Inventory Your Existing Processes

The ultimate goal of your Let's Get Started program is to implement eNsite Pro in a way that's seamless for employees and transparent to customers. To do this, you must duplicate your existing processes on your new DDMSsystem.

Before you can duplicate them, though, you have to know what they are: you must create a detailed inventory of your existing processes. In this section, we discuss the following:

• What you need to consider
• Understanding multiple locations.

What you need to consider

To begin your inventory, ask "how do we handle" questions in each department. In customer service, for example, you might ask how they handle:

• normal orders
• special orders
• customer returns
• new customer accounts
• quotes
• pricing requests.

In accounting, you might ask about:

• normal payments
• overpayments
• past due accounts
• collections.

Many dealers find it helpful to create flow charts to document the individual steps in each process.

Your inventory of existing processes is important as you work through the last two steps in the Let's Get Started program: creating databases and learning applications. Understanding how you handle processes now will help you decide how to modify your databases and which applications you need to learn first.

Even if you purchased DDMS to take advantage of some particular new feature, DDMS recommends that you duplicate your existing processes before trying to implement new ones.

This approach lets your staff learn DDMS while dealing with familiar tasks. It also helps make the new system transparent to your customers.

Understanding multiple locations

DDMSuses two kinds of locations: general ledger (G/L) and inventory. How you define and use these locations affects your database setup and your employee training.

To learn more about setting up General Ledger, see Chart of Accounts. To learn more about setting up your inventory database, see Inventory.

G/L locations are profit or accounting centers. Bank accounts, accounts receivables, accounts payables and so on are separate from any other G/L location. In other words, each G/L location has a complete set of balance sheet accounts (assets & liabilities) in the Chart of Accounts. Each physical location is usually setup as a unique G/L location. Inventory locations refer to stocking or warehouse locations. There are 3,782 unique inventory locations available.

When determining the best configuration for your situation, it is important to clearly define your needs and goals. Many customers want to track the profitability of the different segments (printing, supplies, furniture, and machine sales and service) of their business. That is, they want to track sales, expenses and cost of goods sold uniquely for each segment. This can be done, and usually is, with inventory departments rather than G/L locations. Inventory departments give you the pertinent information without the added system maintenance that comes with multiple general ledger locations. However, if you need complete financial accounting and reporting, multiple G/L locations are required.

When creating a database with multiple general ledger locations, there are several considerations to keep in mind. When setting up the system initially, you decide how to store your databases (customers, inventory, vendors, etc.) on the server. There are three configurations available. The first two configurations are the most common. They offer the most flexibility with the least system maintenance, and they meet the needs of most.

Configuration 1: Single G/L Location and a Single Inventory Database (Default)

Advantage

• Simple to set up and operate

Disadvantage

• Limits financial reporting and tracking

Configuration 2: Multiple G/L Locations and a Single Inventory Database

Advantages:

• Complete financial reporting for each location
• Unique customer pricing by location
• Transactional information retained by location for complete reporting
• Allows for centralizing operations

• Increases system maintenance
• Increases training required

Configuration 3: Multiple G/L Locations and Multiple Inventory Databases

Advantage

• Complete segregation of all business information

Disadvantage

• Substantially increases system maintenance and training

An important concept to keep in mind is that devices are used to designate G/L location rather than the individual database entries. In other words, each workstation is flagged with a location designation and all activity (purchasing, order entry, invoicing, etc.) is reported to the specified location by default. The default location flag for each workstation is set up in the (L1) Terminal and Tickets Parameter screen. You can manually override the default at any workstation. This allows you to enter information for any location from any workstation.

To learn more about setting up locations, see Understanding Multiple Locations.