are looking for.  Ask a professional sports player how they perform at such a high level.  Ask a professional sports player why they have a coach, after all they typically have been doing the same sport since they were a young child.  What more is there to learn?  At some point don’t they know it all?

What is it that you want to accomplish and is it realistic in the time frame and budget you have set?

If you want to achieve more, then you need to associate with someone who has fruit on their tree in the area of your need.  Someone who has succeeded and has experience with the challenges you expect to have and the hurdles you are not even aware of.

When settlers started expanding west (here in the United States for my foreign readers) they looked for guides that knew the territory they would travel, the challenges they would likely encounter and knew which resources they would need.  How long would the trip take?  What would they experience?  Had anyone else been successful?  How would they know when they were “there”?  It was a big land and easy to get lost.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions have similar challenges for businesses and equally challenging objectives for the solution providers.

• What is working now?  What is not working?  Why? 
• Have you mapped out your processes?
• Do you know what makes money and what increases overhead?
• What amount of budget have you allocated to an ERP project?
• Who are the stakeholders?  Who makes the final decision?
• What would it cost you if you did nothing?

How long can you remain competitive if you continued doing what you always have done in the way you have always done it?

One of the biggest challenges businesses find themselves having to navigate when they make a decision to start looking for a new solution or upgrade, is what is it exactly that they do and how do they do it.

It really is a necessity to map out the existing business process.

Customers.

How are customers found and serviced?  You know, the people or organizations that actually buy the “stuff” you provide.  Where are they located?  What do they buy and when?

How do you manage their credit?  You are their supplier.  How do they communicate with you and how do you keep them up to date? 

What tools do your customer service people have available to answer the questions from your customers?  What tools do you provide to let them self-serve their needs? 

Products and Services (Stuff).

How do you stock and deliver that stuff?  How do you know how much stuff to keep on hand and how do you find it?  Do you know how much stuff you have now and where it is located?  How do your people find it, pick it, and ship the right stuff?  What does it cost if you ship the wrong stuff or the right stuff to the wrong customer?

What tools do your procurement people (buyers) have to identify what needs to be ordered and when?  Do you buy based on supplier deals or customer demand?  Do they guess what is needed?  Do they walk around and use an educated guess?

Suppliers and Vendors.

Where do you get your stuff or the material to make your stuff?  How do you know what to purchase and when?  How much is too much?  How long does it take to get more stuff?  Do you drop ship any of your products?  Are you being billed the right amount?

How do you generate a forecast and keep in touch with the organizations that ultimately enable you to deliver your solution or finished product to your customers?  How do they need to get paid?  How do you manage your credit?

Employees and Labor.

How many people does it take to service customers?  How many to pick, pack and ship orders?  How many people to run your finance department?  Procurement?  Warehousing?  Production?  How often are you on-time or late on customer deliveries?  Do you have sales people on the road?  How many locations do you need to coordinate?

A big clue that you should be looking for a new solution is when you start adding people and you do not gain an equivalent amount of productivity.  For example, you have 10 people in your warehouse.  You add two more.  You might expect 20% more productivity and you do not even come close to that return. 

In fact the inefficiencies in your operations just absorbs the extra labor capacity.

There is no magic pill.

No simple article is going to solve your challenges.  Likewise, no volumes of information are going to transform your operations.  There is too much information and too little experience to sort through it all to find the pieces you need, that relate and fit your organization.

A sales person is not the first one you should start with.  It is not that they are not intelligent.  It is not that they do not know about the solution they represent.  It is not that they do not know about competitive solutions. 

The issue with sales people is that their goal is sales.  After all is that not what you want your sales people to do?  They are needed and there is a time and place for them.

What you need most is a mentor and coach, often referred to a Trusted Advisor.  What is their goal? Is it your solution that addresses your critical business needs?  First and foremost the trusted advisor’s responsibility is to help you identify your business process, how you operate and what options are available within your budget and most of all what is reasonable and achievable.  You may want to have 100% accurate inventory, but that might not be possible.  You may want to ship more products with less people, but what investment would be necessary to make that happen?

A note of caution regarding people involved in the decision process.  When taking inventory of the stakeholders in your operations, the more people that are involved in the decision the less consensus there will be.  It is not linear, the lack of consensus will be exponential in growth with more people involved.

MaaS – Mentoring as a Service.  It is what we do.

Your challenges are important to you and your business.  More than likely they are not unique in your industry.  Dolvin Consulting provides business consultation services that can be used to help you navigate the sea of change.  We leverage our industry and business relationships to help you identify your challenges so that we can find a solution together.  Please contact us today to see how we can help.

Information is Cheap

Information, once highly valued, has become a very cheap commodity. 

Thanks to the interconnected world and web browsers, just about anyone with an Internet connection can find out just about anything at any time.  Connection is provided in so many ways today with so many devices providing access.  Information resources often number in the thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions. 

“ERP Software Solutions” returned 4,850,000 results during the writing of this posting.  If you really wanted valuable information, it is available.  This information is available for the most part at no-charge or the dreaded word “Free”.  Each and every day the time equivalent of more than eight years of video information is uploaded to YouTube.

What information will be of value?  Which piece of information helps solve your problem?  Do you even know where your problem lays?

Anyone who has been around a while knows the true value of free.  Either it is worth what it costs or it is of little value. 

With so many resources available much pressure exists for the suppliers of information to position their resources high on search engines creating a potential conflict of interest of genuine information of value and the quest for income.  Everyone screaming look at me, look at me.

In general we love having choices and having so much information available, but how can we apply it to our decision making?  What happens if we really need the information to transform our businesses?  We seek more and more of it, not less.  How can we filter what we need with what we have available?

This information quest applies both in external resources and internal management of business operations.  Information is key.  Not knowing where you are going leaves you nowhere.

We are now at the point where Internet Librarians have become the valued resource.  It is not enough to know the answer to a question.  The Internet is full of answers. 

The key is knowing the questions and how to apply the answers to your real world challenges.  

Business Technology consultants have become that well needed resource.  It is important to understand the difference between Managed Service Providers (MSP) which provide the resources, monitoring and support to keep your business operating versus Business Technology Providers which consult as trusted advisors to guide you into the future.

At their core all Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions for Manufacturing and Distribution are designed to help companies manage inventory more efficiently.  All of the modules and add-ons have that imbedded in their design, either directly or via a supporting functional role, such as Finance. 

The Supply Chain’s needs have not changed since the beginning of distribution services.

Wikipedia defines Supply Chain Management (SCM) as "the systemic, strategic coordination of the traditional business functions and the tactics across these business functions within a particular company and across businesses within the supply chain, for the purposes of improving the long-term performance of the individual companies and the supply chain as a whole”.  It has also been defined as the "design, planning, execution, control, and monitoring of supply chain activities with the objective of creating net value, building a competitive infrastructure, leveraging worldwide logistics, synchronizing supply with demand and measuring performance globally."

If the challenges of the supply chain have not changed significantly over time and there is ever more information available, then what is the problem?  The answers exists.  In fact the ratio of answers to question have exponentially increased.  Every business should be running great.

What we now need is help with our questions. 

Action is the answer to the question you are asking now.  That is where opportunity to advance lays. 

What actions can I take now that will help me run and operate my business more efficiently, lower my costs and be more competitive? How do we learn what questions to ask to get the answers we need?  How do we incorporate this new philosophy?   How do we get the best information to the people who need it most?

How do we deliver on the promise of results?

Dolvin Consulting has the experience, resources and contacts to help you find the right questions to the answers you need.  Contact us today for help, which is why we are here.

Retail Software – Achieving Effective Integration

New technology available today allows Enterprise Resource Management (ERP) solution providers to more economically provide integrated solutions that actually drive efficiency.  There is only so much overhead costs that can be cut.  Product, personnel and overhead cost inevitably increase over time.  Add business growth to the overhead increase and you end up needing a solution that can grow with your needs.

Companies are typically growing or shrinking and those cycles alternate.  Long term we hope the trend is upward.  If so, then that company will need a solution that meets their current demand and will provide the tools and resources to match and facilitate growth.

Some key features of a capable solution would (should) include:

• Automatically calculate restocking orders.  Regardless of how your products are ordered, you solution needs to track inventory movement and balance reorder availability and timelines to ensure you have enough stock to meet future demands and not too much that your overhead and handling costs increase.
• Timely reporting on sales.  Up to the minute, real-time reporting is a necessity for management to make informed decisions.
• Speed up customer check-out.  No one likes waiting in lines and they expect the prices to ring correctly.
• Integrated credit card processing.  Not only do retailers need to process credit cards, but they need to do so quickly, accurately, and safely.  Key benefits are when the credit card processing is fully integrated with the order fulfillment system. 
• Reward your customers.  Loyalty tracking allows you to recognize and cater to the needs of your customers as well as attract new customers that have similar needs.
• A single solution.  A single integrated solution that links retail stores, Ecommerce, inventory and warehousing will inevitably drive efficiency and fulfill the other objectives listed hear.
• Timely reporting.  Management needs access to real-time information, but also sales history from all sources and inventory movement for better planning.
• Procurement tools.  Purchasing needs access to all sales information to gauge trends on ordering and resupply decisions.
• Easy customer enrollment.  Online solutions need to be customer friendly.  If you make it easy for your customers to business with you, they are likely to return and do more business with you.
• Integrated marketing tools.  Your business needs integrated and easy to use tools to stay in touch with your customers.  Customer relationships need constant nurturing.
• Provide tools for your customers.  Customers need access to their information as well including sales history regardless of their point of purchase.  This helps with common questions and reordering. 
• On account customer service.  Your account customer need the same tools as retail customers.  They also need to review their credit line, reprint invoices and check order status.

Final thoughts:

Customer service is important.  Serve your customers well and they will return.  Remember if you do not service them, someone else will.  A key sign your customer value your relationship is when they refer others to do business with you.

Integration is key.  Every time people have to touch information and manual processing, you are increasing the likelihood of errors and inefficiency.

Information is key.  Real-time and accurate information is critically important to manage and run your operations.

Information and integration help to drive efficiency in your operations, reduce costs and deliver great customer service.  This cycle will repeat itself if you are using the right ERP solution. 

Performance and up-time are critical in Retail operations.  Make sure your solution runs on systems that can ensure you meet your customer’s needs first and foremost.  Kiosks are another customer service tool that generates repeat business.

Whether you have a single location with many terminals or many locations, a few part numbers or many SKU’s, the right solution should be helpful in managing operations.  Faster replenishment and minimized outages that result from new solutions help move you towards a Just-In-Time (JIT) inventory management solution.

Contact Dolvin Consulting to find out how our industry expertise and relationships can help your organization improve the way you deliver to your customers.  We are here to help.

Please share your thoughts and experiences with our readers.  What applications and tools have you implemented that have helped?  What are you looking for in a future update or system?

Inventory Balances

If you are in the food industry you already know that one of the primary challenges is your inventory level.  You need enough supplies to satisfy customer demand, but not too much due to obvious reasons of expiration dates and potential spoilage. 

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions are designed to streamline operations and provide a central repository of information to effectively manage inventory processing.

A case study - VAI S2K Food: Hillcrest Foods, Inc.

Do you walk around and “look” at inventory to guess and gauge usage and need?

Many food distributors do just that.  They have been in business a long time and there is built in knowledge of customer and seasonal demand.  What moves, what does not and what to do with surpluses or not having sufficient supply and cost expense of expediting replacement inventory?

How does your organization handle recalls and FDA requirements (FDA Food Safety Modernization Act - FSMA)?  Do you have the ability to include all lot numbers on products and paperwork?  How much time and effort does it take you to process a recall?  What about the paperwork and certificates of origin?  Where are these documents found and how are they linked to your inventory?

If you are processing food inventory manually, then your ability to meet the FSMA requirements will be limited and expose your business to great risk and regulatory nightmare.

How efficiently do you process your distribution, truck loading and routing?  What tools does your ERP solution provide to ensure your customer needs are met?  How long does it take to train your workforce?  Is the equipment and process intuitive?  How many times during the day do they have to look up information and how much time does it take?

Handling inventory is a primary focus of food distributors as is financial processing.  You need to service your customers, yet also manage their credit usage on the Accounts Receivable (AR) side and expenditures via Accounts Payable (AP) on the vendor/supplier side.  The General Ledger (GL) ties all the various aspects of the financial reporting and forecasting together.

If these topics strike a nerve with your organization and you are curious if you are doing everything reasonably possible to empower your workforce and drive efficiency in your operations, then it is time to contact Dolvin Consulting.  We work with industry experts to help you look at and evaluate your organization from a fresh perspective.

We look forward to serving your needs.