Ideas & Opportunities

While many businesses have computerized their jobs, many systems are simply electronic versions of old-school paperwork—word processors for typing, spreadsheets for accounting, e-mail for correspondences, and presentation software for visual aids. These have improved business efficiency minimally. Information, file sharing, and workflow are only as efficient as the procedures devised by the company.  

The old way of computerizing a business was by setting up identical hardware and a uniform software package, updated and upgraded periodically. Microsoft calls such a system “single tier”—when all information is made available to the user by placing all of it in the immediate terminal, or computer, of each and every user. In such a system, the data is requested, copied, shared, and updated periodically across the board to each and every terminal. This is resource intensive and very inefficient.
But good workflows adapt, they’re not stagnant; Good workflows are flexible, they are dynamic. Microsoft’s newest productivity tool, Dynamics, has packaged software integration and efficient workflow into one sweet suite.

Dynamics “fully integrates all aspects of a business’s processes, so that everyone in the company is fully informed,” says Lyn Reyes, manager of Microsoft Dynamics for the Philippines. “Dynamics keeps track of a company’s engineering, manufacturing, purchasing, finance, inventory of materials or products, processing orders, and human resources information. It integrates internal and external management information across an entire organization, embracing finance and accounting, manufacturing, sales and service.”

ONE DATABASE, TWO LEVELS
Imagine what a company auditor has to do in a multi-branch restaurant business: She goes through the books and the POS (point of sale machines) to check daily sales, make projections, and generate reports—which need to be interpreted to help company executives make decisions. Accounting departments use a large part of the same information to manage taxes and purchases. Also, purchasing departments need similar aspects of the same information—to monitor inventory, determine best sellers, and pick products for phasing out.

Instead of restructuring everything in a merged company, Dynamics merges the existing databases in a “two-tier” system, in which the data is stored in one tier and the applications that access the data are on another, called “role centers.” This setup ensures that there is only one database that requires updating.

For example, a purchasing agent’s role center may have a setup that helps him access purchase quotes, prepare purchase orders and reference them to current inventory, and help him prepare analysis reports from the database.  Meanwhile, from the same database an accounting manager’s role center would be configured to help her organize accounts, keep track of VAT statements, and review approved and pending purchase orders.

EVEN FOR SMALL BUSINESS
The Dynamics suite has potential in the small-to-medium business sector, Reyes says. “Small companies can benefit from Dynamics because it will allow them to monitor daily sales and inventory transactions, manage the business processes by having the ability to do scenario-based analysis and make decisions from these information, like responding to BIR (Bureau of Internal Revenue) reporting requirements on time, as well as manage the company’s procurement processes.”

With Dynamics, financial and accounting information is kept up to date in real time, including plotting revenue, actual profit, and cost. It also provides the business with a streamlined customer order tracking system, which keeps up with the status of a customer’s order in real time so customers and employees can access this information instantly.

ERP software like Dynamics also makes it easy to, for instance, spot parts or supplies that are running low and need to be reordered to fulfill future customer orders. It sure beats leafing through boxes of old-school paperwork.