Streamline your sales order workflow in Canada

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good afternoon everyone and welcome to today's webinar five reasons to use automated workflows in your ERP solution we know your time is valuable and we appreciate you sharing some of it with us today now with that said I'd like to introduce our two presenters our first speaker is dan Griffin who serves as director of product management product marketing for exact macola division located in Dublin Ohio as part of the senior leadership team Dan guides a vision of the McCulloch product line overseas product market activities that serves as one of the primary representatives from the cola brand our second speaker is Dave dozer senior product manager who has over a decade of experience in the IT in the erp industry with the background and hardware and networking accounting and distribution application development quality assurance and leadership experience is a veritable cornucopia of expertise oh now with that said I'd like to kick this off and pass it over to Dan who's going to start us off here all right Thank You Nate but thank you everyone for joining this should be a lot of fun thanks Nick for the introduction we have have we've had a really good turnout for the webinar here and so please if you'd like to ask questions please do so I think this will be a lot of fun and very informative so let's go ahead and get started you know today we're talking about automation and I think that's a really important topic and one of the things that that we did here is that when you registered for this webinar there was a question in that registration and we've compiled the statistics here and the question was what would be the most valuable benefit of automated workflows for your business I'm overwhelmingly this kind of surprised me overwhelmingly what you guys said was that you were looking to reduce the manual effort the paperwork the busy work that you wanted to increase productivity so um while I think all of these are important it looks like the the idea of getting rid of that that that manual step kind of what I think of as the drudgery work you know that the stuff do you think there's got to be a better way that's what you guys nativists will definitely touch on that in fact that actually flows pretty well into you know something I was thinking about the other day my wife has been in a mode where she's cleaning up the house and was selling you know if you haven't used this cell this clean this up get rid of this and so you know every time that we go through this I kind of have this love/hate relationship with ebay and and what I mean by that is I always have these intentions of man i'm going to sell all this stuff on ebay and i do a few things and you know you take the pictures you post them on the page somebody buys it then you got to box it up you got away the box you got to print the label and you get y'all your packaging and all this kind of stuff and every time I do it I say I'm never doing that again right because every time I do it I think it's just not worth the thirty or forty dollars that i made from that effort you know the interesting thing is i think to myself if i could automate that like if i were a store selling you know 10,000 of these same items it wouldn't be a big deal right you'd have it automated you'll be able to batch it in ways that makes economies of scale and so it's the same thing right it'sit's if i had an automated process that would be so much more streamline a bowl so much more it makes so much more sense for me as an ebay seller well you know that's how that's how it is in the business world too and that's what we're going to be talking about today is is ways that we could use automation to take out that human element that human you know it's not just time value of money but it's money value of time right what's our money value of time when we're doing these things that we can automate so let's take a look at our first poll question Nick's going to put a poll up in the webinar tool here how many automated workflows does your business currently have in place be curious to see what you guys say here so how many more employees are you currently using today all right it's about what I expected was it it would be somewhere between zero and maybe a few and that is exactly what we see here is that thirty-one percent of you said what automated workflows we don't have any 51% said we have a few so eighty-two percent of you are in this category of zero maybe a few for lucky right so that's what we want to fix here with what we can do with Nicole attend automation you know in our last webinar we told you this this story about automation and essentially automation first has to come in a first thing you have to do is you have to figure out how we're going to take this chaotic process and turn it into something resembling order and so to do that first you actually have to think about what that process should be and take that chaos and line it up into definable actions that goes step one to step 2 2 step 3 to step 4 and on down the line and so on our animation here basically it's you know take that chaotic order and put it into a one two three four five order once you have that one two three four five that's when you can start to automate big chunks of it so instead of delaying when something gets to an inbox because nobody checked that inbox in a week let's set up automation to do it right let's let's take away multiple data entries so we can do we can then start to automate large chunks of that and so we use that example in the last webinar I felt that really resonated but I want to talk about where where else can we automate well I've made some examples here in sales finance operations customer service HR for example in sales maybe you want to set follow-up awards for prospects or get notified when one of your main customers has had their order filled and shipped maybe you want to flag past due accounts if you're in operations maybe you want to know about inventory items that are moving really fast to really slowly maybe you want to let customers know about their warranty is about to expire or that that three-year long maintenance contract they sign is about to come up for renewal right you can automate all these things maybe you want to keep an eye on the on the overtime situation with your with your workers down in the shop for so all of these things are things that can be automated another way to slice and dice that is to think not about departments but to think about the different values that we get out of that so for example these are the things that you guys voted on right reducing manual effort maybe we want to autumn automatically reorder an item in our warehouse when it gets down to a certain level of inventory for bottlenecks maybe we want to get an alert if certain personnel are not available or if something didn't start if an order didn't start being produced by the day which we said it had to be produced to hit that Indian date right so these are things that we can set up awards and it really the thing to remember about automation is it set up in a triggers and actions kind of format so the way that we think about this is everything is a trigger and inaction what's a trigger maybe it's something around inventory maybe it's something around production and then what's in action let's take a look at what are some of our customers are saying you know I don't know if you guys know this but on our website McCullough calm we do have customer success stories we have a lot of videos out there and I pulled some quotes out of some videos Don McCall from GL Mazetti he told us that in one department we dropped four hours every day on one task and that's just by using workflows and document management making you guys imagine how much money that is four hours a day every day basically that's a that's a half time headcount that they eliminated by just automating some some processes in their business so that's a huge money driver for them another quote is from Todd keski at foam supplies and he talked about going from paper to electronic format so he said taking paper from the department's like production actually putting it into an electronic format there was a familiarity going from paper straight to the screen a cup the training necessary to a bare minimum so the way that they did this was uh you know they created these paper these electronic forms to look just like paper and that was something they were able to do a small step they were able to automate instead of going from paper or going on to paper and then into the system they could take it right into the system in the first step so you know I talked about triggers and actions right so we've looked at some triggers what are some of the actions that we can take out of the system well maybe you want to when a trigger happens you want to create a task in a workflow maybe you want to update data in mikkola maybe you want to create a document in your document management maybe you want to do a notification right in that notification or alert could come in the form of a text message maybe it's in the form of the email or if you're still using facts we can handle that as well maybe you wanted to kick off a web service and that could be internally you know web service inside mikkola or inside your business if you could call a webservice somewhere out on the internet right and then of course you can save things two logs you can generate PDF crystal reports these are all the actions that you get to take after you find that triggered mechanism you know so all of it is do you want to be alerted how so do you want to be alerted you wanted to go into a log you want to send an email right so the sky's the limit when you start combining triggers with actions now when Dave comes on the line here in a few minutes he is going to give a demo and in his demo he's going to show how we handle this in six key areas sales opportunities order processing supply chain production logistics and finance but I thought before bringing Dave on the line here I would just sort of step through these and talk about what are those KPIs that you want to track in each department and what are some some ideas for things that you might want to automate take a look at the first one here sales opportunities what are some KPIs we might want to look at there but we might want to track our or lead response time example we might want to track how often we're contacting our customers right so that those are KPI so how do we do it how do we do an automation well maybe we set up flags around average sales prices that are above or below a certain number maybe we flag sales reps calendars that have tons of appointments or not enough appointments maybe we send emails to every new customer on their first order offering them a coupon or maybe we send them an email on their first order saying here's our frequently asked questions document that you can reference right so that's all having to do with sales order processing kind of the same thing there's just a little bit further down the down the path of production so in order processing you have kpi's like wins and losses or you know are you are you hitting your on time delivery rates so what are some things you might want to look at all you might want to know when a large order it comes in you know we ordered some pizza here in the office a few weeks ago and the pizza didn't show up for three hours and finally I called and I said are you know did you guys lose my order or what's up you know it's like two thirty in the afternoon our pizza never arrived and they told me oh sorry about that we got a large order right in front of you we had to run 75 pizzas or something like that right in front of yours right that's a problem and they didn't have any way to handle that it literally just blocked everyone else from getting their order for apparently two or three hours of a prime lunchtime pizza delivery so you know we would want to be alerted about that kind of thing and maybe we'd have some automation set up to to only allow half of the production or to be used on the large order while not blocking the others right so these are all things that just want to be alerted you want to know what's going on in your or so that you don't always have to be watching everything because nobody can write no human can watch everything that a program can watch supply chain is another element you know you want to know about your inventory turns you want to know about you know how much you're selling versus what you have in stock so maybe you want to send some some invoices your check the status of invoices if they've been open for a while you know hey these have been sitting there for you know 31 Days nobody done anything with it that's a problem right so it's just an alert that you can trigger on invoices maybe if you have X number of invoices that haven't been looked at or if you know if they need approvals or they've been sitting there with no action there's tons of stuff that you can do there or maybe you got an order for Part B and Part B is dependent on Part A and they didn't order part a right maybe we want to find that as a dependency and make sure the customer understands what they're doing that oh yeah okay they meant to do that they've already got tons of parties dates and part B's right because we can prevent those kind of errors and those kind of customer satisfaction issues by setting up some checks and balances if we go down the line here the next one down is production you know we want to think about things like order to lead time and you know are we delivering things on time to our customers so things we might want to set up is if we've got supplies that need to arrive that need to arrive by x date in order for us to hit our delivery date and if that doesn't hit or if they haven't been shipped like let's think a little bit further out they haven't been shipped by five days before that's going to be a problem we need to be alerted to that maybe we want to know that exchange rates you know hey if we're selling to to Mexico or China or wherever even Canada you know exchange rates fluctuate and if we're not taking other hedging methods then that's going to impact our business we need to be alerted to that logistics definitely an issue you know what are some things that we need to know well if your inventory falls below a certain level or if if the order was placed at 9am and it hasn't been picked by 12pm you know three hours later what's going on is there an issue when when something does actually go out the door is that shipping confirmation is that tracking number being saved to the customer record let's do that automatically don't pay someone to go cut and paste a tracking number into a customer record have a system do that for you so six weeks from now when the customer says they never got part XYZ you can say well it was shipped on this aight the tracking number was this it was delivered on this date and signed for by this person right let's let all of that be automated in your system and finally as we walk down the line here finance and invoicing we want to know things about accounts payable and accounts receivable you know what do we have this past due what bills have we not paid you know that we're in danger of going past due what do people owe us you know are we sending out payment reminders to our customers you know you want to get more money in your door faster sometimes it helps just to send a little reminder and that will trigger Heyman and actually increase your working capital on hand and all of that can be done you know automatically you know Nick didn't send out these webinar reminders manually right that was done automatically by the webinar system and of course that helps drive webinar attendance so it's just little things like that that take things off of your manual plate and put them into your automated plate so we're going to go to another poll here and then it's going to be Dave Stern to actually show you in the system how to do some of the stuff that we've been talking about so I'm going to turn it over to Nick and let's see if we can get this second poll up here I'll he's doing that I'll tell you the question is which area of your business do you believe would benefit the most from automation should be able to choose something there so the winner is sales and order processing but clearly everywhere everyone has a you know all of these got some boats and sales order processing came out on top but not too far above production and financing and invoicing so I think it just goes to show that everyone sees value in a lot of these different categories so that's a good thing and I think this is a great point for me to turn it over to Dave and he's gonna you know I trouble and tell me I've been talking too much and let's let's actually see some of this product that's quite all right all right perfect well I appreciate the handoff there Dan and so we're just going to take some time here and run through some real life examples I'm hoping as we go through these you guys are kind of me thinking of those areas and those pieces that Dan this pointing out there we're just going to show some pretty basic examples of what you can do with the automation tools and also take a look at how that ties into workflows and doctorate management and the sales side and really how the automation piece and the workflow piece can be so many different things and really comes down to putting those lego pieces so to speak together in a way that makes sense for your business so what we're showing today definitely isn't going to be the end-all be-all for for what you can do with automation but certainly there's just a plethora of things that we can accomplish with the tools that are in there so to kind of we're going to break it down into sections here and kind of focus on on on some small little tidbits on as we go into each piece so the first one here is we run through on the sales opportunity piece we're going to take a look at a lead coming in from a website for instance so someone fills out a request for information on your website so the the automation piece can then actually take that create a workflow request for the sales person to follow up on and create the cuspidor the prospect and the contact and the crm system so let's take a look at how that would work so I'm on my CRM dashboard here and you look under my workflow there and I've got a web inquiry so that actually came in from someone on the outside world filling in the information you'll see here wit created the test bike for me so a brand new prospect it's not relate you know not me having to type that in or anything and then when I go back to that request that's going to tell me I need to follow up with this person so we're using the workflow engine to drive me as a salesperson to interact with John Johnson here at the test bike company where it's a lot of times that would go to just a group email or something like that and you'll see here so now Bob's owning this and we're giving John a call and hopefully this is going to turn into into something else but the account the contact on that account and this web inquiry that we're working off of we're all automatically created you know through the through the automation system so we're going to kind of take a look at the other side of automation though is it revolves around quoting and ordering and if we pull our account back up here so I'm going to pull up my test bike account that I'm you know again came in automatically and we're going to go ahead and we're going to create an opportunity for this account as well so now this is a manual process where we're going to see some automation happen on the back end of this process so I'm going out and I'm selecting a on sales cycle and the sales cycles themselves are made up of different workflows that a better set up within the within the system here so what that's going to allow us to do is in create this automated process of tracking the CRM opportunity all the way through from the inception to the point where we hopefully get a quote and in an order form so I'm just putting in some various information here and in this case you'll see i'm going to manually fill out on that the source for for this one came from from that web inquiry now we could automatically create these opportunities as well you know when when that account comes in Oh save whoops I forgot to put the contact in there so we'll get John on there and save that but what the automation piece does in with that opportunity is now that's going to create a flow of workflow request to track this all the way through the system so you'll see this proposal development request was automatically generated because I put that opportunity in the system and each one of these workflows can look a little bit different capture different pieces of information through the course of the project so you see I've got project numbers and different things on there so I'm going to prove that out now this is a three step one so once I complete this what this is going to do for me is actually create another request a proposal review and then if I go back into my proposal development here and when I go up to process flow I'm going to be able to see everything that needs to happen in this cycle and in this process and I'm not having to manually create each one of these steps the system automatically doing that for me as I go through and tracking that and then I have full visibility you know into into that whole process without having to to manually fill out paperwork or spreadsheets or anything like that so again a very simple example of where we can automate what traditionally would be a email heavy flow or a paperwork heavy type of flow the next one we're going to take a look at is centered around order processing and again this is often a very manually intensive type of process and then a lot of times customers meet on paperwork they need validation that you put the order didn't order in that you put the order in correctly and then there's a lot of things that can happen along the way that can impact that order going through properly so in this example we're still the sales guy and we're going to we're going to pretend that that we got the order from from that opportunity that we put in so we're just going to put in an order here real quick you can see again this is a manual process that we're actually going to be supplementing with the with the automation piece and the workflow tool so the key is the automation and the workflow don't have to exist necessarily in a in a vacuum / say that this ties into your normal everyday processes so we'll save the order header here and then we're just going to go ahead and order our bike AS item now this is another area where if there were issues with margin anything like that we would be able to create an automated workflow or an email to to let someone know that you know maybe we sold under margin something to that effect now since that order has been placed what we want to do then is actually see you know send down an order of knowledge meant so you know general you'd have to do that manually and and send the print the report send it to PDF sent it to an email but here will see that automatically generated an email with that order tied to it out to the customer and we have that attached in a PDF format here so that just the automation tool was looking for that order to have been put in and we automatically sent that out now that's the external communication with the customer the automation tool also lets us act internally as well so let's say I pull that same customer back up we're going to go out to customer 901 here so at the same time that it sent that email out if I look in the document management system it also put a copy of that order acknowledgement on the customer card for a customer as well so you'll see there at the top there we've got a type of sales order confirmation in order acknowledgement 753 and that same PDF is attached to the card so if customer calls back in and says hey I didn't receive the order acknowledgement or there was some sort of issue with that sales reps and just come in and pull that up on their account card and shoot it right back out in an email so lots of cool ways that we can automate interacting with our customers and and communicate with them now let's say that that order 753 is on backorder and we don't want Bob to have to be checking on that constantly so we can have the automation system polling orders in San hey this is on backorder and in this case we just automatically created a simple task to let bob know that um it's on backorder so he's going to drill down in here pull up the email for harry mason the contact on the order they're automatically opened the email client and now he can just shoot off an email you know to the to the contact on the customer there that is something we can automate but in this case we want to kind of combine automation with them that human touch of it coming from Bob and not from the automated email system but that would also be very possible that we could just go directly to the contact and let them know that hey your order is on backorder so there's lots of different ways to mix and match those communications as we're setting up the different events so now we go back to our workflow open the task up and Bob can say hey I communicated this to the to the customer and we've got a record that that happened and that it's been communicated and he can realize this task and beyond be done with that so one of the other things with the automation and workflow is we're creating transparency where everyone and anyone can basically see what's going on at at any given time the next story we want to look at is around supply chain so we put an order in and maybe maybe the components on that order we're short some so we're going to need to order some some new material for that or maybe in some examples we need to set up a new item even that maybe we haven't ordered before to be able to make that and we want some automation and some transparency into that process as well so those are the two examples that we're going to dig into here a little bit so in this case we were short some bolts and we're going to log into our purchasing persona here and take a look at the system here as if we're Jack Davis are our purchasing agent so because we had a shortage of material from that previous order with what the automation system did is automatically created a materials purchase request and will see that there in jax workflow and this is telling Jack because that order was put in we now have a shortage on this item we need to go out and order this particular item so it's given him the quantity that were short who the preferred vendor is and all the information around that so he can drill right into the vendor from the workflow there take a look at any purchase orders it may already be open so again combining the automation with the manual piece of it and the human eye he says okay we don't have anything coming in for that amount so I'm going to go ahead and create a purchase order for this now that's another step that you could look at automating but a lot of times same pace you like to like to get some some eyes on it so we're going to put the p.o header in and then we're going to enter the bolt item that were short so we can't make our bicycle until we get these bolts into stock here so Jack's going to go ahead and finish the order and then make sure type the quantity in right here like messed it up their sets another good example where we could add some automation and so if we put that in at the 1050 instead of on 1500 we could say hey this is way over our normal ordering quantity so now he's going to be able to go back in right here from the supplier account and say that he's completed this now again this could be supplemented with some additional steps as well to automatically send this to the next apartment if there's some sort of approval needed or even create the p.o right from that particular request so the next piece I want to look at is if we didn't have an item set up at all and we needed to go through a whole approval process to do that so I'm logging in here Sally or engineering person and she's got a new item creation request in her workflow there that she needs to pull up so if maybe you're familiar with some of the older versions of mikkola you'll see we've got a lot of the same information that you would find on an item master and probably in any ERP system you're going to see similar data so this is where I'm workflow and automation and data are all converging so we see all the different pieces of information that they need to be collected to create a new item you'll see at the top we've got a whole slew of steps so create prove realize process so what this allows us to do is collect that information from different departments and then that move that through the logical steps there and at that final process stage the automation system is actually going to take that data and push that into the back office as a created item so you're combining the interactions that generally have to happen between different departments and creating an actual transaction off of that interaction and create a logical transparent type of flow as you move from department to department so next we're going to take a look at a production and so we've got that order sitting out there and you know they haven't been able to work on it yet because some of those components for missing that we had to actually go out in order so we're kind of taking a leap of faith here and we're skipping over the step where you'd actually receive that p 0 n but in this case we're going to say hey we want to notify the production people that we've got the components in stock now and are able to begin production on that particular order that that's tied to so I'm going to login is my production person here as on as Bruce and some of these can be as simple or as complex as a you one v you see we had a task they're sitting in Bruce's workflow that was automatically generated from the fact that a purchase order was received so this is just a simple notification saying that hey for this customer order for this item over here the bolts we now have the material to complete that that he can verify that by drawing down and looking at the inventory for that and saying hey I now have that in stock and my Boston plan here where I received that in so again he can double check that the automated system is in line with the with the real world scenario as well say hey everything looks good now we can go ahead and and start production on this so again another simple example where we're letting Bruce know but we have tracking that goes all the way through that as well now those anyone look at on the production side is talking a little bit about quality and how the automation piece and the workflow piece can tie into quality as well so this again could be automated or not but let's say we need to enter a corrective action so this is something where we could use the workflow engine and say hey these bolts were messed up so let's collect the data and be able to derive some kpi's around why these um bolts and any other items were messed up so in this case I'm the guy as he was receiving dropped the box of bolts on the floor we're going to say it was from count 500 hear what I want to do with them we're going to use them as is so this is going back to talking about those KPIs and allowing us to start start collecting those and getting data out of the system as well so here on we say Susie is responsible for this so what this is also doing is creating that automated workflow where an action took place and we need it to go to someone else in order for something to happen for someone to take action on that and and do something with it felt shoot and say I've picked myself out there and have them put a date in so we got our validations in there so now we've created that and again we can have that picked up that could be part of a corrective action type of report quality analysis you know we're collecting all this data and all that ties back into the automation and the workflow pieces next we're going to take a quick look at a couple cool little things we can do on the on the shipping side both with them the automation piece and then also using the workflow piece and some unique ways to be able to capture and tie notes to a to an order so i'm going to log in here is my shipping person so the shipping person I've got a whole list of orders I'm going to put in my required ship dates here and then that's going to generate a whole list of orders for me that I need to ship out today so I'm going to see that order 753 that we've kind of been working with here I'm sorry 736 getting dyslexic on us here so i can take actions on this but i can also let's say i want to put a note comments on this order so I'm going to go and leave a comment on this let's see we have a very simple one-step workflow now let's say this is going to ship late and eventually we come back and say why did this ship out late now I've got a mechanism that I can capture those notes to say you know let's say Fred so this is going to ship out late and it's because I look outside here in the office it's raining today so I don't feel like going outside and unloading the truck necessarily so it's going to ship today instead of tomorrow so what this replaces though is the need for a you know for Peter just send an email to Bob and let him know that that theme that this order can't ship so in this particular instance it's a one-step workflow and as we refresh our screen here we're going to see that creates a little note for me beside that particular order so in this case Bob would come out and need to look at that but again we could add an additional step that and then that's going to automatically notify the salesperson that the order is going to ship out late you see here I'm getting that information you can pull it up and and view that note so not to reiterate it but we're adding transparent transparency to the process here let's say that order ships out tomorrow everything is great but now we want to let the customer know with the order shipped we can automatically send the email here with a tracking number in it now this is an old tracking number we can create that hyperlink right in the tracking number pull off the UPS worldship system FedEx whatever the carrier might be and we're doing that straight from the email and you know without a human as Dan mentioned earlier having to copy and paste a tracking number into an email and send it someone we're just letting the automation system see that the orders got out and popping that information into that email and I'm doing kind of a advanced shipment note notification of sorts there now the final piece you want to touch on here is on the finance and invoicing side we're going to look at a couple different pieces here so the the automation of sending out and boys to to customers so we've taken that order all the way through we've build it shipped it invoice today it's always a pain to print the end voices and stuff them in envelopes and sometimes I guess you just have to do that with some customers but you know moving forward it's really great to be able to just have that automatically go out as an invoice and then we're going to look at another unique way of using the system to capture notes around when somebody's not paying why they're not paying so first let's take a look here we've invoiced and now if we go out and take a look at our email here we see that invoice 518 has gone out to the customer as a PDF so again you know we can pull that up it's going to act just like any other PDF would but similar to what we did with the order acknowledgement for internal purposes we can go and now pull that customer back up and we're going to go back into the document management system and we see that that on sales invoices automatically been attached as a document to that particular customer again automatically without anyone having to intervene with it or do anything so we've got a record within the system that that end voice went out and we can always go back and resend that if if we need to without having to go and print anything or do anything like that or print it or do what we need to with it so there's a lot of value in getting that loaded up without them having to do a whole lot with it and then we can also you know as we're looking at these we can switch our types so we're using the automation to to create a lot of different types of documents for the internal system here so we can search on those we can do a lot of different pieces with that and then we can configure this screen as well to do quite a few things and you know as we're tying the automation in there we're creating this whole repository of data and information to be able to sort things you see we've got a lot of options around how you can slice and dice us so it goes further than just automation and workflows in there so the final piece want to take a look at here we're going to login as our finance person and we're going to use the workflow pieces to to take a look at capturing data related around collections now again we could automate a lot of pieces with collections and and send out statements and reminders in this case we're going to look at a simple example of we're just looking at our aging and we're going to drill down into a particular customer here and we're going to see all their outstanding invoices so now let's say we want to track the communications with that customer we can drill down into the notes section and we can either edit an existing node or we can create a new note but what this is going to do for us is allow us to use the workflow engine and then if we want to automate this and send it to different folks for different approval levels we have the ability to do that so we're just going to put in a new note here with a type of sales invoice when you see again this is one of those one-step workflows and we're just going to say we contacted this person again so we're creating a whole bunch of data related to this and we have the ability to pull that up again and and edit that what that does is let us keep this in the system without having to go outside of it and anyone else that comes in is going to be able to see that and then we can also as you know you have certain past due dates we can kick off pieces to descend to account managers or send them up chain if if we need to so it's the last piece of that and again those were some pretty simple ones you know that we wanted to demonstrate you can do with the automation and the workflow pieces it can be very simple or it can be you know very complex to support big processes with a lot of different steps and those pieces can be automated along the way there so with that I want to go ahead so it back over to Dan and leave us with some parting thoughts here okay sure thanks Dave um let me also mention that we've gotten a lot of questions in the the box down here will take some some time to try to answer as many of those as we can a couple of them that I've had come up several times what tool are we using for the automation the answer to that is its exact event manager so this is not anything third-party this is built into mikkola 10 and most of what Dave showed actually I think maybe all of it is is available in 10 prior to 10 for I don't think any of this was something we released in 10 for right now that functionality was like brand spanking new rights or even if your urgent exactly so as long as your own 10 dot something you should have that functionality so let's go ahead and cover these last couple slides and we'll do this we'll do some of the QA you know the the automated workflows I hope what you guys took away from this is that it really is like having extra employees employees who work 24-7 who never call in sick who always have their eyes open watching what's going on in your business right and so you know you can use automation as as a time-saver you can use it as an error reducer you can use it as something to help you mitigate risk you can help it you can help get rid of the paper I made your office by automating things directly into mikkola so there's a lot of things that we can do with automation and a lot of ways to make your business more profitable you know from either reducing expenses or increasing revenues so this picture here may may look familiar to you if you're on mikkola 10 basically this is just a quick reminder of what functionality is built into mikkola 10 you've got manufacturing project management distribution quality accounting HR and crm now those are the core pieces in addition to that you also get business process management automation and our sizable working spaces so all of that comes out of the box with mccollough 10 and the core tenants of McCollough 10 I was just waiting for the screen to paint their the the core tenants of McCollough 10 you know when I think about what is mccollough 10 mean it's an all-inclusive solution it's integrated in the end it's based on a web services model and that means it's browser based it's using modern architecture it'sit's has external API is available we can expose our api's we can consume external api's and finally this idea of any time any device right whether it's a phone or a tablet or a desktop or a browser you can use McCollough 10 all right well for additional info we're doing a couple things that you might be interested in one of course is a replay of this webinar will be sending that out second is a post webinar survey um but also will be doing a full-on demo next week and I want to encourage you to come to that Davey's got some really good stuff cooked up there you know we have some work spaces now that really just look top notch as far as you know modern erp software and we're able to do that with our workspaces technology that we rolled out in 10 dot 3 was that 10 3 or 10 4 we introduced widgets ok so its end up for I get my versions mixed up sometimes I tend out for we introduce widgets we call those workspaces 20 and so Dave's got some really cool stuff lined up that we can do with those widgets well I will be sending out some more information via email to everyone that registered here as well as a link to register for that follow on demo you know if you're interested in what you've seen here today definitely reach out to your business partner reach out to us directly however you want to get involved feel free to do that you can do that on our website you can fill out the form you call us however you want to get in touch we'd love to hear from you so I know we've got about ten minutes left let's hit some of these q and A's and we'll just kind of tackle these one at a time so Davy well there's a couple in here I don't know if you can see these on your screen that have to do with you know specific functionality like can you use automation to print order acknowledgments or to print pick tickets and packing slips that sort of stuff so can you is there a place maybe the that lists every possible thing that you can automate or how would you approach that yeah I don't know that there's necessarily a list of every possible things you can automate but sort of a rule of thumb is so the short answer to that question is yes all of those can be automated so basically anything that can potentially generate a crystal report or a SSRS report could potentially be automated and that could be sent in an email form there's even some ways we didn't demonstrate it today but there's ways to send that directly to a printer even if you need a hard copy like a pic ticket that can be sent out so if and even if it's custom stuff that maybe we don't do out of the box if you can if you can make a form to show the data then that can be automated and sent in a in a PDF type of format okay um let's see how about using this with progression side doable um some of it yes so say that you on you know the tool that were using the event manager tool could be used with a progression back office now the things we looked at around workflow you may or may not be able to use depend on what other products you have but as far as like sending invoices printing acknowledgments pick tickets things like that you you would be able to do that with with progression but some of the advanced things and document management things you wouldn't be able to do okay how about pdfs that you were able to save into synergy like at the invoice automation part you address how those pdfs were created and saved into surgery yeah so part of the automation tool there there is the ability to create an action where you where you map data to a document on the synergy document management side so you pass the information over and then the attachment itself is in the example we show it was just a crystal report so that crystal report then get some run as a PDF and attach to the document now it's also important to point out that it doesn't necessarily have to be a PDF the the system can also generate Excel files Word documents can export that in a lot of different formats but you know obviously an invoice it makes sense for that to be a non editable type of file okay you see anything else here Nick that we want to try to how some of these questions are a little bit more in depth that I think requires some some thought and some and some longer responses and so Nick I know that you typically go through these and and address these individually so what can people expect if they've asked a question in the forum here yeah uh really well just reminder we'll send out a link to view the recording we're trying to answer the questions that we can hear if we can't answer your question now we'll follow up um and I'll connect you with with someone who will get you that answer um or if you have questions even after you can email me just reply to the email you get also one other note is we've created a nice little white paper about automated workflows and if you like some of the examples that you saw you know really this was just something to kind of get you thinking about if you aren't get you thinking about what you could be doing with it we created an automated workflows white paper and we'll be including a link to that and sending that to you as well if you're interested if you want to learn more about it Dave one last question because I think this is a good one to end on okay um if someone wants to get started with automation how can they learn enough to kind of get started and ought to make their first few things so the the documentation and help was but then the product is is pretty good and sort of walks you through going a basic type of type of event and I think there is some learning pass oh they own all right so yes if you've got learning pass that will coach you through your burst view yeah and you know it goes through and says here's how to set up an email type event and you know if you start with something easy and then kind of get the hang of it and can start getting them to more advanced type things all right well that's great well I think we're done here Nick do you have any closing thoughts on your side no I just want to thank everyone again for attending and we know your time is valuable so we appreciate you spending it with us today um so again thank you again for joining us and just have a great rest of your day alright thanks everyone thanks a lot