Tossing and turning at night is never fun, especially when the cause is concern over work related issues. There is an abundance of literature in medical journals regarding the negative impact on one’s health due stress or to a lack of sleep. Clearly, there would be a lot of demand for a product that could alleviate or even eliminate the stress and let you sleep at night. Even better if the cost of the product was reasonable and it actually allowed you to recoup your investment many times over.
I am sure you have heard the old axiom “if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is”. Well, in this case, I would say this doesn’t apply or at the very least it is worth your time to evaluate the product. What I am talking about is an alert system for your business, based on a set of self-defined rules waiting for an event to happen. The below are some examples of errors that could be prevented or actions that can occur with a proactive automated watch dog protecting your cash and profits while improving processes:
- Shipping a customer order to European address with a US power cord
- Notifying your sales people that one of their accounts just went on credit hold or is within 15% of their credit limit
- A critical part in inventory just went below its safety stock level
- An e-mail to your customers attaching the invoice for orders that shipped today
- An e-mail to your buyer that notifies them about a new Engineering Change Order that will obsolete an inventory item and remind them as the cut-over date approaches
One can certainly make an argument that any one of the above examples where the prevention of an error, cost avoidance, and/or process improvement could very easily pay for the cost of an alerts module all by itself.
Another great example comes from one of our longtime customers. The owner was reviewing his records and was going back a few years to find something. By happenstance, he noticed that an invoice for a product shipment was sent that included a line item that had $0 for its list price. He couldn’t go back to the customer as the event was a few years in the past. This error literally cost him thousands of dollars. Right then and there he decided he didn’t want to even think about this happening again so “in order to sleep at night” he decided to purchase our alerts module.
The bottom line is the number of ways an alert system can help you and your business is almost limited by your imagination and creativity. How about a daily email alert that is sent at 6:00 every evening displaying the day’s bookings, shipments and cash collections amounts by customer?
