What comes in MUST go out

Using Phocas to analyze your sales history and customer behavior is our customers’ bread and butter. We can tell you how many left-handed screwdrivers and tins of striped paint you have sold to family-owned construction businesses in North Smithfield in any state, in any region, at any year since the dawn of your data.

However what increasing numbers of our customers are learning is that we can also show you what’s not selling and from which warehouse it’s not selling from. So if you are holding 143 pallets of Day-Glo fuchsia semi-gloss in your southern warehouse but only selling it from the North East, you need to transfer it, or have a clearance.

So how do you do it?

Well you could put your sales data into a spreadsheet, then put your stock levels into another spreadsheet, then put your purchases into a 3^rd spreadsheet, then build a pivot and a bunch of lookups and formulas, then try and query your zeros and then repeat the above process year on year to see if this year was typical or an exception….. or, you could bring your inventory and purchasing data into your Phocas implementation and build an interactive dashboard that lets you choose warehouse, product, customer individually and independently to see what is coming from where, where it’s standing as stock and then who is buying it.

You build this dashboard or query once, share it with your sales, inventory and purchasing people and let them use it to streamline and reduce your standing and/or dead inventory. What you have now is a tool you can use internally, and in vendor and customer meetings to quickly see what needs to move from where: ultimately to sell it off, rather than return or depreciate it.

Picture this – you’ve sat down with a major vendor or distributor at a trade show, said your pleasantries and in the 12 minutes you have left you need to review your stock items that are pain points as well as be pitched to on the 3 new flagship products they want to sell you. You may have already done the ungainly spreadsheet process above and are trying to show your colleagues your good (and your bad) inventory highlights. You might have notebooks and printouts and charts and brochures all scattered across the table, when you could have this:

Every element on this page can be drilled in on and explored with the answers pre-queried, pre-calculated ready for quick analysis. Then with two clicks of the mouse or taps of your finger on the tablet screen, you can generate an ad-hoc report for the audience, email and move onto the next topic with no need for questions on notice or urgent phone calls to someone back at the office to run the report and email immediately.

Phocas is ready for you to maximize your intelligence on your business, not just in sales but in the whole procurement/sales lifecycle. Call, email us or visit our demo page to schedule a live demo and we will make this work for you