Many businesses will determine their terms of trade on the basis of what is generally acceptable in the industry, and importantly, what resources it has to fund those debtors, either out of its own cash resources or funding from its own suppliers in the supply chain. The ultimate trick perfected by many retailers is to sell for cash but squeeze extended credit terms from suppliers. Most businesses are somewhere in between, and close attention to your debtor days value is important when managing cash flow required for the business. Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) is another name for the same thing.

This is one of the most critical performance metrics in the debt collection process. It tells you the average number of days sales still outstanding based on the period of activity assessed. It is worth noting that DSO measures the efficiency of your collections in terms of how quickly the invoices are converted to cash rather than the effectiveness of your collections in terms of what activities result in the best client behaviour.

Have a look at this quick DSO calculator to see how reducing your DSO could release cash back into your own business.

A lower DSO is good and means clients pay their invoices in a timely manner, a higher DSO means clients pay slowly and quite probably late. A high DSO means the company is using its own cash to fund the business rather than funding from cash recovered from clients. When you go out to replenish product stock or pay salaries it is a far healthier position to be paying with money from sales rather than money from capital.

If the client DSO value is close to the client payment terms then they are behaving well, however if for example the terms are 30 days and the DSO is 60 days then you have some work to do. A low DSO can also be a health indicator of client satisfaction (happy clients pay their bills) and indeed in the quality of the business as a whole.

There are no right and wrong values for DSO however there are forums for most industries where membership will include access to common benchmarks, best in class, etc. As an example, for some industries if your payment terms are 30 days then a common and reasonably achievable goal is to keep DSO in the high 30s or very low 40s. Best in class would probably be consistently sub 35 days. The target really becomes an average, as many businesses have different types of transactions which attract differing terms, and of course different client categories may have varying terms.

One of the most valuable applications of the KPI is to analyse the DSO over time by various dimensions. You may want to see DSO trends broken out by account manager, and perhaps also by geography, client sector, client size, project or product. Measuring your collections staff by DSO can create a healthy competitive atmosphere where people strive to better each other in keeping the DSO down for their allocated accounts. When a collector only has time for one more phone call in the afternoon they should perhaps target it at a client that counts most, from a DSO perspective.

Some organisations use the value of a single days’ DSO as the target for sales/account managers to agitate their clients to settle outstanding dues. If each account manager succeeds in reducing your DSO by a day then you will have recovered a meaningful amount of cash back into the business at little cost of sale. For some organisations they discover that reducing their DSO by 10 days is worth more to the business than increasing sales by 10%.

Whilst the focus on the DSO is one of the most valuable in managing cash, celebration of an excellent DSO measure must not be allowed to breed complacency and the traditional techniques and activities in the collection management must be ongoing in order to maintain the clear focus.

DSO is well worth making a key focus for your collections activity. Both Infor SunSystems Collect and Collections Management for Dynamics GP will uncover your current DSO and help you reduce it.

You can read more about Professional Advantage and Infor SunSystems Collect here or Collections Management for Dynamics GP here.

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XMPro will handle 100% of your business processes completely. Any other system could easily fail to fully address up to 50% or even more of your needs. Why is this?

Workflow and business rules in other BPM applications assume that you can always define the correct next step from the position you are in. They force you to use arrows in their workflows to direct processes from one step to the next. And those arrows are laid down at the time the process is built. However, services-based businesses are not production line businesses and this ‘happy day’ scenario is not how the real world works. Your people are faced daily with a myriad of choices, both deviations and opportunities, that could never be incorporated into a defined arrow-flow. When this happens all other BPM applications lose their power and value. People are forced ‘off the page’ and onto telephone, email and spreadsheets to solve the problem. Typically these activities are not captured, in fact are literally hidden and never show up in the audit trail for risk and improvement analysis.

This reality will reveal itself as your project moves into execution and especially when your focus shifts from cost saving in the back office to revenue making and customer engagement. Improvement plans will turn to areas like customer satisfaction and time to revenue. You want to change your image in the eyes of your clients and increase profitability through your certainty of deliverables. You will want to give your sales people the ability to confidently say ‘yes’ instead of ‘maybe’ or ‘I don’t know’ and to make those things happen in front of the client. The front office is where surprises lie at every turn. How a business handles these truth-points tends to drive its success and competitive advantage.

XMPro addresses this in two ways. Firstly, the concept of workflow arrows is optional. XMPro can allow a set of steps to be done in any order and at any time. Some of the possible steps may be situational and XMPro allows your people to use their experience and wisdom to make the right choices in the moment, rather than forcing them down a predefined path they know to be wrong. Secondly, if someone finds themselves “dropping off the page” they can instantly create an ad hoc task within the current step that allows them to take alternative actions, including contacting colleagues who may be able to assist and resolve the issue. All of these ad hoc tasks and social peer collaboration remain within your compliance guardrails and also appear in the audit trails for risk and improvement monitoring.

The design philosophy within XMPro is one of adaptability and flexibility. The real world tells us that rigidly defined processes do not satisfy service-based businesses. Processes need to easily evolve and transform as opportunities present themselves. When people find themselves in unfamiliar territory they need the system to offer them contextual intelligence and considered guidance. Casual peer-to-peer collaboration needs to be captured within a process for audit and performance purposes.

You hire expensive people for their skill and experience. XMPro allows them to succeed while keeping your costs and compliance in check.

These differences are what will make the implementation of your process improvement strategy through XMPro a success from the bottom to the top of the business.

You can read more about Professional Advantage and XMPro here.

The post Why your smart people don’t like your workflow system appeared first on blog.pa.com.au.

We’ve all heard the paperless office goals, the grand desire to drive paperwork out of the business. Of course it is a great aspiration for many reasons; get some efficiency and visibility, save on printing costs, clear the clutter off the desk, reduce the off-site storage, even save some trees.

I think it’s fair to say that very few of us have ever seen this come to fruition. Plenty of document scanning and capture activities have removed the paper from certain processes. Those tend to be the high volume areas like contract management and supplier invoices. But there are rafts of activities that continue to attach themselves to a piece of paper in some way. Making them paperless has involved scanning the form on the multi-function printer in the corner and emailing it around.

In my opinion email has become the equivalent of the paper job bag, and in some cases made things worse. Emails are generated on a whim.  They can pull in unrelated individuals and issues in a single missive.  They drag reams of history along with them until someone snips it off to create an orphan without context. They allow looseness of language and ambiguity of intention. They permit denial of ownership and shirking of responsibility. They defy the core needs of clarity and purpose, status and outcome. They exist within a system so buried in volume that they readily slip through the cracks.

So when someone says to me, “we want a paperless office” I say, “and what about email?”

If you replace every piece of paper with an email will that resolve the problem? No – it won’t and you know it. I think what people really want is to orchestrate their knowledge business in a framework that marries flexibility with compliance and responsibility with visibility.

Imagine a world where everyone did what they were supposed to when they were supposed to; with the ability to do more or do less as the case demanded;  to flexibly solve problems while remaining rule compliant; to complete or delegate; to escalate or collaborate; and all at the fingertips of audit and risk.

You can read more about Professional Advantage and XMPro here.

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This blog discusses a process design methodology which addresses the design by first capturing and analysing how people do the process. It does this by enabling the process to be visualised digitally through an analysing tool and then reviewing the most effective pathways. This approach is called design by doing.

This is in contrast to the traditional method of process design, which is to carry out an analysis, design and documentation of the expected process. This approach takes a predefined approach where people walk a designed path.

The ‘doing’ approach reaches its design through an iterative optimisation process, like an ongoing work in progress. As one level is reached, the next task to be tackled reveals itself, whether that is putting in some business rules or if an activity needs to be supported with decision support in flight analytics.

What we are also doing with this approach is capturing not only a rich audit trail of how and why decisions were made but also we digitally capture the wisdom and experience of the best people in the organisation.

This becomes a valuable asset to the business for managing risk in both a tactical and wider business sustainability context as well as providing insights into the ways revenue and costs are generated.

For this type of approach to be possible, our design and analysis tool must provide for both structured and unstructured work to take place. Typically workflows involve decision points as illustrated below.

In a structured workflow such as this, there are only two options– either on/off, yes/no, approve/decline and so on. This is a binary decision and is very limiting when dealing with real world processes. For this model, we need to design and predict every exception.

In contrast, XMPro manages unstructured workflows in two key areas:

1)      It removes the hard wired process flows, the arrows allow multiple possible decisions.

2)      Instead of prescribing the flow, it provides decision support to knowledge workers.

See the figure below.

This approach changes how technology can be leveraged when designing your business processes.

You can analyse the real paths that people follow to get work done. You will find that there will be high numbers of variant paths (we found 80 different variants for a funeral arrangements process, for example) and find process patterns that yield higher revenue, lower cost and best risk management practises.

This is fundamental to design by doing approach. It leads to quicker, more effective process outcomes. It becomes a digital asset for the best knowledge workers of the business. We also have a rich repository of process analysis for which we are able to measure, and track KPIs that would not have been possible in a manual world.

Is this the beginning of a new era in business performance management?

You can read more about Professional Advantage and XMPro here.

The post Design by doing. A new era in business performance management? appeared first on blog.pa.com.au.

The following table shows is a compatibility matrix with the version of Dynamics GP and associated version of Collections Management. The “x” represents which RegKeys are required for which version of software.

*Existing Microsoft media shipped prior to June 1, 2013 will include Microsoft’s version of Collections Management.

 Points to consider:

 1) Professional Advantage RegKeys will only work with Professional Advantage software  i.e., the new version of Collections Management, due for release from Professional Advantage on June 1, 2013.  If you are still running GP 2010 or GP 2013/SP1 and have not installed the Professional Advantage’s R2 release of Collections Management, the existing RegKeys from Microsoft will continue to work.

2) Microsoft RegKeys are version dependant i.e., if you stay on the same version of software the RegKeys will operate in perpetuity.

3) Professional Advantage RegKeys are date and version dependant i.e., if you upgrade to a new version of software you will need new keys. eEch year you will need to obtain new keys.

Professional Advantage RegKeys are automatically generated and emailed upon receipt of a paid Annual Enhancement Plan (AEP). RegKeys are generally sent to the Microsoft Partner who services the end-customer.

New RegKeys can be requested at any time – for example say the original ones have been lost or mislaid – by contacting Professional Advantage.  Send an email to regkeys@profad.com or visit www.profad.com. When requesting new RegKeys, be sure to include the following information:

a) Product : <in this case Collections Management>

b) Customer name – as it appears in VOICE (this must be identical)

c) Dynamics GP Version number

d) AEP expiry date

Blog written by Chris Pennington, Consultant to Professional Advantage. The opinions expressed here are the personal opinions of the writer.  Content published here does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Professional Advantage Pty Ltd.

The post Which RegKeys do I need for Collections Management for Dynamics GP? appeared first on blog.pa.com.au.

1) Efficiency. The use of a purpose built, multi access budgeting database will automate consolidation of budgets, automate reporting and planning and automate integration to source systems. By automating these processes you can reduce or eliminate large numbers of manual tasks in Excel. This factor alone is often enough to justify a project for some organisations.

2) Non-financial planning drivers. The use of parameters or budgeting assumptions will automatically create a number of budget lines. An everyday example is how planning headcount and grade will drive the payroll accounts in the general ledger such as wages, tax, superannuation. Imagine also being able to produce your P&L down to the gross profit line using only non-financial drivers.

3) Business intelligence. Some budgeting products offer BI and reporting capability all in one. This means it doubles up and replaces a number of ad hoc and reporting currently handled with older and limited reporting products such as Crystal. Not only that but many of the best budgeting systems will have dashboards and KPI reports built-in. Imagine the value of having a single powerful reporting product rather than a number of different systems?

4) Confidence. Many companies are unable to provide the information requested by senior management in a timely manner and with a degree of confidence. Or if you do provide an answer with a reasonable degree of accuracy, it takes so long to provide that the data is already dated. Not easy to account for in an ROI, but if you provide an answer with clear assumptions, your senior managers will thank you for it when it is their head on the block.

5) Accountability. When budgeting and forecasting is a self-service, easy to deploy process, there is no blame game, “they’re not my numbers”. While it is difficult to apply an ROI to this it will certainly result in a more aligned organisation.

6) Business modelling. A fully featured budgeting system will allow you to provide not just one answer, ie the budget, but a range of answers and options with key assumptions built in. People like to have choice. Imagine going to senior management with three or five budgets where they can decide on the most likely scenario to go with as the main annual plan. This is true decision support. How much value can you put on a good decision?

7) Poor financial systems. A good budgeting system can make up for the inadequacies of a finance system. Many tasks such as reallocations of cost are better managed outside of the world of debits and credits, resulting in reporting with a real basis of preparation of your management reports. You will also be able to generate reports from your financial systems with ad hoc analysis to drill down to the underlying numbers.

8) Strategic alignment. It may sound like a lofty goal but with a broad featured budgeting system, it becomes far easier to implement and track strategic initiatives. This results in real savings to the bottom line.

So if you thought budgeting was just about replacing Excel and speeding things up, this could be just the start of things that a combined budgeting and BI platform can do for your business. How do you put a value on it? It’s not easy. There are possibly efficiency savings alone which can justify a project. However if you can talk persuasively to senior management with a focus on meeting the objectives of the business and what it means for them, you will find a project far easier to justify and do great things for your career as well!

Wanting to streamline your budgeting and forecasting? Register for our free seminar here.

The post Eight things you need to get from a new budgeting system appeared first on blog.pa.com.au.

In CIO magazine, Gartner predicted that by 2017, Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are anticipated to spend more on IT projects than the Chief Information Officer (CIO). There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, CMOs place their focus on measurable business outcomes such as return on investment (ROI) and as a result, marketers are not only expected to be innovative, but also to leverage analytics to refine marketing efforts. Secondly, more and more organisations are now seeing marketing as a revenue centre rather than a cost centre.

In simple terms, it’s all about the ability to study and leverage information about your target market, to deliver truly personalised content and tracking your prospects through their buying journey, until they’re ready to buy.

The more you know about your prospects’ buying behaviour, the better you can nurture your leads to take them through to conversion.

Your insights into your target markets combined with the technologies and tools now available, marketing departments can track almost everything: emails, website landing pages, web form captures, social media activities, call-to-actions, click-through rates, blogs, lead scoring, surveys and more.

All this data highlights the importance of usable marketing data and analytics.

Marketing analytics is a discipline and one that is becoming increasingly relied upon to inform the best possible business decisions. It’s a set of processes and technologies that allow marketers to evaluate the success of their marketing efforts by analysing key business metrics such as the effectiveness of campaigns, the return on investment (ROI) and the overall effects on the business as a whole.

Marketing Sherpa recently published some research they conducted into  marketing analytics challenges, asking marketers about the types of challenges they had faced in 2012. The results from the survey showed the top three challenges in order of importance were:

1. Acting on data to improve marketing effectiveness
2. Combining data from multiple sources to draw correlations and make predictions
3. Funding new analytics tools and solutions

These findings highlight why marketing departments need to overcome functional silos. It is essential that your marketing department has a single view of its performance to see exactly what’s working, and what’s not, and move away from the siloing of data in multiple or disconnected systems. This is the main reason why companies end up making business decisions based on gut feel instead of facts.

Other factors highlighting the need for accurate and integrated analytics is the number of marketing channels available to us today, and the need to control the marketing budget and spend. The question you probably ask yourself on a regular basis is which marketing channel had the highest ROI and conversion rate? The answer to this question will give you the intelligence to select the best channel(s) to re-invest in, giving you the best return on your marketing dollars.

Having access to key customer data, provides you with the intelligence to predict what your customers desire, to provide relevant and personalised content, to the right audience, at the right time. With actionable marketing analytics, you can identify, attract, interact with, and retain your most valuable customers, enabling marketing success.

To achieve this success with marketing analytics, you need to collect the right data, manage/analyse it, and transform your knowledge into actionable insights. Because unless you do something with the knowledge you have, you’re not getting any value or gaining benefit.

With the above trends in mind, Professional Advantage is conducting a seminar on the topic. Join us and learn all about the Anatomy of Marketing Analytics and how you can drive actionable analysis from your marketing data, discover fresh insights and achieve higher ROI. Click here for full event details and registration form.

The post Marketing analytics: more than just numbers in a report appeared first on blog.pa.com.au.

Let’s imagine for instance turning up to the office on Monday morning to discover that the application server hosting the finance and warehouse applications has failed in a major way and the server won’t boot. The onsite IT support troubleshoots and discovers a major hardware component has failed, he immediately calls the hardware vendor. When the hardware vendor arrives around lunch time critical systems have been down for 4 hours and major operations like billing and dispatch have ground to a halt. After replacing a number of components the server is operational again but Windows still won’t boot, as it looks like the data has corrupted on disk. At this point the hardware engineer steps away having done his job, leaving the onsite IT engineer in a world of hurt with operational hardware but corrupted software and critical services still offline. It is at 3pm that the support person bites the bullet and reinstalls Windows and prepares data for restoration, most likely from tape, with also adds time and complexity to the process. Before he can bring the services back online he needs to arrange for reconfiguration and installation of the major applications by the support vendors. If he is lucky he can arrange this for after hours, but most likely it will be next morning before they can reinstall and configure the applications for him. By the time data is restored and services operational, the system will have been down for 36 hours or more.

A major headache in the whole process was requiring external application expertise to re-install and configure applications. These days backup software can snapshot the state of the entire server, meaning that the IT support person doesn’t need to rely on any application expertise to restore the server. In the example above, the onsite IT engineer could have restored a backup of the entire server in a matter of hours once hardware was available. For a small server it is likely it would be back up in under half an hour. Certainly having a virtualised environment simplifies and reduces recovery time, however this type of technology and rapid recovery is also available for physical server installs. 

Many companies still employing older data level backup technology are not aware of the complexity and time required to recover from these types of disasters. A company may have a good backup of their data but it doesn’t mean they can automatically recover an entire system in the event of a disaster let alone meet recovery time objectives. Modern backup software and recovery techniques have paved the way for greatly simplified disaster recovery and have reduced recovery time. We have seen this technology trickle down from the enterprise and be available to everyone, even the smallest SMB. Today the process of recovering an entire server is almost child’s play. When I started in IT you needed the involvement of a number of experts if you had any chance at a successful recovery.

To hear the latest improvements in IT disaster recovery and tips on setting up a business continuity plan for your organisation, register for our complimentary business survival guide seminar to be held in Sydney and Melbourne.

The post The changing face of disaster recovery appeared first on blog.pa.com.au.

If you take a look at the ‘way back when’ engine web.archive.org, it’s pretty clear to see a significant change in the external web sites of most business over the last five years.

But what about our intranets? If we way-back-when-ed our intranets how much have they changed in five years? What about five years ahead? Will we be solving the same problems or will we laugh at the immaturity of our current mindset?

I believe the most important intranet elements for the next five years will be:

• social integration of intranets for staff
• role of search
• mobile devices
• location targeted information
• user centric design

Five years ago the first iPhone had only just been released and the iPad was still another three years away. Facebook had only recently opened its doors to public users, and Twitter was in its infancy. The pace of technological change can be frightening, making it difficult to forecast even five years ahead.

Having said that, in terms of probability these elements will have an impact on our business in 2018. None of these are in the realm of science fiction, they are being done right now. And come 2018, it’s reasonable to expect that these ideas will be a ‘given’ for any reasonable sized business, much in the same vein as email, telephones or internet access are today.

Social integration of intranets for staff

All the big kids have spent the last few years building or buying their way into this space.   It doesn’t take too much industry knowledge to see key players creating (or buying) their own social platforms. Microsoft have been building social features into SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013, they paid $1.2 billion for Yammer, and also have strategic partnerships with NewsGator; Salesforce built Chatter; VMware have Socialcast; Cisco have built/bought a collection of collaboration tools; Atlassian built Confluence; TIBCO created tibbr; SAP bought Success Factors. All the cool kids are doing it. Why? They’re doing it because it’s going to be big. Organisations will use social business platforms and tools to revolutionise the way information is created, shared, consumed and retained.

Connected organisations and user-generated content improve information sharing and retention in a way we haven’t seen before. Social business tools take the groundswell of social media adoption, and use it to share knowledge, generate engagement, and store retained business knowledge in a way that makes our existing tools look primitive. I see many uses for social business tools, they will become the backbone for the way we create, share, consume and retain business knowledge.

Role of search

Every minute, 72 hours of video content is added to YouTube. There are 340 million tweets per day. There are close to 29 million pages of content on Wikipedia. Inside the organisation, we’re also seeing unprecedented growth in content creation. With more and more content being created, we need to create better ways of aggregating and finding information.

Search will play a critical role in connecting staff with the information they need to do their job. Searching across multiple systems, repositories and farms will become a key technique for managing the ‘findability’ of the exponential explosion in content we are creating.

Ask yourself, would your organisation be more efficient if all resources available to staff were to become searchable and actually findable?

Mobile devices

The mobile revolution is already upon us, but its growth and impact will still dictate the next five years.

Regardless of whether companies provide them, or staff bring their own device, employees will use a collection of devices to access work content. Smart phones, tablets, ultrabooks and a collection of devices that seem to be hybrids of each of these are commonplace in all areas of business. This is the case across all business verticals, not just corporate executives. Retail staff, manufacturing/ engineering, mobile sales representatives and restaurant staff are all using mobile devices for key business processes. There is a shift in user expectations, and staff are expecting that these tools will be available to them.

At the moment, email and calendar applications are by far the most used mobile applications. Over the next five years we will see huge developments in applications and tools that allow staff to add value and carry out business activities while away from their desk, mobile access to the organisations intranet being one of them.

Location targeted information

We are yet to really take advantage of the potential of mobile devices in the area of location-based information. Location-based social media sites like Foursquare (and Facebook to a lesser extent) have paved the way for location targeting.

Devices will be context- and location-aware, allowing notifications and alerts to be pushed to staff when they are in their vicinity. Manufacturing plant operators will be alerted to upcoming plant maintenance schedules, retail operators will be alerted of low inventory/stock levels, engineering staff will be notified of safety alerts when arriving on site or when servicing potentially dangerous equipment.

This style of contextual information publishing will feed directly into our social information stream, giving us the information we need at the time we need to do something about it.

User-centric design

In the past, IT departments built systems based on functional and technical requirements, delivering functionality that meets the documented business rules. In many ways, this process is flawed. Over the past few years, we’ve started seeing a significant shift in the way we deliver projects, and an increasing adoption of user centric design techniques.

User-experience and user-centric design techniques address these requirements from a user point of view, rather than a systems view. Who are the people who will be using the system? What do we know about them? What are their goals, motivations, experiences, and expectations? What information do they need to perform that task? How can we design a solution that best meets their needs?

In the next five years, we will (slowly) see intranet and IT teams shifting away from point-to-point system solutions, and understand the role that user-centric design plays in developing holistic and usable tools to help people do their job.

The wrap

These predictions are here and now. There are companies pioneering these new areas of intranet innovation, and reaping the rewards.

As a business professional, what does this mean for you?

• If this is the first time you’ve thought about some of these things, you need to find out more about them.
• If these things aren’t on your radar for the next 2-three years, they should be. Start making a mid-range plan for how they will impact your business.
• If you are already walking the path, congratulations and godspeed.

Want more information?

Register for the complimentary Future of intranets seminar being held in Sydney and Melbourne on 29th and 30th  May.

As the keynote speaker, I will cover in more detail, where intranets are heading, what the benefits are to your business and the key areas all intranets should be embracing now to revolutionise the way your business creates, shares, consumes and retains information.

The last seminar on this was incredibly popular and places are limited so register now.

The post The future of intranets appeared first on blog.pa.com.au.

fig 1 Maintaining inactive accounts

Choose to clear the balances of unit accounts so their balance brought forward is zero.

fig 2 Clear balances of unit accounts

Clearly track your year-end status with a progress bar.

fig 3 Progress bar

Use the journal entry enquiry window to view journals from historical years.

fig 4 Journal entry for historical data

 Store the approval user and date in the year to date transaction open and history tables when a batch is approved so you can run inquiries in various GP reports. 

fig 5 Storing approval user and date for inquiries

Choose to copy the analytical accounting transaction dimension information when copying sales order process, purchase order process or general ledger transaction.

This should give you an insight into some of the exciting new features of the general ledger. If you would like to know more about Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013, Professional Advantage is holding a free seminar, ‘Discover the Possibilities’, in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth where Errol Schoenfish, Director of Product Management for Microsoft Dynamics GP will be the key note speaker. To find out more click here.

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