Every feature of a drink-specific ERP system should be designed to add value to your business– and that value will be recognised by your successes.
However, despite their proven advantages, some ERP functionalities are often underutilised – which tallies with the old IT adage that 80% of software users use just 20% of the features. In fact, according to Standish Group’s much-cited research, 45% of software features are never used at all.
This article aims to combat this effect, using a selection of our own sales data features, that could make all the difference to your business.
Hyperlocal reporting
The more specific to your business your demographics are, the more effective your sales strategy will be.
Some distributors look to expensive industry-wide reports for direction on their sales decisions, and while we think it’s healthy to understand the big picture, we also believe this approach is a misstep. What matters above all is your customers.
Their activity, their preferences and the trends in their behaviour are all encapsulated in your order data – which gives detailed insight via hyperlocal reporting.
In-built analytics tools will help look for local trends, commonalities between locations, or other geographical/demographic factors that can inform your sales decisions. Not only will the insight be of benefit to your business – it can also be offered to customers as a means of adding value to the relationship.
Contract commitments
Contract commitment reports are a great tool for helping keep sales steady. Feed yours into a live graph, and use it to spot likely gaps in your schedule. This will give you plenty of notice to create effective promotions that will drum up orders when contracts drop off.
Promotions take time to create – from sourcing product, to defining the customer pitch and promotion. Keeping an eye on your contract commitments will help you figure out when the process needs to get underway.
Diverse data visualisation options
SAP research (quoted here by Visual Matters) shows that those organisations which use data visualisation say they would take an average of nine hours longer to see patterns, trends and correlations in their company’s data without it.
With this in mind, we’d always advise using multiple visualisations to assess the data that feeds into your sales decision-making.
Our ERP enables reporting with a range of graphs, charts, maps and sparklines – a mix well suited to ensuring you pick up on decision-defining details in the data.
There are more specific uses for each visualisation type, too. For instance, sparklines used alongside tabular data offer broad-brush insights at a glance, which can be a great help when you need to quickly pick out a product recommendation while on the phone to a customer.
Custom reports
In some cases, a complex custom report is required to support sales strategy-making – especially where third party data sources need to be queried in real-time (e.g. weather data can be used to inform seasonal sales decisions[Link to seasonal opportunities blog]). We’ve catered for such needs by including the option for IT professionals to design reports within the Gaina ERP.
Once you’ve created a report (whether via our simple, accessible report builder, or a custom design as described previously), you should maximise the benefit by getting it in front of every relevant stakeholder you can.
Company-specific terminology
From the processes it supports to the vocabulary used in the system, Gaina software is built especially for the drinks industry. Nonetheless, your company may deal with specific terminology to match its specialism – and if that’s the case, we’d recommend using the facility to replace our language with your own terms (though this would require some software modification).
Making your ERP as accessible as you can to all team members is important, because it increases the chance of all the system’s features – including those discussed in this article – getting used. That, in turn, will enhance the organisation’s capacity to make prudent sales decisions.