The Attivo Blog

I found some interesting statistics that support my earlier post "ISO 9001 - Compliance, or just smart business..?" The main point I made was that although the top reasons for getting certified is typically the "arm-twisting" directly from customers or from corporate mandates responding to industry pressure, the seemingly unexpected result is that increased efficiency and improved financial performance ranked as high as third in the list of benefits cited in surveys from the International Association of Accredited Registrars (The organizations that would come out to audit & certify you) [caption id="attachment_205" align="aligncenter" width="615" caption="First Chart Reflects Top Reasons for Certification"][/caption] This next chart summarizes the top benefits actually cited after getting certified...It's kinda like the doctor making you join a gym for your health, but the unexpected benefit is that you look better, feel better and perform better in other aspects of your life.

Improve Your Cash Flow Why not send out an automatic email message (or fax) to all customers, or just specific customers, regarding their balance due to be paid one week prior to the due date?  Include a request to "Please verify that these invoices are in your system and scheduled to be paid" message requesting that they contact you if there are any discrepancies. Event Manager can automate sending these messages, whether there's only one to send, or several thousands.  This is guaranteed to improve your cash flow. Insure Timely Delivery of Purchase Orders The requested ship dates on your purchase orders support your schedule and your commitments to customers. To help insure that all of your vendors are keeping their commitments, have Event Manager send them a notice a week in advance regarding the expected shipments. Include a request to "Please notify us immediately if you anticipate any problems meeting the ship date".  Also, have Event Manager watch for late shipments, and send an email notification to the vendor (copy to you, in this case) regarding the late shipment, requesting immediate status update.  This should save your Purchasing Manager a lot of phone calls (which might never get done to start with). These tools will send the message to your vendor that on-time delivery is very important to you, and their performance will improve.  Automate Sending Order Acknowledgements Whenever a new customer order is entered, or an order is changed, you should be sending an order acknowledgement to your customer.  This will save time, confusion and a lot of cost over the long haul if your customer has a chance to verify their order and notify you if there are any errors. Have Event Manager send these via email or fax immediately upon entering or changing an order.  Let this be the default, and if you need to, you can use a checkbox on the order to not send one when it is not necessary.  Notify Prospects of Expiring Quotes You spent a lot of time creating the quote for them, but they have not responded yet.  A simple call to action might do the trick to get a response.  "Your quote number 123 for Item xyz is scheduled to expire in 5 days - can we place the order for you?"  That might be a little bold for you, but something to get a response is the key here.  You should find out if they are not going to place the order, and what the reason was for not placing the order with you.  This could be helpful information for future quoting. Let Event Manager do this work for you.  Insure Sales Follow Up There is nothing more detrimental to a sale process than lack of timely follow up.  Use Event Manager to notify you when leads are not being followed up within 24 hours, or quotes have been given without a follow up phone call in 3 days, or (insert your pet peeve here).  Let Event Manager be the watchdog on these activities, and stop letting opportunities slip through the cracks.  Avoid Stockouts If you are a retail outlet, distributor or manufacturer, you probably use many different types of tools and strategies for managing procurement and planning to insure you have the right stuff at the right time.  But supply and demand doesn't always behave the way that you predict.  Event Manager can watch for these conditions, such as an unusually large order for an item.  Ordinarily, this may cause a stock out of the item until the normal procurement cycle replenishes it, causing some lost sales.  This could be caught as soon as the large order was placed, by anticipating normal demand through the replenishment cycle, and suggesting that an incremental order be placed immediately. There's a lot more suggestions where this one came from...  A Very Long List of Possible Uses The possibilities are endless.  We work with a few of these Event Management/Business Activity Management solutions. Check them out here, along with some other suggested uses.  These are extremely affordable applications, with very high return on investment.  They are designed to work with any ODBC compliant database, which includes pretty much every accounting, ERP, and business management system out there today.  Event Management software can do an incredible amount of work, safeguarding assets, improving throughput, lowering costs, and serving the needs of virtually every business objective.  In these times, we all need to be paying close attention to business - so...let's sit down and see how you can benefit ASAP!

Did you, or are you getting ISO 9001 certified because of the proverbial "gun-to-the-head" by your customers..? …Or, did you decide that certification would actually provide benefits in not only the area of quality, but also operational performance and business objectives? There is no question that it costs money for companies to prepare for and maintain ISO 9001 certification. It’s also arguable that many companies would not have opted to do so if they weren't forced to by specific customers or from competitive industry pressures. I’ve worked with a few clients that simply wanted the ISO certificate and the shortest route to obtain it. They would have just bought the certificate if they could have! I have also been fortunate to work with clients that opted to become certified as a way to implement an enterprise-wide, concerted effort to benchmark practices and make improvements where needed as a business improvement objective, where certification was simply icing on the cake. Case in point, my experience with All-New Stamping, Inc. of El Monte, California.  All-New completed the AS 9100 certification to support it's growing aerospace business.  Nick Kopinga, the company President, felt that even with close to forty years in business, the process of becoming certified would force them to properly document the things they were already doing well. Additionally, though, he knew it would also highlight new areas of opportunity to update and improve both their business systems and their management practices. And that’s exactly what they experienced. In particular, the ISO mandate for regular management review of the quality system, and the requirement to achieve continuous measurable improvement was widened in scope to include additional business objectives. Can there ever be any reason to separate quality from any other business objectives anyway? The objectives they monitored only intuitively before, such as on-time delivery, plant efficiencies, supplier quality, product conformance, etc. now have objective trend charts that are used as their dashboard to drive the organization’s priorities for action and improvement. Most importantly, it conveys the metrics in a very visual way to the entire organization, which has given everyone a continuous improvement mindset. What started out to achieve an objective (ISO Certification) has continued to provide true return on investment at All-New Stamping. Check out this case study about All-New Stamping - and call Nick Kopinga if you'd like to hear it straight from the top.

If you are using Exact Synergy, have you ever wanted to have Exact Event manager send an email when a particular workflow task or request is completed, but only in certain situations? Exact Event Manager triggers on certain criteria are a great way to do this, but if the keyed data isn't exactly what you want, the email may not be initiated. If you instead use a Free Yes/No Field (checkbox field) however, you can limit the trigger to two criteria: "send" or "don't send".  This means your trigger may look like this:

WHERE  dbo.Absences.FreeBoolField_05  =  1 AND dbo.Absences.Type  IN  ( 102 , 200 )

The value of "1" indicates that the box is in a checked state.  The second line adds additional conditions to the trigger: in this case, the request is one of 2 specific types. Once you complete the rest of the EVENT, you can have the email send off to a particular recipient when the box is checked.  But what if you want to trigger the same email multiple times from the same request? I was able to solve this problem by adding a little SQL update script to the end of my EVENT. In addition to sending an email when the event is triggered by the above script, my event also runs the following:

update Absences set FreeBoolField_05=0 where HID={HID} and FreeBoolField_05=1

What does this do? Well, it simply resets the checkbox from a checked state, to an unchecked state! And the "where" clause defines the specific job that JUST triggered.  The only thing that remains to be done is to allow the job to run multiple times. This is accomplished under the Description Tab of the Event under the checkbox "Repeat notification for triggered items."  If that box were left unchecked, the email would never send again, even if you had checked the box again. That's it!

With the Advanced User Permissions in QuickBooks Enterprise Suite Version 9.0,  you can control your employee’s access to only the information and activities they need to do their jobs, without exposing your data to accidental or intentional misuse.  QBES 9.0 allows you to configure access control over 115 individual reports, bank accounts, lists and activities.   The system comes with 13 Predefined User Roles to make new user set-up fast and easy. Each predefined role template comes with a complete set of permissions designed for that role. You can copy and edit each role template and assign any role to any user instantly, or apply multiple roles to a single user.  Predefined roles include: Accountant, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Banking, Finance, Full Access, Inventory, Payroll Manager, Payroll Processor, Purchasing, Sales, Time Tracking, and View-only.  Check out the full description of the security capabilities in QuickBooks Enterprise Suite. My CPA constantly complained about how easy it was to change data from a prior year, for which a tax return had already been filed.  Problem solved.  And in the off-the-shelf versions of QuickBooks, such as QuickBooks Pro and QuickBooks Premier, user security over data is very limited.  Also solved in QBES. Upgrading to QuickBooks Enterprise Suite is very easy, and provides the accounting and security control that most companies really need.  As a business owner I am very impressed with the new security functions in QuickBooks Enterprise Suite Version 9.0, and  I like that I do not have to worry about my company’s data being misused.