Mentoring Getting your data right

Owned by John Nairn (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Mar 15, 2021 by John Nairn
3 min read

Overview

Getting your Data Right …what to measure/when and how?

Customer data around sending information to automated marketing is a common weakness. Address, role and contact details

Product data is normally something dealers get, we normally have issues with this but we get good progress on addressing the issues:

Office Brands are working on being able to identify the  top level category that would belong to service stock and furniture.  So we can still use those products with automated marketing


Objective of mentoring week 2

Understand how to use tools to improve data, target and plan for improvement

Plan to have contacts completely accurate by the end of the year.  Industries, roles and address data needs a lot of work at most dealers. OB intend to make more use of this going forward.

Procedure

  • Inventory Data:

    • SOH accuracy. VIP. Paradigm: stocktake once, never again.
    • How to improve: scanning in and out | Rolling stocktakes |  detailed pick slips | stock adjustments
    • Purchasing: avg weekly sales or min/max…are you updating min/max?
    • Auto price book updates…what is the price book…how to populate, how to update to product file.
    • Auto Product Updates. Manual vs auto catalogue and flyer loads. Do you know what you do?
    • Ignoring catalogue data.
    • Price book updates…do you know what the price book is?
    • How to automate price updates / use product import audit log
    • What is selling…what is not?   Value Rank on goods.   Min/Max affected.
    • Back order performance report….indicator of how well you are controlling stock.
    • Dead stock view variant..what to do about it and when.
    • Stock accuracy…how? Detailed Picking slips…as stock adjustment sheets. Count everything you pick and check against SOH on pick slip. Objective..never to stocktake again.  Scan check IN and OUT.

  • Customers Data:

    • Who’s performing..who is not!  Lapsed customer view variant (not report).
    • Top 10 AA client reports in CRM.
    • No spend category anaylsis..CRM. TODO: 
    • Update industries and rolls all AA and A clients by next week.
    • Aged debtors…view variant, no report, cases or CRM if share debt collection job.  Email batch for overdue customers..edit wording.  Email batch for account receivable followups.
    • Using Optional Validation Messages to help / remind you to update industries / employees/emails.
    • Putting contact data onto a new tab in sales order module – to update as/when you enter sales orders.
    • Setting default values for customer card creation – helps ensure values are created.

Supplier data

    • Review lead times, trim them to 1 day for Acco.  So your purchase order due dates default to reasonable values. 

  • Sales Order ‘Data’

    • Monthly sales ex…vs same month last year…where?  Management Dashboard.
    • CRM at customer level, Management dashboard at member level.
    • No. of orders processed per month…and average $ value of picking. Where? Management dashboard.
    • No. of lines per sale…good efficiency / delivery measure. TO DO: KPI for spike line for no. of lines per order.
    • Old sales order / DIFOT reports.
    • Use conditioning to: highlight back orders, or low GP margin line items; unshipped orders; new customers; top clients who have ordered.
    • Adding industry and contacts to sales order screen.

    • Use Instock supply type or maximum shipments to limit the number of shipments to customers.

      There is a lot of room to drag blurb onto sales order screen on a new tab, add a new tab for contact details so they can be edited as you process the sale, add GP% to your sales order screen and use conditional formatting to highlight top customers in pink, customers who have never ordered in orange, sale orders with no sale shipment in blue, web orders that have a workflow status other than ready in red. So the sales screen informs you about the status of or sales orders flowing through the business.

    Staff skills review…who does what?

    • Warehouse people should pick, pack, complete…not substitute/delete/reship orders.
    • Customer service 100% responsible for order entry / substitution and order accuracy at point of origin.
    • 1 person to control / double check stock adjustments (or can make it worse)
    • Substitutions to be done at point of order origin.
    • Have clear way of handling / checking and confirming web orders.
    • Finance / payments / payroll / debtors / creditors / bank rec / GST / IAS / workers comp / super…all 1 person?
    • Purchasing: now easy, and is a shared role…purchasing also helps in warehouse when time allows.
    • Inbound phone calls…sharing?
    • Inbound faxes…handled via fax to PC? 1 person has folder shared. Customers that send in faxes are an opportunity to move over to web customers
    • Sharing email folders / accounts across no of people.
    • Who does / checks web orders.
    • Someone to review all shipped sale orders (SALORDS), daily. Use colour variant to make them obvious.
    • Someone to monitor supplier back order ETAs, and ensure supplier lead times are up to date.