Method:Classic General Q&A

Re: Business Process Improvements - Help/Feedback/Suggestions Wanted

Anonymous — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 18:34:49 GMT

Hi Viret56,

I answered you in the other thread but we do apply a discount on the line item above - I'm not sure which screen you were testing but I believe they should all function this way. Please let me know which screen you ran into a problem with and I can review.

Re: Business Process Improvements - Help/Feedback/Suggestions Wanted

viret56 — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 16:08:44 GMT

In the discussion above, the Discount line item was mentioned. In my use of this line item, I find it does not function in Method as it does in QuickBooks, when used as a % discount. In QuickBooks, the Disount line item calculates the % discount based on the line above it. In Method, the % discount is calculated based on the total of all the line items.

I cannot think of a way to work around this so that the Discount line item is consistent between QuickBooks and Method. Would the Method team look into getting the Disount line item to work as in QuickBooks when used as a % discount.

Re: Business Process Improvements - Help/Feedback/Suggestions Wanted

robjgriffin — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 01:31:16 GMT

Chad, thank you for taking the time to answer each of the points I listed. First let me clarify since I did not do this and now see that I should have, I would grade Method overall as an "A". It is a great solution and I hope my intent came across which was really to get feedback to see if anyone has the same types of issues and how they are solving them. It is not a slam or dissatisfaction with the product, just open and honest feedback the best way I know how to give it so thanks for bearing with me here.

Your explanation on the CRM/email piece helps put some perspective and based on how we work in a distributed environment with virtually no technology experience in our sales office and shop I must keep things very simple and straigtfoward, I will need to think on this area some more. As you can tell I am looking for "one solution" to my needs.

My reality is I have grabbed all the low hanging fruit (that I can figure out) and now the rest of my problems seem to be much more difficult to solve. Because of this I am hesitant to start spending money on customizations until I am certain that it is really the right way to go and a good use of precious funds. I would still love to know if there are other customer's with similar challenges and what are they doing about them.

One recommendation that I would make is perhaps have an area on your forum focused more on a solution need rather than customizations, questions or problems. From a business owners perspective, I have limited time to make improvements to my business and I place high value on resources that can help me be more efficient. I would not spend much time searching on a forum that listed problems, granted there is value to some for that but it is casting a very wide net to find a very specific item. Building an inventory of solutions that are available would make your product that much more better. An analogy of what I am talking about is how WordPress has cataloged their plug-ins, each one is a solution to a problem and to me that is what software has evolved into and should be. By this analogy I don't mean to get into the whole open-source vs. licensed software debate, I am just trying to illustrate what I think would be valuable to me and perhaps others.

You have provided several good points and suggestions that I will follow-up with. I look forward to hearing any more thoughts or ideas you may have.

Thank you,

Rob Griffin

Re: Business Process Improvements - Help/Feedback/Suggestions Wanted

Anonymous — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 20:00:01 GMT

Hi Rob,

Thanks for your feedback - I'll try to address everything in my reply...

First up let me say that Method is the most customizable CRM on the market today. We provide you with a CRM template and the ability to customize it to fit your needs along with robust QuickBooks support.

robjgriffin:
While the process of what I have done with Method is a vast improvement over previous business processes, it is still a time consuming manual process.

In a perfect world, our solution would solve your needs along with every other customer's needs out of the box. We can't envision every possible scenario so we built the baseline CRM and provided a toolkit to customize beyond this. We provide the platform to build a better process but the build part is something you need to tackle on your own, with a business consultant or with us.

Your ideas on the warehouse and shipping process would definitely require some thought as there are multiple ways to reach the same goal. You've outlined a good chunk of what we would ask for when scoping out a job so it sounds like you know what you want, you just need someone to build it.

With regards to your pain points on the sales process...

robjgriffin:
We frequently get system errors on the receive payment screen, this adds to frustration when trying to close that sale so they can move to the next call and increases the time investment to finish that sale.

Errors on our stock screens are covered under free support so you should contact us if you're having a problem. If these are custom screens then you'll need to post to our forums for help or contact a consultant for troubleshooting.

robjgriffin:
We frequently run special sales pricing and there is no way for the salesman to use price levels to discount the sale. This interrupts the process where they have to wait for me to go into QB and apply the discounts on the invoice for them so they can process the credit card payment.

You could add a non-inventory item called discount to cover this type of process - just add this item to the invoice and in the rate field type in your discount (-$25). There still may be some manual process to calculate the discount but you can decide later if this is a pain point you want to automate through customization.

robjgriffin:
Generating the multitude of purchase orders that are required and emailing those out.

Through customization, you can work with someone to have the system behave as you need.

robjgriffin:
Not sure how you could help on this one but we have a large number of Apple users that cannot view the Invoice PDF when we send the invoice to the customer. Could an image file be generated instead?

We use Mac here in the office for all support and sales staff with no problems. PDF is a standard document format so generating an image is not the way you want to handle this. It sounds like this is a support issue to review with your customers (to find out what the error is) then follow up with your consultant or our support.

robjgriffin:
CRM and Email Process... In this area I have to give Method a D-

This is your first letter grade for us so I hope we ended up with a passing grade at the end - you never provided us a final grade? I will say that we are not an email focused CRM solution so it may not be fair to grade us here. We provide just enough emails (and the ability to customize them) for the various parts of our CRM process but we do not provide a total email marketing platform. We find our customers like to bring their own marketing efforts since the cloud has a multitude of options out there.

robjgriffin:
A training offering based on how I would envision my company using CRM. We are not doing anything unusual; again the issue is that it is not intuitive.

We currently provide webinars for training, a help center for reference and forums for support on customization and general questions. We have more webinars coming up and are open to suggestions for future webinars topics.

We appreciate the time you took to write this response and hope that all your questions/concerns have been answered. If you have a business consultant then it might be worthwhile to share this post with them and discuss how to cover your pain points through customization.

Business Process Improvements - Help/Feedback/Suggestions Wanted

robjgriffin — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 03:24:27 GMT

Hello,

I wanted to share some items that I am running into that maybe someone else has solved or perhaps facing a similar problem. I am looking for ideas, suggestions or even product improvements that could go into Method to enhance the solution.

First, it is important to understand we are a manufacturer, distributer and drop shipper, some products we ship or deliver, some we drop ship and some rather than drop shipping are shipped to us for further modification, we also have customer pickups. One order can have all the scenarios listed above and on average about 1/3 or our orders fall into this situation the rest are single shipments with one to many items.

Method has allowed us many improvements, but we are now faced once again with challenges that need to be further refined to save time. My hope in writing this is that this thread can be mutually beneficial to many – Method and its customers and my company. That is why I have explained our processes, pain points and what I think would be the right solution.

Warehouse and Shipping Management Process

To tackle the management of our order process I have modified the "Existing Cases Window" to become our "Warehouse and Shipping Manager" and this tracks an order from initial sale to delivery by invoice number/customer with an internal workflow status we use and various other key data points such as shipping origin, our line of business, shipping carrier and tracking number.

Pain Point

While the process of what I have done with Method is a vast improvement over previous business processes, it is still a time consuming manual process.

What would be nice:

1. An auto populated record in our "Warehouse and Shipping Manager" upon payment of invoice. What would make this tricky is that one invoice can have multiple rows in the "Warehouse and Shipping Manager" because we have two physical shop locations on opposite ends of town and several Drop Ship vendors. Each item must be tracked independently on a given order if the Ship From location is different.

2. An update to the Invoice field "Other" in QB, we use this as the "Fulfillment/Ship Date" from the "Fulfillment Date" field in the in the "Warehouse and Shipping Manager" row which is entered when the order is shipped.

3. Email capability at the row level in "Warehouse and Shipping Manager", since each invoice could have multiple separate shipments to notify the customer their product has shipped and provide the tracking number(s). Ideally you could check which items for that invoice you wanted to email the customer on.

Sales Process

Today 90% of our orders are generated from our websites and we have 5 main product lines and within each product line hundreds to thousands of SKUs, many of our products are configuration or customizable which is labor intensive in and of itself. We do our quoting and proposals typically in Word and then PDF, this will likely not change because there are technical details that must be communicated in the proposal as well as pictures. We have an eCommerce site that is integrated into QB as well but the bulk of our orders come through the phone where a salesman works with the customer to provide pricing, product fit, description, answer questions and provide a personal level of service. However since we do most of our business on the phone, as you can imagine the sales process can take a while especially for our higher end large products which can reach $80,000 or more and the sales cycle may take weeks with multiple calls. For our smaller and lower priced products the sales process may take 10 – 20 minutes on the phone and before we can finalize the sale we must get all the standard bill to/ship to information and credit card info. A very high percentage of our sales do close because we are in a niche market so we are not doing a lot of quoting for the smaller sales. All salesmen are commissioned so they are incented to close the sale and help the next customer.

Pain Points

Because we are accustomed to writing invoices vs. quotes/sales orders the salesman often feel they have wasted time when they start an invoice for it to really turn into a quote. They don’t like using the quotes because they feel like it is just additional unnecessary steps when most calls end in a closed sale except for the high end products.

We frequently get system errors on the receive payment screen, this adds to frustration when trying to close that sale so they can move to the next call and increases the time investment to finish that sale.

We frequently run special sales pricing and there is no way for the salesman to use price levels to discount the sale. This interrupts the process where they have to wait for me to go into QB and apply the discounts on the invoice for them so they can process the credit card payment.

Generating the multitude of purchase orders that are required and emailing those out.

What would be nice:

1. The ability to generate Purchase Orders from invoices without having to key in the PO and without having to create a Sales Order first, I myself can find no value in having the Salesman create sales orders, but I could be wrong here. A screen with all new invoices that have not had purchase orders generated would be ideal here so the additional capability to tie an invoice to a PO would be required as well.

2. A native way to use price levels to apply discounts, this is a severely limiting feature and my understanding it is a QB limitation not Method and if that is true what influence can be leveraged to make this message heard loudly by QB? I am really not interested in paying for a customization here.

3. Not sure how you could help on this one but we have a large number of Apple users that cannot view the Invoice PDF when we send the invoice to the customer. Could an image file be generated instead?

4. What are your thoughts about a streamlined “Invoice screen” controlled by a radio button group that would allow either a Quote, Sales Order or Invoice to be created. The thought here is that it is one screen rather than the current 3 screens which adds to training efforts and end user confusion and dissatisfaction. The entry of the customer information could also be streamlined to capture all the pertinent information up front that will be required to ship a product (minus credit card) and if this turns into a quote or prospect then it could simply be a lead. Again the concept would be one streamlined screen.

CRM and Email Process

We are extensive email users and do receive questions, requests for quotes, etc. via email. Currently the salesman use desktop email clients outside of Method.

Pain Point

In this area I have to give Method a D-, prior to Method I used SugarCRM and their CRM and Email applications were spot on, intuitive and useful. I have not found this to be the same with Method, it is confusing, hard to use and I am not sure it works. Therefore we don’t use any of these features in Method, but would really like to. We frequently send multiple attachments to emails which could include product information, pictures, etc. Customers also send us signed specification documents, pictures, etc.

What would be nice:

1. Some case studies showing how this is being used effectively without the need for an email client.

2. A training offering based on how I would envision my company using CRM. We are not doing anything unusual; again the issue is that it is not intuitive.

Thank you and look forward to hearing some feedback and ideas.

Rob Griffin