Do your workshop/field staff complete multiple manual forms with the same information?
Do you wish you could easily compares estimates with actual costs?
Do you believe you don't charge for some of your time and/or materials?
If you answer YES to any of these questions, contact us today to arrange a no obligation meeting to discuss how we can work with you to improve YOUR business.
Our wealth of knowledge and ability to think outside the square, turns the comprehensive feature set of the Advanced Business Manager software into a business management system of YOUR business
Benefits to you
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Reduce your paperwork.
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Reduce admin time and eliminate double handling of data.
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Improve your cashflow.
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Reduce errors.
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Information provided to you is accurate and timely.
A snippet of features
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Provides accurate job costings.
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Ability to add mobile data entry.
- Parent and sub-jobs.
- Attach documents to jobs.
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Comprehensive inventory control.
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Job work in progress management.
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Invoicing flexibility – simple summarised, through to complex detail invoices.
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Quotations and job estimates.
- Retentions.
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Accurate profit reporting at all levels.
REAL LIFE EXAMPLE
Roofing Manufacture and Installation
Initial discussions with our client uncovered the following problems/needs:
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Our clients’ business sells product but not just by a weight, a length or simply per item. They needed the ability to continue to sell some of their products by these types of one-dimensional quantity but other products such as their roofing iron by both width, length AND quantity, as defined by a customers’ requirements. When it came to roofing iron there was no such thing as a ‘standard size’ product!
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Roofing Iron has a ‘Use By’ date and our clients’ manufactured Roofing Iron products have ‘Use By’ dates which need to be tracked back, by ‘Lot Number’ to the ‘Use By’ date of their original base product.
- The base product for roofing iron is bought by the tonne but is then manufactured into a product that is ultimately sold by the square metre. The product is sold by the square metre. The manufacturing process, of the product to be sold, needed to reduce the stock level (weight) of the base product that it came from!
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Our client also needed to be able to quote for work and then use the quotes to forward plan inventory requirements.
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As well as prepare quotes, they also needed to accurately cost jobs correctly as the job progressed.
- Allow for manufacturing and job costing.
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Profit and Loss reporting needed to be accurately broken down by Branch.
Standard software systems which only record a traditional one-dimensional quantity, with ‘out of the box’ inventory management features, were simply not going to be able to meet the needs of this business!
We worked with the site to scope, design and implement a customisation that dovetailed seamlessly into both the standard ABM invoicing and job costing.
This newly designed screen allowed the client to record 'cutting details' and select the lot number of the base product that the new product would be manufactured from. It also allowed the client to see if there was enough base product available in a single 'lot' or if multiple base product 'lots' were required to produce the end-product.
Once the details had been entered, the customisation was designed to produce the factory manufacturing instructions and the packing slip details, as well as allow for an immediate invoice to be produced or for the system to hold the data for invoicing at a later date as part of a larger quoted job.
A few custom reports were added and ABM's strengths of inventory control, job costing and general ledger, all fully integrated, look after the rest.
REAL LIFE EXAMPLE
Window and Door Manufacture and Installation
When being good at what you do leaves you with a workflow headache that results in letting customers down!
As a successful Window manufacturing and installation business, our client’s factory works at almost maximum capacity for large portions of the year. Insufficient Workflow management meant that very often they would have dissatisfied customers wondering where their windows were and when they would be installed. This then triggered a knee-jerk re-scheduling of work to fulfil the order and installation, as a matter of urgency, forcing other scheduled work into the same overdue situation.
Providing quotes forms a massive part of our clients’ business, however, following up on quotes delivered was a very ad hoc process, meaning that some quotes would fall through the cracks, whilst forward planning for ‘large jobs’ was almost impossible and created resource problems if, and when, a large quote suddenly became an ‘unexpected’ order.
Simple yet effective
ABM allows for the addition of Custom Fields to be used as required. Strategic Software used this functionality and added processes so that the client was able to record, not only dates, but also estimates of how long each job might take. Now that the client was storing timescales and dates, Strategic Software was then able to write specific customised reports that took this data and turned it into important workflow information that showed the client:
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What quotes were in the system and what stage each quote was at allowing their sales team to follow up in a timely manner.
- Summaries of quotes provided within a given date range.
- An analysis of the number of hours of work scheduled for the factory based on expected achievement dates and compare this to the expected factory throughput.
It suddenly became very easy for the client to see when the scheduled work might exceed the factory’s throughput and they could reschedule work and inform their clients of revised timelines long before they received an angry call wondering why an order was late!
