Logistics month continues for ONE.Source, our ASUG community for SAP Business One.
Throughout my career, I have met many small business owners with encyclopaedic knowledge of their businesses who absolutely amazed me. Much less often, however, have I met small business owners who were able focus their attention on innovation and business growth. Developing that encyclopaedic knowledge requires a lot of time and attention—attention that may be better served elsewhere.
Too often, we focus our attention on achieving all-encompassing, encyclopaedic knowledge instead of devoting that effort to strengthening or innovating our small businesses. This problem may stem from lacking the right technology or (more likely) not trusting the technology you have. We rely on our instincts or organizational memory because we don't have quick access to the data.
SAP Business One Can Help
Supporting your instincts with data will strengthen your business case and help you avoid critical mistakes. Analyzing your data for trends may also expose areas where your instincts are off; as your business grows and evolves, your instincts may no longer match the new reality of your changing business needs.
So how can you get quick access to your historical data to help you make sound, data-driven decisions?
The great thing about an ERP solution such as SAP Business One is that when used correctly and with accurate data, your SAP Business One system becomes that trusted source of organizational memory. Your data is accessible to the people who need it, when it is needed.
Analyzing Your Inventory
Seeing as it's Logistics month, I see a critical example when managing inventory. Decisions around stock levels are best based on historical trends; "organizational memory" about sales and purchases can be used to forecast demand or drive overall stock levels.
As I mentioned on my Logistics Best Practices webcast last week, this is where your SAP Business One Inventory Turnover Analysis Report can help. See the image at the top of this blog for an example.
The Inventory Turnover Analysis Report gives you insight on the critical metric of inventory turn, as well as other helpful indicators, including suggested reorder points and number of days of inventory available. Additionally, this report is built using SAP® Crystal Reports®, so it can be easily adapted to fit your business.
More Logistics Best Practices
If you missed my live session last week, you can still access the recording and slides via our ONE.Source community forum. We also have three webcasts coming up later in the month, including a session facilitated by SAP's Idit Saguey on January 25.
One of our goals for our ONE.Source webcasts is to crowdsource topics and tailor our content specifically to the questions from our community. For Idit's webcast, you can ask your logistics questions for SAP in advance of the webcast so that we can plan to address them even if you cannot attend the live session.
Our other two webcasts this month explore two complementary solutions, from Produmex and Wisys, for warehouse management and other logistics processes. This and much more to come over the second half of Logistics month.
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