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!
