AMS Blog

How to Assess Your Professional Services Organization’s Maturity Level

john@accountingmicro.com (John Kearns) — Tue, 29 May 2012 05:23:33 +0000

According to a research report by SPI, “Professional Services Maturity Benchmark”, there are five “fundamental Service Performance Pillars” which form the foundation of all service and project-oriented organizations:

1.Leadership: Unique view of the future and the role the service organization will play in shaping it

2.Finance and Operations: Ability to manage service profit and loss, generate revenue and profit while developing repeatable operating processes, IT applications, and management controls

3.Human Capital Alignment: Ability to attract, hire, motivate, and retain high quality employees and subcontractors

4.Service Execution: The methodologies, processes and tools to effectively schedule, deploy and measure the quality of the service delivery process

5.Client Relationships: Ability to communicate effectively with employees, partner and customers to generate opportunities and win deals

The five pillars provide a great framework from which to measure your own operations from a management, financial, human resources, engagement, sales, and marketing perspective. Each pillar deals with a separate area of your business which when combined can provide you with excellence in execution. In other words, it isn’t sufficient to have great leadership or be able to attract great talent if you cannot effectively execute in the other areas.

Your Maturity Level

SPI suggests the following levels of maturity when trying to assess your company:

Level 1: Ad hoc processes, chaotic environment, opportunistic, focus on client acquisition and reference building.
Level 2: Repeatable core processes, but lack of documentation.
Level 3: Standard processes and operating principles exist for all major service performance pillars, but hold-outs may exist.
Level 4: Precise measurements, metrics and controls. Each performance pillar is supported by a detailed set of operating principles, tools and measurements.
Level 5: Focus is on continual improvement of all elements of the five performance pillars. Measurement and performance is a disciplined and controlled process. There are quantitative and qualitative process-improvement objectives, continually revised against changing business targets.

Does Maturity Really Matter?

According to SPI research, professional services companies that achieve maturity levels of 4 and 5 show 55% more of revenue per billable consultant than their counterparts with maturity levels of 1 and 2. Also, those with higher levels of maturity show billable utilization at 74%, against 64% for those of lower maturity levels.

This sounds good, but how do you move from one level to the next? The key in assessing your maturity level across the five pillars is not to see how you compare to other organizations (although that is a starting point) but rather how you prioritize improvements you have to make in order to improve your organization’s effectiveness.

Where to Go from Here

The “Professional Services Maturity Benchmark” report by SPI is worth downloading and reading in detail. It goes deeper into each of the five pillars and includes advice of how to move up the maturity ladder.

Download a free copy in PDF format of the Professional Services Maturity Benchmark today and improve the performance of your professional services organization!

Sage Extends Exclusive Offer to Sage PFW ERP and Sage Pro Users

john@accountingmicro.com (John Kearns) — Wed, 23 May 2012 20:49:05 +0000

If you are a Sage PFW ERP or Sage Pro user, then you are in luck. Sage has just extended their special Sage Investment Protection Program to the end of May, 2012. This means that you can trade your Sage ERP system for one of their flagship ERP products like Sage ERP Accpac, Sage ERP MAS, or Sage ERP X3.

Investment Protection for Sage ERP

Moving from Sage PFW or Sage Pro to Sage 500 ERP for example, can help tremendously if you are a small or mid-sized business that is experiencing growth and wants to make sure your business system can keep up. Sage 100 ERP is another good choice for small organizations that want to ensure their back-office operations are run on the latest Sage ERP solution.

Upgrading Your Sage ERP

The Sage Investment Protection Program is available for Sage PFW ERP and Sage Pro ERP on- and off-plan customers. To qualify for this great upgrade opportunity, you must commit to a minimum one-year Sage Business Care Gold support agreement for the Sage ERP destination product. In addition, you will receive Gold-level support program benefits at the Sage Business Care Silver prices, offering you access to training, education, and support.

For more information, visit our Sage ERP Upgrade page or contact us.

How Tech-Speak May Destroy Your Next IT Project

john@accountingmicro.com (John Kearns) — Tue, 22 May 2012 20:31:05 +0000

User adoption is one of the top causes of failure in ERP implementations, and I believe that one of the culprits of low user adoption can be attributed to a lack of communication and incorrectly setting up expectations.

A recurring theme we see in some of our engagements with small and medium-sized businesses is that while some IT vendors had high promises and the IT department was very supportive of the solution, the business users ended up hating it. There is often a gap when it comes to translating all that IT excitement into business benefits.

Bridging the Tech-Biz Gap

You may have been in this situation yourself. At the table, technical folks are nodding and encouraging the IT vendor to go on, while the few business users present are a little bit lost as to what all the fuss is about. The problem is in the translation (or lack thereof) between technology and business. Sure, the features, the new database, the integration capabilities are all very exciting but being able to translate what that means in a pure business sense is difficult. Having done a few hundred implementations of accounting, financials, and ERP business systems myself I can relate to that.

If there is one key thing you should look for when either getting together a group of employees to lead your next software implementation project or when hiring an outside firm to do it for you, is the ability to translate tech-speak. This means laying out for the business users in plain English how different technical characteristics of the new system will improve their daily operations. It also means forgoing lists of features and instead focusing on the high-level key business benefits those features bring to the table. It also requires a good understanding of business processes so that you can talk their language and understand their concerns.

Does Your ERP Have a CPA?

At AMS we have the luxury of having consultants with business backgrounds and CPA’s who not only understand the technology being implemented, but have been on the other side of the table and understand the users’ concerns. But don’t worry, if your IT team is not that business-savvy you can still get them to tone down the geekiness and help you with the business benefits. Here are some tips to help you out:

1.First, you have to be firm and drive the conversation, don’t be intimidated by technology terms you may not understand. When in doubt, ask them to explain it in layman terms.

2.Ask the IT person to draw an image or process flow for you (drawing is a great way to get technical terms translated in plain English) so that you can better understand the business implications. Ask to add to the drawing the types of users that interact with the process, and types of data that they are interfacing with (i.e. inventory levels, revenue numbers, sales leads, etc.).

3.Ask “so what?” after a feature or technical benefit is thrown at you. “So what if the database is multi-tenant and has redundancy built in?” or “so what if there are cloud connectors for our CRM system?” Get it explained in business terms (i.e. “With these cloud connectors we can ensure new sales leads and closed deals are accounted for in our financial system!”).

4.Ask “and how is this done today?” in order to get the difference between what is done today and how the new system will work. For example “you said this new system has a list of ready-made financial reports including sales forecasts by region… and how do we get this same information today?” and the answer might be “well, today in order to get the same type of report the CFO asks us here in IT to run a query against three different databases and print it out for him and this usually takes 3 days while the new report could be run in 3 minutes!”.

5.Get your key business users all in one room, without IT or senior management present. Talk to them about the “business features” you were able to translate from IT and hear them out. They will have additional questions. Also, make them feel like they own this process and their questions and concerns are important. Users that don’t feel like they were heard during the process are the first ones to try and avoid using the system after it is implemented.

What are some additional suggestions you have for translating tech-speak?

If you’d like to discuss getting your next software project on track and in plain English, feel free to drop us a line.

Cloud Computing - What You Need to Know and Why You Need to Be There

john@accountingmicro.com (John Kearns) — Tue, 22 May 2012 20:21:47 +0000

Our partner Avalara, makers of the leading sales tax automation solution AvaTax, are hosting a webinar that is worth attending:

"Cloud Computing - What You Need to Know and Why You Need to Be There” will take an in-depth look at Cloud technology and its applications and impact on your business. The webinar will cover:

SaaS, PaaS, IaaS and On-Prem;
the advantages and benefits of cloud solutions;
how to manage the risks associated with cloud technologies;
how to choose the solution that is right for you;
what questions to ask; and
how to implement new solutions.

The webinar is on Thursday, May 24 at 10am PDT. Click here to register for the webinar.

Whether you are considering a cloud-based solution, are just curious what the fuss is all about this online presentation promises to be a great starting point.

Managing Sales Taxes In the Cloud

john@accountingmicro.com (John Kearns) — Tue, 08 May 2012 23:40:05 +0000

Most businesses are intimately familiar with the growing pains of updating their business management systems, hiring additional employees, and reviewing and revamping their processes and policies. These are things that can immediately help or hinder your operations.

However One important task that is often unfortunately relegated to the end of the list of process improvements is addressing sales tax compliance. Understandably, addressing sales tax compliance is not top of mind and someone in your Accounting department is tasked with this task. Among the many elements that this person is tasked with are:

Nexus
Rates
Sourcing and Taxability
Exemption Certificates
Preparing and filing returns
… and more!

What many businesses fail to realize is that the effort of maintaining compliance manually can become a major drain on resources very quickly. In addition the potential penalties for non compliance and the human costs of going through a tax audit can be substantial.

The Small and Mid-Sized Business Sales Tax Savior

In response to continued inquiries from our customers, small and large, asking for best practices to handle the sales tax calculation and filing effort, we decided to look for a solution to this problem. We identified AvaTax, a cloud-based solution from Avalara.

AvaTax helps you automate the critical steps in sales tax calculations, such as:

Calculating the correct tax for each transaction
Managing exemption certificates
Filing and remitting sales tax returns
Preparing and managing your audit exposure

And best of all, it integrates with many SMB ERP and business accounting systems, Sage ERP included (MAS 90/200 and Sage 500ERP). Automating the sales tax calculation and filing process for your business is one of those logical steps you will be glad you did. Just as it makes sense to upgrade your accounting system when your business grows, it also makes sense to look for a software solution when it comes time for calculating sales taxes.

Even if you are not dealing with multiple states, or trying to determine whether your operations in a separate county can be considered a new nexus, check out AvaTax and you will be surprised by the ease and amazing functionality of this cloud-based sales tax calculation tool.

For more information on the benefits of the Avalara AvaTax Suite of products or to schedule a demo, check out our new Avalara products page.

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The Next Step Your CFO Should Take

john.kearns@accountingmicro.com (John Kearns) — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 19:32:07 +0000

Here at AMS we work with small and medium businesses that are tired of being restricted by their basic accounting packages. They need a way to grow the business while not having to worry if their systems will handle the additional transactions, new regulations, or even the new offices and distribution centers being opened. Whether they decide to go with a SaaS solution like SAP Business ByDesign, or an on-premise business system like Sage ERP, we know that the company will benefit.

What we have seen, though, is that while the business processes are ready to be handled by a more robust software solution like an ERP system, there is still an area where some companies have been reluctant to change: financial planning.

What's in a Spreadsheet?

It's only natural. The wheel that squeaks loudest gets the oil, and so it happens with accounting, sales, marketing.... but neglecting to revamp your processes and systems used for budgeting, forecasting, and financial reporting and analysis is a big mistake.

The multitude of spreadsheets used today to plan your business are likely to give you headaches as soon as you start expanding, so what can you do now to avoid problems in the future? AMS now provides a solution we believe is a key component for any small or medium business trying to grow: Adaptive Planning.

Corporate Performance Management

Adaptive Planning is our tool of choice for CPM, or corporate performance management. We have selected this on-demand, completely integrated performance management solution because it has demonstrated it can take care of the job while not complicating the process.

Adaptive Planning automates the Corporate Performance Management cycle, which includes budgeting, reporting, analysis, and re-forecasting. A truly integrated and automated solution, it allows for tight collaboration among managers throughout the organization, as well as tight integration between systems – the GL and other enterprise systems, and the software used for planning, reporting, and analysis.

Check out our new Adaptive Planning web section and call us today to schedule a demo.

The Advent of the mobile ERP

john.kearns@accountingmicro.com (John Kearns) — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 01:51:47 +0000

In a June, 2011 report "Innovative Technologies Will Drive Enterprise Applications and ERP to a Bight New Future", Forrester Research talked about seven technologies that will shape the evolution of ERP and enterprise applications:

1. 1. 1. Software-as-a-service (SaaS)
    2. Mobile
    3. Business process management (BPM)
    4. Usability
    5. Platform-as-a-service (PaaS)
    6. Social networks
    7. Elastic computing

According to the report, each technology will impact three key areas:

Business process flexibility will be enabled, not restricted
Cost of ownership will be more transparent and predictable
Mobility and collaboration will accelerate process execution

What this means is that ERP applications will become more flexible, less expensive, and provide better return on investment in the form of real-time collaboration and improved execution capabilities.

since the recent launch of Apple's iPad 3 has generated so much buzz around the future of mobile apps, I'd like to focus on the "mobile" aspects.

The Portable ERP

In their report, Forrester Research describes mobile technology as "evolving at a breakneck pace". It also states that "the potential of mobile applications to transform business processes hinges not only on the speed and convenience of mobility itself, but also on the devices' unique capabilities to sense, respond to, deliver, and capture information in real time".

It is interesting to note that in the same report, Forrester notes that SAP, during their 2011 Sapphire Now Conference, announced 19 new mobile applications. Why is SAP betting so much on mobile? Because there is clear ROI there.

This is exemplified in Business ByDesign, SAP's cloud-based ERP focused on the SMB market. It not only includes an iPhone app, an iPad app, and a BlackBerry app but is now releasing an Android app as well. By giving CFO's, COO's, mid-level managers and even lower-level workers mobile access to the business system, companies can get more done in less time.

As an image (or in this case a video) is worth more than 1,000 words, check out the videos below that showcase SAP Business ByDesign being used on an iPad.

Do you think that this trend will continue?

What are some of the challenges you foresee in adoption of mobile ERP among SMB corporations?

Let us know!

Business ByDesign Dashboard iPad Application

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Business ByDesign Approvals iPad Application

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SAP Event Lifts Cloud to New Heights

john.kearns@accountingmicro.com (John Kearns) — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 20:01:56 +0000

The upcoming event, SAP Cloud Community Inside Track 2012, is a daylong gathering of the best and brightest stars of the cloud computing community. In a single day you will learn from SAP, LinkedIn, Netflix, McAfee, VMWare, HP, Accenture, and many others how to best take advantage of cloud computing.

This cloud summit is being hosted by SAP to address typical questions from a technical audience, like what’s the latest in cloud computing? What are the new solutions, technologies, and trends? What aspects of the cloud are the coolest start-ups and high-profile IT vendors working on? What problems will they address?

The answers to these questions are grouped into three different tracks:

1. Building the Cloud (All development related sessions, tools, frameworks, quality, testing, etc.)
2. Running the Cloud (PaaS, platforms, IT operations, etc.)
3. Everything else Cloud (Business, Management, Related technologies, etc.)

If you are interested in learning more about cloud computing in general, software development for the cloud environment, Amazon’s AWS cloud computing environment, and how SAP is using the cloud to develop business applications like Business ByDesign, then this is an event you cannot miss. I am especially interested in the session being hosted by Kevin Nix, EVP, Line of Business on Demand Solutions, SAP who will be talking about SAP Cloud Solutions.

Event Details

What: SAP Cloud Community Inside Track 2012

When: Feb 16, 2012 (starts at 8am, full day event)

Where: SAP Labs in Palo Alto, or online streaming

Financial Reporting is more than Financial Statements

john.kearns@accountingmicro.com (John Kearns) — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 22:35:17 +0000

Far too often, a company's financial reporting is limited to a set of financial statements and if more than the basic financial statements are provided in a financial reporting package, the supplementary data is often prepared manually in Word or Excel.

A good financial reporting package should ideally consist of a variety of financial statements as welll as meaningful supplementary data. Some additional data elements that are meaningful to a business decision maker are:

Top X customers
Top X items
Sales Trends
Job Profitability
Etc.

The problem with getting this type of data from many ERP applications is that the financial reporting tools are often limited to extracting and reporting on General Ledger data. Fortunately there is a new breed of financial reporting applications that address this need and now is a good time to take a look at them, especially if your business is currently using a tool like FRx (being retired by Microsoft).

Some good candidates to consider are Sage MAS Intelligence (limited to use with Sage MAS 90, Sage MAS 500 and Sage AccPac), BizNet and SAP Business Objects. These financial reporting packages are especially relevant if your business currently operates on Sage MAS 90, Sage MAS 500, SAP Business One, Epicor or one of the Microsoft ERP applications.

What is relevant about these financial reporting applications is their ability to extract data from parts of your ERP application other than the General Ledger. Examples include Customer data, Project data, Inventory data, etc. Another strong feature of all of these applications is their ability to create presentation quality reports that mix data, graphics and other media types in the same report.

If your forte is Excel and you wish to edit the data extracted from your financial system before finalizing your financial reporting package, then consideration should be given to Sage MAS Intelligence or BizNet. Both of these financial reporting applications reside in Excel and therefore provide all of the flexibility of the Excel environment for laying out data as well as the ability to enhance the data already provided with additional analyses driven from that data.

Welcome to The Wire

john.kearns@accountingmicro.com (John Kearns) — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 22:31:19 +0000

One of the more interesting aspects of the new social web is blogging. Now that we have decided to join the party, one of the first things I was tasked with was coming up with a URL for our blog. Our consultants recommended using something like blog.accountingmicro.com or info.accountingmicro.com. Howerver I just couldn't do that as it made it sound like this was going to be one more cookie cutter blog. That we were going to go through the motions of adding a blog to our site just like everyone else hopping on the social marketing bandwagon.

To the contrary. In thinking about it, I actually saw this as a great opportunity for I and my staff to finally have a forum to share all of the great information and ideas that we share among ourselves. I feel that what we have to share is exciting, current and useful and as such needs to be conveyed from a forum much more exciting than something called a blog.

Hence The Wire. Anyone who has watched old movies can envision those scenes of the printing presses and the hot stories coming off of the teletype. These were the hot stories coming to each newspaper, radio station etc, from the AP Wire, also known as the Associated Press.

We are pleased to begin publishing our ideas re ERP, CRM and a host of other IT trends and issues on The Wire. I and my staff know and appreciate how difficult it is for a business technology buyer to navigate the large and often confusing body of information available from the web and other media. We hope to help by providing in this blog our knowledge as experienced technology consultants.

As representatives of multiple, competing publishers including Sage Software, SAP, Microsoft, Epicor and others, we are qualified to provide objective assessments meets a businesses needs best.

We are looking forward to adding interesting content to this blog from our experienced consultants. Look forward to hearing from our experts in Manufacturing, Distribution, Project Accounting, Nonprofits, and more.