Life has been made simpler with Internet banking and scheduled payments. As soon as the functionality was made available, I put my mortgage payments, car payments, utility payments, and every other regular payment I could think of, on an automated schedule. It just made sense to schedule them and save myself the time of paying them individually every month.
Automation is a liberating process, and one that SYSPRO caters for. With SYSPRO 7, Update 1, you can run a wide variety of automated processes that will save you time, accelerate the response to problems, and keep the worry lines off your brow. Setting up the Automation screens is simple – just check the options you want to run. Set everything to run at 2:00AM, while you sleep. Like magic – it just works.
In the morning, of course, you need to check to make sure that your tasks have run successfully. If the program failed on a certain step, the system is trying to tell you something – run it again manually to find out. It’s also important to make sure that your SQL maintenance is running, so your log files don’t grow insanely large.
There are other benefits to SYSPRO’s office automation. Combined with messaging, it can improve workflow, decrease response time, and even save you money and customers. One of my favorite automated features is Event Management, which can be set to send e-mail to relevant people, or even run a program, given pre-determined parameters. Let’s say, for example, that an inventory item has fallen below safety level. Before automation, low stock levels could go unnoticed, sometimes with serious impact on the fulfillment process. As all of us are aware, late orders and angry customers do not a happy business make. With Event Management, low stock levels can be set to trigger remedial action, such as e-mails to relevant employees, or even to downstream or upstream business partners.
On the flip side, Event Management can send out alerts if a stock item is over-stocked, helping you keep your inventory costs in line with a Just-in-Time methodology. There are, in fact, countless ways in which SYSPRO automation can help you run an efficient and responsive organization, automatically running programs and notifying the appropriate people of critical events. The gains are qualitative and quantitative – less worry for you, and accelerated action on important issues for the company and your customers.
In the final analysis, automation saves you time. And time, of course, is money.
