Your ability to harness e-Commerce technologies effectively has enormous potential to transform your business and enhance commercial success and growth.

Your customers and suppliers may look increasingly to closer collaboration, to cut production timetables and minimize disruption to their supply chain. This could involve working via their electronic order and supply chain systems to enable streamlining of operations and to reduce margin for error. Multi-organization research and design teams may need to work collaboratively and to achieve this, you must have efficient, secure systems that can deliver and receive information.

SYSPRO facilitates streamlined, secure electronic data interchange and collaborative commerce through features such Document Flow Manager, e.net Solutions, EDI, Office Automation and Messaging, SYSPRO Workflow Services and various Business-to-Business purchase and sales import and export functions. In addition, SYSPRO's Web Applications are out-the-box solutions which you can run on the Internet/Intranet and easily customize to suit end-user requirements.

Quick response times and accuracy in fulfilling orders are critical to your reputation in a diverse and demanding global market. Automated 24/7 customer order placement and acknowledgment is facilitated via SYSPRO's Document Flow Manager and email. In addition, SYSPRO's e.net Solutions enables the rapid development of applications for mobile devices, so that your sales force can check stock and place orders directly into SYSPRO while out visiting customers, thereby improving order turnaround time.

SYSPRO's e.net Solutions can be extended to integrate SYSPRO with other applications, such as shipping companies' tracking systems to determine the shipping status of customer orders. In addition, e.net Solutions facilitates the integration of SYSPRO with scanning and Smart technologies, thereby streamlining picking and packing processes, as well as inventory stock takes.

If your customers include Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) you can import and easily reconcile vendor EDI releases using SYSPRO's Blanket Sales Order module.

Whether you supply pharmaceuticals, food or other fast moving consumer goods, your pricing strategies are built to accommodate a wide variety of customer types in wholesale and retail environments. SYSPRO enables you optimize pricing for a heterogeneous customer base, providing you with the tools to implement and manage your global pricing requirements, and to minimize the costs and effort associated with the administration of trade promotions and deductions.

Comprehensive sales data, along with powerful analysis, querying and reporting tools provide multi-dimensional analysis of product profitability to inform the pricing strategy process, whether it is cost-based, performance-based, market-based, or a mix. In addition, deriving accurate and competitive pricing for commodity or customizable products is easily facilitated by SYSPRO's powerful costing functionality and visibility. Different costing methods per warehouse, quotations, bill of materials, product configurator and what-if costing functionality enables you to derive cost-based quotes and pricing with confidence.

The system accommodates local and foreign pricing techniques, from manual and simple automated pricing to contract pricing and complex trade promotions pricing and discounting. Sales order entry and electronic capture is streamlined through pricing automation based on customer and/or stock code matrices, and contract pricing at customer and/or buying group level by product or product group. Discounted, foreign and quantity-break pricing methods are catered for, as well as profit margin controls. The import, export and global price update facilities enable seamless implementation of extensive price changes.

Essential for suppliers of retail and wholesale customers, SYSPRO's Trade Promotions module facilitates the creation of rules that govern pricing, promotions, special offers, and rebates, as well as improved promotions tracking. In addition, the system's powerful rebate, accruals and deductions management functionality promotes fast, accurate invoicing and reconciliation, and improved cash flow management. Optional integration to SYSPRO's General Ledger module facilitates complete management and reconciliation of associated financial transactions.

Various tools exist in SYSPRO to facilitate placement and picking within a warehouse. The multiple bins facility and ability to set it on or off at warehouse levels is one of these. Picking by bin, provides for picking lists to be generated in bin numbering sequence.

The Warehouse Management solution provides many more sophisticated rules around warehouse storage, picking and put away procedures.

SYSPRO provides the tools to help you optimize your inventory investment without sacrificing customer service. It enables you to effectively plan and control diverse and extensive product lines in a single or multi-warehouse environment, facilitating the creation of warehouses and bin locations to represent both physical and virtual stock locations.

Whether you stock, sell, purchase or manufacture items by unit, weight, volume, pack or container size, SYSPRO's multiple units of measure per stock item give you the flexibility to accurately record and track stock quantities. Product version control is automated through the Engineering Change Control module, while extensive master data enables you to define parameters for transacting in sales, purchasing and manufacturing.

Inventory optimization functionality aids the sales and operation planning process. Decision-making on desired levels of inventory and customer service is enhanced through the graphical output from its powerful Pareto analysis and forecasting tools. Master information such as order policies, gross requirements rules, lead times, safety stock and minimum/maximum levels assist in planning replenishment. Extensive costing facilities ensure accurate costing of sales, purchase and manufacturing activities. Costing methods are available by warehouse and include the average, standard, last, FIFO, LIFO methods. Furthermore the system provides the ability to track actual and activity-based costs. The custom forms feature gives you the freedom to define your own fields for the capture of details, such as hazardous goods information, enabling you to include these in your queries, reports and transaction documentation. Also, you can add standard notations per item for automatic inclusion in various transactions such as sales orders, purchase orders and jobs, as well as link multimedia files to key data.

SYSPRO's serial tracking and lot traceability features facilitate the tracking of materials from purchase through production to customer, thereby providing you with the tools to manage product recalls, should they occur, and the optional 2-phased receipting for purchased and manufactured products provides inspection control. The Goods in Transit system gives you comprehensive quantity, variance and cost control over inter-warehouse transfers, as well as providing input into SYSPRO's Distribution Requirements Planning. The Stock Take system enables you to select on a range of criteria and continue transaction processing once the physical count is complete, so operations are not delayed while the count is being captured. Import facilities are available and you can run a number of verification and variance reports to highlight stock take exceptions and provide the necessary checks before confirmation.

SYSPRO's integrated nature and powerful reporting and query facilities give you visibility to detailed stock statuses and transaction history, while perpetual inventory costing provides at-a-glance valuation of stock holdings by warehouse and stock code. Queries include summary stock code quantities, such as warehouse on-hand, on-order, available, free, in-transit, in-inspection, allocated and backordered, as well as the ability to drill-down to supporting detail. Extensive reporting is available including detailed kardex movements, identification of obsolete, slow-moving and excessive inventories, as well as reports on summary inventory quantities and exceptions based on various stock level criteria. In addition, the Office Automation and Messaging module provides the ability to create alerts and events which are automatically fired when inventory exceptions, such as 'below minimum' occur.

SYSPRO powerful functionality enables the efficient synchronization of supply and demand, thereby helping you to reduce inventory, obsolescent stocks and lead time to your customers.

In industries where rapid innovation is critical to remaining competitive and trends (such as Moore's Law) continue to apply downward pressure on revenues, strategies to optimize inventory without sacrificing customer service and quality are essential. SYSPRO's Inventory, Inventory Optimization and Requirements Planning modules provide the tools to help reduce forecast error, manage seasonality and optimize inventories to meet customer service targets.

SYSPRO enables you to automate and streamline order-to-delivery processes, and provides complete visibility to an integrated picture of your operations, thereby enabling efficient management of operations in rapidly shifting demand environments. The Inventory Optimization suite provides comprehensive tracking and analysis of forecasts, as well as slow-moving, excess, active and static stocks. Its powerful features enable accurate obsolescence provisioning, product rationalization programs and targeted promotions on slow-moving and end-of-life stocks.

Excess component, work-in-progress and finished goods inventory is further mitigated through the use of SYSPRO's powerful forecasting and material requirements planning (MRP) features. These provide a complete view of independent and dependent demand and supply, as well as accurate time-phased requirements with comprehensive pegging. Component-to-operation linking, along with order policy, lead time and time fence features, enable accurate JIT-based materials replenishment.

For those businesses not requiring full-scale MRP but a simpler derivative, SYSPRO offers Advanced Trial Kitting, which you can run based on a range of user-selected criteria thereby ensuring that you order only the materials that you require. Additionally, true order-linked pull replenishment is provided through sales order- and purchase order-to-job linking and multi-level trial kitting, which enable the automatic raising and linking of the relevant supply orders via simple review.

SYSPRO Factory Scheduler facilitates the efficient preparation and execution of achievable production schedules and assists the production area in quickly implementing the necessary changes when order profiles vary from plan. Additionally, materials-constraint scheduling helps to prevent the accumulation of excess Work In Progress inventories.

Efficient automation, management and tracking of product life cycles is provided through the Inventory, Bill of Materials and Engineering Change Control modules, thereby streamlining time-to-market processes, while efficient warehouse and shelf life management is provided through SYSPRO's powerful inventory, warehouse management, lot tracking and serial tracking functionality.

Whether you supply original equipment manufacturers, diverse retailers, after-sales service outlets, or distribute product to your own distribution centers, effective planning and control of your inventory and order fulfillment activities is essential for operational efficiency and maximum profitability. SYSPRO provides a real-time integrated view of business operations, as well as the means to manage large diverse inventories and to plan and execute sophisticated warehouse replenishment and order fulfillment requirements. Efficient replenishment planning and fulfillment per warehouse is facilitated through SYSPRO's Distribution Requirements Planning, multi-warehouse and Goods in Transit functionality. The system caters for warehouse-specific costs and order policies, backorders, inter-warehouse lead times, optional inclusion of transfer costs and detailed transfer documentation. Furthermore, the Goods in Transit system enables detailed control, reconciliation and balancing of inter-warehouse transfers.

Distributors supplying major retailers and original equipment manufacturers (OEM) would be challenged to optimize customer service and expand distribution capabilities without e-business capability. SYSPRO's Web Applications enable you to provide your global customers and remote sales force with the convenience of secure 24/7 access to order placement, as well as to queries on pricing, stock availability, detailed statements and order statuses. In addition, sophisticated automated order placement and acknowledgement is facilitated through SYSPRO's e.net solutions and Document Flow Manager. This is further enhanced by SYSPRO's stock code interchange feature which enables customers to query stock and enter orders using their own part numbers.

Customer order fulfillment is managed through SYSPRO's sophisticated sales order picking and dispatch features, while SYSPRO's Customer Relationship Manager and Return Merchandise Authority modules provide the means to manage, control and analyze customer returns and credits. While simple, extended and contract pricing are standard features of the Sales Order module, the Trade Promotions Management module provides complex pricing functionality for distributors, including promotions, rebates and accruals. The Blanket Sales Order module enables SYSPRO customers to easily update call-off schedules for their OEM clients, as well as to reconcile the cumulative position against their OEM contracts.

In environments where materials and product replenishment planning is largely based on demand forecasts, the forecasts must be as accurate as possible so as to minimize the costs associated with inaccuracies, such as redundant stock and poor customer service. While forecasting is, by definition, an inexact science, its purpose is to improve the quality of predictions, and tracking the forecast error is an essential part of this process.

SYSPRO's Forecasting module provides tools to enable you to track and evaluate your forecasts, as well as to identify the possible causes of forecast errors. These tools assist you in optimizing your forecasts to produce the best possible outcome. The Forecasting module enables the entry of manual forecasts, as well as the automatic generation of forecasts via a variety of forecast algorithms, including those that compute for trends, seasonality and cyclical events. In addition, the module provides a competition forecasting method (also known as focus forecasting or the tournament method) which attempts to select the most suitable forecast algorithm, based on a selected error measurement and your recent SYSPRO sales history data. This enables you to compare results to determine which method is the most suitable for any particular item, whether you forecast on products at code, revision, release, or warehouse level. A tracking signal is used to indicate when the validity of the forecast might be in doubt; those items with high forecast errors are highlighted and can be reviewed and adjusted as required.

Forecast accuracy depends not only on the regular evaluation of the forecast error, but also on the integrity and nature of the source data. In SYSPRO, forecast accuracy is enhanced through the ability to automatically filter and adjust outliers, as well as to manually adjust forecast base data for quantitative and qualitative factors. Reports and queries provide comparisons between actual sales, and suggested, draft and approved forecasts.

SYSPRO's Inventory Optimization and Forecasting modules enable you to minimize forecast error and manage seasonality, thereby helping you to reduce your inventory investment, and improve order fulfilment performance. This is further enhanced by features such as Available-to-promise and various time fence indicators, which give sales and production staff a reliable view of what they can promise to customers and when.

SYSPRO's Material Requirements Planning gives you clear visibility to the integrated effect of current and future supply and demand, thereby enabling you to make better purchasing and production decisions and reduce excess and obsolete inventories. The inclusion of sources of supply and demand is configurable and various reports and related review programs enable easy potential oversupplies and seamless execution of suggested actions. In addition, order policies by stock code at warehouse level enable you to implement lot-sizing rules for purchased and manufactured items.

In make-to-order environments, where a full material requirements planning run may not be required, features such as Advanced Trial Kitting provide full visibility to replenishment requirements for multi or single-level jobs. The purchase order to job link enables purchased or subcontracted materials to be receipted directly into specific jobs.

Standard reports such as the Inventory Exception and the MRP Potential Oversupplies report help you identify excess inventories and possible problems with your lot-sizing techniques.