The Attivo Blog

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!

Tip #1 - In business, things will go sideways.  Be prepared.

With all of the data that we're creating every day, especially as things become more automated, how can anyone possibly keep up with all of this?  Are we expected to spend more time reading reports?  That doesn't sound very productive. In business, knowing what didn't happen, or is not going to happen as expected is very important.  Knowing what looks like a problem in the making is extremely valuable.  That's one of the things that event management and business activity managment is all about - getting some advance warning about things that are about to go sideways. A great example is customer credit - something that definitely needs to be managed.  Under the old fashion way, a customer has to show up in the 60 day (or worse) column before someone swings into motion to make some collection calls.  And then you go through the dance - "Can you send us a copy of the invoice? It's waiting approval from so-and-so who's on vacaction until next Wednesday, It's in our check run for this Thursday" etc., etc.  (Call me if you need some more of these...I've heard some beauties).  Using an Event Management system, things can be VERY different.  Let's say one of your customers just went past their terms (like 10 days past 30 days).  And you are about to ship some more product to them, only your event manager system just notified credit, and either the credit department or your system has locked down printing of pick tickets for this customer until the hold is released.  Someone in customer service has also been notified that this customer's order will not be shipped until this credit problem is resolved, and optionally, the customer has also been notified that their order is being held up until the problem is resolved.  Within hours, a few phone calls are exchanged, and the problem is resolved, while you still have some leverage with your customer.  They might be embarassed for the moment, but it was their mistake, after all.  You resolved it with them while everyone was still friends.  They received the merchandise that they needed, and you received the cash that you were owed.  And they also know to not delay payment to YOUR company when the cash requirements report is printed next time.  They know that some vendors watch, and others, not so much.  You are now on their list of vendors that is watching.  The lesson here is that like credit, which will go sideways if you are not watching (guaranteed), there are many things in business where you can be prepared, forewarned or alerted that something important needs your attention.  It doesn't matter what type of software application you are using, or how many different applications or databases might be involved, either.   Business activity management systems look for pre-defined conditions in the database, and then execute your pre-programmed instructions.  The trigger could be something as simple as an email received with a particular word in the subject line.  The response that you plan for might be simply an email to someone that can affect the outcome, or it could be a complex series of outcomes.  In our example above, it might have been a simple email to the controller or credit manager, or a combination of that email plus automated credit holds on all orders and an email notification to the customer.  You define the action to take - whatever is appropriate for the issue at hand. Put these simple and inexpensive tools to work for you - and deal with fewer fire drills every day.  Fire drills are very expensive, and take time away from your productivity.