E R P Functional Areas

An ERP system covers the following common functional areas. In many ERP systems these are called and grouped together as ERP modules:

Financial accounting

General ledger, fixed asset, payables, receivables, cash management, financial consolidation

Management accounting

Budgeting, costing, cost management, activity based costing

Human resources

Recruiting, training, payroll, benefits, 401K, diversity management, retirement, separation

Manufacturing

Engineering, bill of materials, work orders, scheduling, capacity, workflow management, quality control, manufacturing process, manufacturing projects, manufacturing flow, product life cycle management

Supply chain management

Supply chain planning, supplier scheduling, order to cash, purchasing, inventory, product configurator, claim processing

Project management

Project planning, resource planning, project costing, work break down structure, billing, time and expense, performance units, activity management

Customer relationship management

Sales and marketing, commissions, service, customer contact, call center support - CRM systems are not always considered part of ERP systems but rather Business Support systems (BSS). Specifically in telecom scenario

Data services 

Various "self–service" interfaces for customers, suppliers and/or employees

Income Statement

The five key lines that make up an income statement are:

• Sales or Revenue: The total amount of money taken in from selling the business’s products or services. You calculate this amount by totaling all the sales or revenue accounts. The top line of the income statement will be either sales or revenues; either is okay.
• Cost of Goods Sold: How much was spent in order to buy or make the goods or services that were sold during the accounting period in review.
• Gross Profit: How much a business made before taking into account operations expenses; calculated by subtracting the Cost of Goods Sold from the Sales or Revenue.
• Operating Expenses: How much was spent on operating the business; qualifying expenses include administrative fees, salaries, advertising, utilities, and other operations expenses. You add all your expenses accounts on your income statement to get this total.
• Net Income or Loss: Whether or not the business made a profit or loss during the accounting period in review; calculated by subtracting total expenses from Gross Profit.

CRM Concepts

What is CRM? CRM means ''Customer Relationship Management'' It helps give insight into your sales and marketing and customer support processes and   improve team efficiency. In addition, companies that implement a CRM often see substantial improvements  in business processes, Sales team collaboration as well as business profit. Most normal CRM systems are divided into three (but not restricted to) main modules: ·         Marketing ·         Sales ·         Customer Service Marketing The Marketing module allows your marketing team to plan both long and short term Marketing related activities within your business. Marketing Planning Marketing Plans can be entered into the CRM and budgets, targets and campaign related tasks can be set against the campaigns themselves. Campaigns can be specific to company size, location, preferred products etc., as all of this information is stored within the CRM. Campaign Management Marketing 'campaigns' might take the form of trade shows, TV ads, magazine commercials, and may target different potential customers, but leads gathered from these campaigns are entered into the CRM, thus giving you an accurate measurement of the success of each marketing campaign. Your CRM can be combined with an e-marketing application to target the right customers with the right products and to analyse their behaviour during an email marketing campaign. Over time, you can build up an understanding of what attracts customers to your products/services and how they behave whilst viewing the information in your marketing email and in your website. This provides you with a very powerful means of reaching your target audience and giving them best information in the best format. Lead Management A key purpose of a CRM Marketing module is to generate leads for Sales to qualify into real sales and thus revenue for the company. CRM lead management entails managing leads in a structured and organized way, evaluating whether they are worthy of follow up and grading them accordingly in order to convert them in to Sales opportunities for the Sales teams to follow up and close as sales deals. Sales The CRM Sales module helps your Sales Managers structure their Sales team processes from presales through to quotations and deal closure. The CRM allows your Sales teams to capture key customer interactions (calls, meetings, emails etc). Sales Managers can then process this data and compare sales quotas against actual sales. In addition, the CRM can automatically alert Sales people with recommended courses of action and provide structured communication templates, decreasing administration and sales ramp time. This is known as ‘automated workflow’ and can be customized to match your company's sales policy. Opportunity Management Opportunities are potential sales, potential revenue for the company. The CRM helps the Sales team by organizing all the relevant opportunity information into one central database and it helps business managers by giving a real-time ‘window’ into sales status. Typically information stored on an opportunity is as follows: ·         Prospective customer – company details etc, ·         Type of sales opportunity and product interest ·         Expected sales revenue, ·         Expected sales closing date, ·         Key people in the sales opportunity and their roles within the deal/company, ·         Key sales-related dates and milestones In most businesses a sales opportunity will have several stages. For example prospecting, qualification, quotation, negotiation and closed (won) or closed (lost). The opportunity stages can be customized to match your company’s sales process. A CRM system helps improve the efficiency of your Sales team as well as relations with your customers during each phase by providing functions to assist the Sales representative in performing suggested sales-related activities and / or using suggested sales-related communication templates, all of which can be predefined by your company's sales policy/process or business model. Many of these can be automated by the CRM Administrator via liaison with the Business Development/Sales Managers, thus structuring the process further, helping to reduce ramp time and saving on Sales Admin time. Here are a few examples of how you might use a CRM in your organisation: Your Sales person has just had an initial meeting with a new prospect – he/she can use the CRM to send a polite ‘thank you’ email, stored in the CRM, which pulls all relevant information and can be sent in one or two clicks as opposed to thirty minutes of typing. Sales admin time is greatly reduced and your customer receives a courteous and personalised follow up. An large sales deal has been quoted by one of your Sales team. The CRM can be customized to send automated alerts to the Sales Manager to get involved as well as (for example) an automatic notification with all relevant details to stock control personnel to prepare for production. Or, for example, if an Opportunity is lost, the CRM system can automatically notify the Sales person to enter details of why the deal was lost so your company builds up a ‘Lessons Learned’ database. These approaches are known as "Guided Sales Methodology" and this is where companies benefit from working with a CRM Administrator / Consultant to assist in making suggestion to improve their business workflow by using the CRM tool. Quotation and Sales Order Management Once opportunities reach a Quotation stage, they can be converted to a quotation and, if they are set to the Closed Won stage, a Sales order. Most CRMs have standard functionality which allow your Sales team to quickly and easily create Quotation or Sales Order from an opportunity and this is then stored against the sales deal for easy reference. Most CRMs, especially those such as Salesforce.com can be integrated to ERP systems if required. Activity Management Activities are such things as Sales calls, meetings, discussions, internal notes, emails). Activity Management allows you to log all of your sales activities in one centralised platform, helping you to build a 360 degree view of customer communications. Most CRMs will allow you to synchronise these activities with MS Outlook/Lotus Notes. Customer Service A CRM allows you to effectively manage your company’s customer support capability. This too can be customized to suit your business process and help you to provide what is stated in your Warranty based services, thus avoiding SLA (Service Level Agreement) non conformance issues. In addition, they can drastically reduce your support team admin time by building a company knowledgebase which can be used by the support team and even accessed by your customers in a ‘self service portal’. CRMs usually include the following customer support functionality: ·         SLA/Warranty Management ·         Resource Planning and Scheduling ·         Solution Management - answers to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) ·         Call Center Management ·         Collaborative customer support resource management A CRM solution can substantially improve your business processes, provide visibility into critical business intelligence and make your teams more efficient. .

Agile Project Management

Why do we need Scrum in the first place?

In many cases when you develop a software project, you know how it starts but you cannot predict what will happen after a few weeks of development. As a result, it becomes difficult to keep track of the project progress. If you’ve ever felt that things get out of control, you know what I mean.

Delays cause the project to cost more, because you need to pay for additional development time. They also cause your clients to get upset and this is something we want to prevent.

Scrum enables you to keep everything visible. It allows the team to know exactly what’s going on and make adjustments to the project to keep it moving forward.
With Scrum you build pieces of the software. The client can experience each part and determine what to do next. This way you have control over the progress of the project and the power to prevent delays.

Let’s get started:

Step # 1 – Create a Backlog

The project backlog is a list of all the features that clients would like to have as part of the complete product. It includes the client’s dreams and wishes. But it doesn’t mean that everything will be developed, as we’ll see later. The Backlog is created by the Product Owner. The Product Owner represents the interest of the people who ordered the product – the clients.

Step #2 – Estimate and Prioritize

After completing the Backlog list the Product Owner estimates how long it would take to develop each item on the list. There are different ways to estimate and I’ll explain them in another clip. Next comes prioritization. The goal is to focus on what brings value to the business. The Product Owner sorts the backlog items by priority, from the most important at the top to the least important at the bottom, picks the features that should be included in the release and creates the Release Backlog.

Step # 3 – Sprint

Here is when most of the work is being done. Sprints are development units between 3 to 30 days. A project usually includes several sprints.

At the beginning of each sprint the team will have a Sprint Planning meeting. In this meeting the Product Owner and the team get together to decide what will be done in the new sprint. They select items of the highest priority from the Release Backlog. The Product Owner describes to the team what is desired and the team decides how much of what is desired they can complete in this sprint.

The Sprint Planning meeting has two parts:
The first part is spent with the Product Owner to decide which features to develop.
In the second part of the meeting the team plans out the sprint. The selected tasks are placed in the sprint backlog and assigned to the team members.

Everyday the team meets for a short 15 minute meeting called “Daily Scrum”. In this meeting each team member answers three questions:
• What have you done on this project since the last daily scrum meeting?
• What do you plan on doing on this project between now and the next scrum meeting?
• What stands in your way to meet your commitments to this sprint and this project?
The purpose of Daily Scrum is to synchronize the work of all team members and address any issues that might delay the work progress.

In every sprint the team must complete the work that was defined for this sprint. Bugs that are related to the features on the Sprint Backlog should also be fixed as part of the sprint.

At the end of each sprint, a Sprint Review meeting is held. In this meeting the team presents what was developed during the sprint to the Product owner and other Stakeholders. This meeting helps to decide what the team should do next. The clients can see the project progress and submit feedback. It prevents the risk of developing features that the client didn’t ask for. Also, in case of a delay in the development process, the sprint will not be completed on time and that will indicate to everyone that there is a problem and something needs to be done.

Repeat step 3 until all features on the Release Backlog are developed and the product is ready to be released.

That’s it. So easy. As you can see, Scrum is a simple and effective way to have control over your development process and make sure things go according to plan.

I created a flowchart for you of the three steps. You can download it using the link below.

Software Development Life Cycle

Datacraft's ERP : Procurement principles, rules, policy and ethics

Datacraft's ERP :

Procurement principles, rules, policy and ethics

Every procurement is based on Principles, the Mandatory Rules of Procurement (where they apply) and good practice guidance. Collectively these provide a broad framework that supports accountability, sound practice and successful procurement results.

 Procurement Principles

The 12 guiding principles which govern the administration of public procurement are:-

1.     Accountability: - Effective mechanisms must be in place in order to enable Departmental Accounting Officers and their equivalents in other public bodies to discharge their personal responsibility on issues of procurement risk and expenditure;

2.     Competitive Supply: - Procurement should be carried out by competition unless there are convincing reasons to the contrary;

3.     Consistency: - Suppliers should, all things being equal, be able to expect the same general procurement policy across the public sector.

4.     Effectiveness: - Public bodies should meet the commercial, regulatory and socio-economic goals of government in a balanced manner appropriate to the procurement requirement;

5.     Efficiency: - Procurement processes should be carried out as cost effectively as possible;

6.     Fair-dealing: - Suppliers should be treated fairly and without unfair discrimination, including protection of commercial confidentiality where required. Public bodies should not impose unnecessary burdens or constraints on suppliers or potential suppliers.

7.     Integration: - In line with the NI Executive’s policy on joined-up government, procurement policy should pay due regard to the Executive’s other economic and social policies, rather than cut across them.

8.     Integrity: - There should be no corruption or collusion with suppliers or others;

9.     Informed decision-making: - Public bodies need to base decisions on accurate information and to monitor requirements to ensure that they are being met;

10.   Legality: - Public bodies must conform to Bangladesh Government and other legal requirements;

11.   Responsiveness: - Public bodies should endeavor to meet the aspirations, expectations and needs of the community served by the procurement.

12.   Transparency: - Public bodies should ensure that there is openness and clarity on procurement policy and its delivery.