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SAP Insight to Action My name is John and I am the sales director
at a 100 person distribution company. A key element in my daily routine is getting real
time info, so I know exactly how sales are tracking. To do this, I simply log into the
Business One mobile app, powered by the SAP HANA in memory platform. Part of running the
business is tracking my receivables and ensuring ongoing liquidity. We have set up the app
to set up a warning in red text when we have a large number of outstanding invoices that
are over 90 days. This alerts me to potential collection problems, so we can deal with them
immediately. By clicking on the red number, I go to an interactive aging dashboard, to
see the status of my receivables. I am specifically concerned with those over 90 days. To find
out which accounts I should take a closer look at, I drag the customer dimension into
the dashboard, sort according to the customer aging amount and select the top five customers.
The aging dashboard shows what is owed by a customer for a specific time period, for
example, between 90 and 190 days, and is sorted according to the aging amount from large to
small. The customer with the largest aging balance over 90 days is customer C2000, I
will tap on the graph to get more details. When I go into Norm Thompson’s customer
record, I can take a closer look at the company’s aging dashboard, and can easily see that the
customer has a large amount that has been outstanding for over 90 days. I swipe the
dashboard to get more details on the customer. From the revenue contribution dashboard, I
can tell that Norm Thompson has been our top revenue generating customer for the past two
quarters. By swiping the revenue contribution dashboard, I can now look at the sales analysis
dashboard. I see that the customer has significantly increased the amount of business they are
doing with us since the second half of 2012 and according to the predictive analysis capabilities
included in the app, this customer will continue to increase its business in the future. I
should probably revisit the credit policy for Norm Thompson. While I like to see increase
in sales, we won’t stay in business if our customers don’t settle their debts. However,
before I decide to decrease the credit for Norm Thompson, I’d like to investigate a
few other areas. I swipe back to get to the aging dashboard for Norm Thompson, and click
on the enlarge button. Now, I drag the project or promotion dimension into the dashboard.
I can see there were no special promotions between 30-60 days and the aging amount remained
constant. Over 90 days, there was a promotion and I can see that the aging amount over 90
days is related to this promotion. I click on this project to launch the enterprise search,
and I can see all of the documents related to this project and customer. I can drill
down to get details and I find that many of the products related to this promotion have
been returned for poor product quality. Now I realize that the key problem is not with
Norm Thompson’s credit, but it is actually related to a promotion that I ran with a big
distributor. All of the purchases related to the promotion were of poor quality and
the customer did not want to pay for it. I can now confidently take action, I call my
marketing manager to stop the promotion, and I will also call Norm Thompson to find out
if I can offer a replacement product. Since I was able to get the facts about the problem,
I know that I can find a resolution to the situation.