FALL 2020

34 THE DISTRIBUTOR’S

34 THE DISTRIBUTOR’S LINK COMPUTER INSIGHTS INC. 108 Third Street, Bloomingdale, IL 60108 TEL 1-800-539-1233 EMAIL sales@ci-inc.com WEB www.ci-inc.com THE BUSINESS EDGE - INDUSTRY-LEADING SOFTWARE FOR UNCERTAIN TIMES by Dennis Cowhey We have been hearing many people saying they want to “wait and see what happens.” While some people are making bold moves, many do not feel comfortable committing to any significant changes. There are times when circling the wagons and doing nothing until the dust settles is your best chance for survival. Sometimes it’s the worst thing to do. The key is to know what your situation is. That is not easy when so many of the things happening are out of your control. A critical piece of the puzzle you should have control over is information directly related to your business. Are you running on a system that has been good enough for many years? Could a new system allow you to make better decisions and do more with less effort? Focus Your Focus Do you know what customers, products, categories, and activities are most profitable for your business? How quickly can you view your sales activity in summary and detail? The Business Edge’s TM “Sales Summary Inquiry” has become a very popular tool for people to find out where they are doing well and where they are not. You can select one of fifteen categories to summarize a date range of sales. Additional options allow you to summarize any combination of customers, products, branches, and document functions. This single inquiry gives you 240 possible outcomes. The results are presented quickly in a customizable grid for review. Is acquiring new customers one of your key performance indicators? How easily can you see how many customers you have on-boarded by month or year? Another popular feature is the “New Customer Sales Inquiry.” The inquiry will summarize your sales by month or year, separating sales to new customers from existing ones. For each category and totals, the inquiry includes optional columns for cost, sales, profit, GP %, number of invoices, etc. Double-click on any row to drill down into the detail for each period. To help you go beyond anything we have thought of, every grid in the system can be sent to Excel with the click of a button. These are just a couple of examples of the hundreds of inquiries that come standard with The Business Edge. TM Customer Expectations Customer service expectations are higher than ever. People demand real-time answers to all of their questions. People expect their vendors to have better access to information about their open orders and sales history than they do. They are quick to point out, “amazon does it, why can’t you?” Customer service is the best way for a company to differentiate itself. It is even more important for companies that sell commodities like fasteners and industrial supplies. Immediate access to the information you need is critical to meet your customers’ demands. The Business Edge TM puts everything in front of you on customizable screens. Every screen lets you select what you want to see with its unique drag-ndrop optional information grids and optional fields. You determine if a field or a column in a grid is not important to you on any given screen. Simply uncheck a box, and it will be hidden until you change your mind and recheck the box. It’s that easy. Every user can make their screens look the way they want, and the system will remember their settings the next time they call it up. No need to call a programmer to request a change; you can do it yourself. BUSINESS FOCUS ARTICLE CONTINUED ON PAGE 116