With tougher times in prospect, individuals and companies will be looking to make economies and squeeze more out of their budgets. Under pressure the first temptation is to cut costs and carve out wasteful expenditure – a prudent step in any circumstances. But few will consider the more subtle benefits of process improvement and the radical impact that it can have on productivity, profitability and competitiveness. Most businesses have access to Microsoft Office but few fully realise the latent potential of this tools set in promoting greater office productivity. Gary Simon, FSN’s managing editor looks at the possibilities.
Microsoft Office is the de facto standard for email, word processing, and spreadsheet work but these applications are often viewed in a vacuum, divorced from underlying business systems and to all intents and purposes used as personal productivity tools. This is not too surprising since from their early beginnings they were promoted as technology enablers for individuals that would empower the individual to do more in the workplace. But with today’s processing power and more reliable communications capability it is a missed opportunity to view Microsoft Office in isolation. A more integrated and shared approach is the key to unlocking increased productivity.
The quality of business systems, whether Microsoft based (such as the Dynamics range) or not, have improved immeasurably over the last decade and most can be relied on to process accounting transactions competently and reliably. Indeed, from a functionality point of view at a high level, there is often very little to differentiate one ERP or accounting suite and another. However, the degree of integration with Microsoft Office can be a distinguishing feature and can be pivotal to process efficiency and handling delinquent transactions when thing go wrong.
Miles Chicoine, of mid-market reseller Sapphire Systems told FSN, “We are noticing that an increasing number of our SAP Business One customers identify Microsoft Outlook integration as a key benefit and one of the main reasons that they buy the package.”
“It gives them a 360 degree view of all communications with suppliers, customers and prospects. There could be all kinds of interaction with customers and suppliers but without the integration between the ERP system and Outlook all of these email exchanges are lost to everybody else in the company,” he added.
Commenting to FSN, Nicki Stewart, TVision Technology, a supplier of Microsoft Dynamics NAV said, “By making integration with Microsoft Office a fundamental tool of the ERP system, users can take reliable data into familiar programs. They can leverage their existing investment in the technology and increase productivity without calling on ERP system experts to create reports or documents”.
The cost of processing an erroneous or disputed transaction has been estimated to be some 80 percent higher than a transaction that goes through smoothly first time and it is instructive to examine why this might be the case.
When things go wrong the natural response is to get on the telephone, walk the corridors to see people, arrange informal meetings and photocopy or re-print disputed paperwork, invoices, quotations and orders. All of these haphazard tasks tend to happen in a disconnected fashion outside of the business systems. It is almost as if businesses inhabit two separate processing worlds, namely; a ‘Transaction World’ based on their ERP system of choice and an ‘Office World’ which drives the informal communications. Is it not possible to bring these two parallel universes together?
In these situations, tight integration with Microsoft Office can be a key enabler, liberating time and substantially reducing the cost of repairing erroneous or disputed transactions. But the benefits do not just accrue when things go wrong. The ability to route documents between key stakeholders, for example, suppliers, customers and employees, without recourse to meetings and duplicating documents has major benefits day in and day out.
Take for example, the simple expedient of integrating the ‘quote to cash’ cycle with email and word processing. The ability to automatically generate an email to a prospect with a sales quotation embedded within it represents a subtle but important advantage. Most businesses know that the speed with which a sales quotation can be delivered to a prospect confirming what was said at a meeting or during a telephone conversation is vital to securing new business. Generating the quotation swiftly and communicating it instantly can substantially increase competitiveness as well as productivity, compared to the traditional alternative of printing it and putting it in the post. Hastening the front end of the sales cycle and subsequent stages such as invoicing following delivery of goods and services also accelerates cash collection – a benefit that few can afford to ignore in these more testing times.
Similarly, the ability to embed product specifications in an email directly from an inventory file may make a crucial difference when persuading a customer to take a product substitution or a higher margin alternative. When enhanced with work flow capability, email can form the bedrock of a much more reliable and dependable process which engages all of the key functions in a business cycle. For example, credit checking and approval, sure to become a more prominent feature of an economic downturn, can be carried out much more swiftly if the key reviewers and approvers of a new account application are bound into a workflow supported by email, calendarisation and task lists in Microsoft Outlook.
The good news is that integration is there for the taking and the latest generation of accounting and ERP products, for example, Microsoft Office Accounting, excel at providing deep integration for small businesses out of the box. But for other businesses at the higher end of the mid-market the basic functionality is there, but often disregarded.
“The good thing about Microsoft Office and the underlying SQL databases is that they are a trusted platform. Choosing Microsoft Office integration is therefore a no brainer and a reason that SAP is one of the biggest suppliers of Microsoft products. But not all the ERP systems we sell are good at it,” warns Sapphire’s Chicoine.
TVision Technology’s Stewart adds, “Three elements are crucial for successful integration: ease to take data in and out, logs to show the interaction and the security to limit who can take data out and finally how any incoming data is checked and validated”.
With tightening economic conditions Microsoft Office integration provides a welcome boost to productivity and competitiveness. It’s a quick win for businesses that want to do the maximum possible to improve their positioning without breaking the bank.
