Features & Benefits

Inventory is often your most significant drain on working capital. Poor inventory control means overstocking to retain good customer levels or facing regular stockouts. For accurate inventory control, you need software that provides all the processes required to track your inventory through the different processes in your business, eliminating the need for Excel spreadsheets and wide use of journals and stock adjustments.

Are you battling with margins that are unexpectedly low? Are your stock purchase prices higher than expected? Are your jobs costing you more than you budget for? Accurate Landed Cost Pricing, proper control of production and jobbing costs and monitoring of labour will all contribute to accurate costing, providing you with the tools to have accurate costing and the means to reduce wastage where it exists.

Insufficient Working Capital is one of the biggest problems of many businesses, making it challenging to meet customer service levels or grow your business. Inventory is one of the biggest consumers of working capital. Having software with every process, you need to accurately record movement of inventory will help eliminate stock losses. Sophisticated procurement and planning techniques such as Net Requirement Planning and Material Requirements Planning allow you to keep your inventory as low as possible while still meeting customer services levels.

Many companies struggle with month-end and year-end deadlines – bringing businesses grinding to a halt while month-end accounts are finalised. Software that allows you to trade in a new month (or year) while still finalising the previous period’s accounts eliminates these bottlenecks. Producing Management Accounts can be done in days instead of weeks.

ERP Software is often criticised for using poorly structured databases. Usually, this is the result of the Vendor taking an existing product and building a new system on the existing file or database structure. The latter is done to save design time and money. The result is software that is prone to corrupt data, with constant database maintenance required. This also causes systems to be out of balance, requiring restoring a prior backup or calling in an expert to fix your system. Umbrella ERP Software started with a large, blank sheet of paper, and the data schema (the relationship of the files to each other) was designed from scratch to suit the envisaged functionality of the product, to be very robust to eliminate out of balance situations. Transactional integrity ensures that an incomplete transaction is not committed to the database.

Finally, proper meaningful descriptions are used as file and field names within the database – allowing for quick and easy access to data for reporting purposes. The result – software that just works, stays in balance and can scale with your business and your transactions volumes increase.

It is a common practice for some of the most critical business processes a business has to be executed in Excel. These include Quotes (and their costing), Sales Orders and Tracking of the progress of the order, trying to calculate what materials to order, have they arrived – it just goes on and on.

Soon you realise that you are doing your accounting on your ERP system and running the operations of your business on Excel. The day will come when this consumes you – probably deep into the night as you slave away at trying to keep all your Excel files up to date! An appropriate ERP system that supports all the business processes you need will reduce administration, improve service levels and provide you with accurate, real-time data from one central database. No business ever succeeded by running on Excel. It may seem cheap and convenient, but if you add up the person-hours needed and the compromised service levels, you will soon realise you will see it is a costly way to run a business.