Sales Analysis


Requirements for sales analysis information vary significantly between firms and decision makers within a firm. The system provides a number of standard sales analysis windows and reports , as illustrated below. Each company tends to develop customized reports to meet their unique requirements.

Sales Analysis for Individual Quotes and Orders The statistics for an order or quote include calculated totals for sales, cost, and the profit amount and percentage.

Sales Analysis for Individual Customers A customer s statistics include month-to-date (MTD) and year-to-date (YTD) values for sales, profits, invoices, and payments. The total value of sales and profits can be viewed across time, such as monthly or quarterly time increments . The Customer Sales Statistics report provides similar information for all customers. The Top Customers report identifies the largest customers in terms of revenue (or balance) over a specified time period

Sales Analysis for Individual Salespeople The Salesperson Commission report provides summarized data and invoice detail about sales and profit (plus calculated commissions) for a specified date range. The Salesperson Statistics by Invoice report provides a breakdown of sales and actual margins after discounts . The statistics window for a salesperson displays the number of opportunities and the total and average value of opportunities.

Sales Analysis for Individual Items The statistics window for an item displays sales, cost of sales, and profitability in total and in time increments such as monthly or quarterly. The analysis can reflect one or all locations, a specified date range, and per unit calculations (rather than totals). The window provides drill-down to specific invoices comprising the summarized values. Similar information is displayed for all items on the Item Sales Statistics report. The Sales History report identifies, for each item, the units sold, revenue, and profits by time period (such as monthly) over a specified date range.

Sales Analysis by Customer and Item The Customer/Item Statistics report summarizes the units, revenue, and contribution margin for items sold to each customer over a specified date range. The same customer and item information can also be viewed by salesperson.

Sales Analysis by Dimension This window provides a matrix view of summarized data tied to the analytical dimensions for customers, products, and other items. For example, it provides sales analysis by customer group across multiple time periods, or sales analysis by customer group and product group . The displayed values can reflect actual or budget amounts, or the variance.

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Business Analytics and Sales Analysis

Sales analysis often requires summarized data for large volumes of detailed transaction data. Business analytics supports this data summarization with periodic data extractions into a data warehouse. With a packaged solution (such as targit.com), business analytics and the data warehouse offer an installation wizard and population tools to support out-of-the-box functionality with minimal technical expertise and implementation effort (such as one day). The cubes within the data warehouse can reflect several business areas, including customer, sales, inventory, vendor, purchase, and general ledger information. They can also reflect the analytical dimensions employed within Microsoft Navision, with predefined reports and ad hoc customized reports ”presented as graphs, maps, charts , and objects.

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Case Studies

Case #25: Automotive Parts Supplier and Customer Schedules

Production at an automotive parts supplier was driven by customer schedules updated weekly. The customer schedules provided authorization (termed releases) for shipping items and quantities on specified dates in the near-term horizon. They also provided projected requirements over the longer- term horizon. The customer required tracking of cumulative quantities. The customer schedules were defined as line items on a blanket sales order, with sales orders created by releases against the blanket order (with tracking of cumulative quantities shipped). The customer also required electronic shipment notification that was provided by a Biztalk document.

Case #26: Merging Customer Information

The merging of two customer accounts, typically stemming from acquisitions or customer duplicates, requires merging of all current and historical transactions to a new or existing customer. After the merge process, the balances , reports, and drill- downs treat the altered information as if it had been posted correctly from the beginning. Similar capabilities also apply to merging information about two vendors , items, and general ledger accounts.

Case #27: Reserved Material in a Lot-Trace Environment

The Batch Process company produced lot-traced items with lot attributes that affected usage suitability. Each customer specified acceptable values for these lot attributes during sales order entry, and the applicable lots were reserved. Customizations helped to automate this business process. First, lot attributes were defined by product category and each item was assigned a product category. Second, attribute values were assigned to lot numbers of saleable end-items. Third, a profile of acceptable values for these lot attributes could be defined during sales order entry. Finally, the available-to-promise calculations were customized to identify existing lots with applicable lot values, and to optionally reserve the material for the sales order.

Case#28: Mobile Order Entryvia Hand-Held Devices The Consumer Products company had field sales representatives that wrote orders on paper forms that were faxed to the home office for manual rekeying. This manual system was replaced with hand-held devices (with a built in bar-code scanner) that allowed salespeople to enter quotes, orders, and invoices, and print them via a portable printer. At headquarters, the sales documents were seamlessly and automatically posted into Navision during each user s synchronization. The solution increased order efficiency and reduced errors, and allowed the average order size to grow significantly.

Case #29: Rules-Based Configurator for Equipment Manufacturer

The Equipment company offered numerous options and features for several models of equipment, and wanted a simple method for configuring products that would minimize time, errors, and engineering design assistance. To solve their requirements, they implemented a rules-based configurator software package tightly integrated with Navision functionality. The package supported user-defined questions and responses tailored to the customer s perception of the equipment applications, with a mapping between responses and the required bill of materials and routing operations for producing the configuration. The configurator enforced engineering design rules, calculated estimated costs, and also provided pricing based on responses and selected options.

[1] See www.CRGroup.com for additional information about the merge capabilities.

Case#30: Smart Part Numbers for Configurations

The Equipment company wanted to use a smart part number to identify the selected base unit and options, but did not want to create an item number for every possible combination of values. They also wanted to price, ship, and invoice a single line item. Using a rules-based configurator package (see Case #29) during sales order processing, the entry of a smart part number was automatically translated into the appropriate order-dependent bills (and routings) for production orders directly linked to the sales order line item. The production order description communicated the smart part number for manufacturing purposes.




Managing Your Supply Chain Using Microsoft Navision
Managing Your Supply Chain Using Microsoft Navision
ISBN: 0071435247
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 71

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