SoftEngine's Newsletter - April 2005
Introduction

SoftEngine News is dedicated to keeping you up to date with the latest information regarding BuroWare’s extended ERP solution.

In this month’s news, you'll find resources and tips to help you take advantage of SoftEngine’s BuroWare ERP products and services. You'll find helpful studies, trends and tips on getting more out of your BuroWare business solution investment.
Increased Profits through Better Forecasting

Wholesale distributors are facing ever increasing competition, lower margins and increased customer demands, this means that more has to be done with less. To accomplish this, BuroWare helps estimate replenishment parameters to ensure that items are accurately stocked in the most efficient manner.

Helping your organization achieve the goal of effective inventory management means knowing when and how much of a product to order. It is a juggling act between understanding current and future customer demand, replenishment lead times, the cost of reordering based on quantity discounts and the expense of warehousing and cash flow.

With BuroWare this once onerous task is greatly simplified. BuroWare allows you to avoid stock outs by easily predefining replenishment points. In addition BuroWare recognizes that a distributor has to place an order of a certain size to get the terms or discounts necessary to competitively sell the vendor’s products. This "target order" requirement can be expressed as ‘minimum number of pieces, minimum dollar amount, minimum weight etc.

Smart System
Time is a precious commodity, that is why BuroWare can be ‘trained’ with predefined parameters to automatically perform routine replenishment decisions and bring unusual situations to the attention of buyers, management, and salespeople. But this ideal situation requires that you have the knowledge to exploit BuroWare’s capabilities. A necessary step in this process is to understand how reordering parameters are calculated, so that they can be "fine tuned" to meet the exact requirements of every replenishment situation.

If you are interested in further information regarding Inventory Management through BuroWare, please contact the SoftEngine Support Department at (818) 704-7000.
In this Issue:
Discounted Block Hours

A better way to purchase labor hours

SoftEngine offers a more economical way to purchase labor hours through its ‘Discounted Hours Program’. By taking advantage of this program, technical support and product customization hours may be purchased in blocks at a deeply discounted rate. Normally $150 per hour, the greater the number of hours purchased the greater the discount.

If you are interested in further information regarding this program, please contact the SoftEngine Sales Department at (818) 704-7000.
Upgrading to Pervasive 2000

The right decision

One area that most of our customers seldom think about is the underlying database that drives the BuroWare application. This critical component of the application is powered by Pervasive a database application chosen for its reliability, performance and speed.

Upgrading to the latest supported version of Pervasive
If you haven’t as yet upgraded to the Pervasive 2000 database engine now is a great time to consider making the change. Pervasive 2000 delivers faster data processing, industry-standard connectivity, simplified application deployment and improved stability.

Reasons to upgrade
1. Speed – Transactional Data Access - The transactional data access method included in Pervasive 2000 provides the fastest, most direct path to data. This is ideal for high volume transactions.

2. Sophisticated Querying - Ideal for user-defined reports and ad hoc querying. The query is broken down and analyzed. Based on the result of this analysis, the database engine determines the best method or path to access the database.

3. Stability and Maintenance – One of the main reasons why BuroWare uses Pervasive 2000 is so that you don’t have to spend time and money maintaining the underlying database. Pervasive 2000 has been designed to be so stable that it is virtually maintenance free.

If you are interested in further information regarding upgrading to Pervasive 2000, please contact the SoftEngine Support Department at (818) 704-7000.
Better Information Translates Into Better Service
The more insight you have into your business the better you are able to manage your company wisely. If a plant manager can tell in an instant what inventory he has in transit, in the warehouse or at the distribution center, he is empowered to make better decisions about production, referrals, freight diversions, transportation and general inventory control.

Using BuroWare our customers have saved thousands of dollars by identifying static inventory, freeing up thousands of dollars in working capital without sacrificing service to their customers. In fact having better information has made BuroWare customers more responsive to their own customers. With better information organizations can now predict delivery dates better, identify product lots that are defective and improve quality control.

With an integrated system such as BuroWare entering a sales order means having the latest information on price, availability and product specifications. Sale people can easily find alternatives with the latest price and quantity on hand.

BuroWare gets you closer to your customers by providing them with quality information that other companies cannot. In fact many customers report a competitive advantage by the mere fact that they can offer accurate and timely information to customers that other companies can not.

The question you should be asking this quarter is whether you are taking advantage of the full power of BuroWare? Have you rolled out the system broadly enough throughout the organization? Which department or location could benefit from better information and service?
BuroWare Tips and Tricks

Effective tips from the BuroWare masters

  1. F11 under transaction selection triggers the print selection
  2. Ctrl+O under line item table send transaction to print/preview
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