Monthly Archives: March 2011

Product: How-To

SIMMS 8 Tasks Made Quick

With SIMMS 8, users can drag-and-drop the features and reports that they use the most often to the desktop as icons so that they can run the tasks they use most in a quick and easy way.

Let’s say they usually create only purchase orders, receipts and run purchasing reports from SIMMS. Once they drag all their most-used icons to the desktop, SIMMS’s auto-grouping feature will place all the purchasing icons together on the desktop.

This will be true of any icons placed on the desktop. Another user may perform nothing but sales tasks and drag-and-drop their most-used icons to their login’s desktop. Every time they log in, their grouped sales icons will be their ready for use.

This login-specific feature makes each person’s use of SIMMS familiar and easy.

To visit SIMMS homepage, click here to discover the other benefits of using SIMMS to manage your inventory tasks.

Industry Insights

SIMMS Advantage: The Drop Ship Method

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Antiquated systems rarely still hold water in today’s market of international distribution and paper-thin overhead models. Sailing vessels evolved into power-driven craft able to meet tighter schedules without having to rely on the whim of favourable winds. Similarly, businesses with huge warehouses and large shipping staffs from the days of the Buy-Hold-Ship style have evolved to the medium-capacity and small-staffed Sell-Source-Ship style. Warehouse space is transitive because many businesses are able to drop-ship materials right from manufacturers to their customers, thereby eliminating the need for expensive storage bills and sky-high payroll responsibilities. Contact KCSI today to learn more about how you can quickly and easily manage inventory in transit between your suppliers and your customers — join the new wave of inventory management and avoid going down with the old ship.

Inventory Management, Product: How-To

SIMMS Makes Returning Goods Easy

If customer satisfaction is your goal, then you need to provide answers and solutions. One of the more challenging but necessary customer service features is the replacement of goods that have become faulty through design or disfunction. Items arrive at the customer either not functioning or perhaps even when unordered (the customer orders three widgets and receives four accidentally). This RMA (Returned Merchandise Authorization) process must be competent and immediate. The SIMMS Inventory Management Software Solution masters this process for you, with infinite tracking capabilities and precise detail coordination. If your business has the responsibility of managing returned items, contact KCSI today to learn more about how SIMMS can make this important feature easy-to-use and accurate.

Product: How-To

ToolTip: Manually Match an Invoice to a Receipt of Goods

Today’s ToolTip comes from KCSI Technical Writer Marc Kondylis:

Manually Match an Invoice to a Receipt of Goods

You can manually match your receipt of goods to your vendor’s invoice. You do this to ensure the details (such as the total and quantities) are the same for both documents. After you confirm the details of both documents match, SIMMS generates an accounts payable invoice.

In Global Settings, you have Payable invoice.

Increased Revenue

SIMMS Advantage: Work Schedules

You’re paying too much if you have warehouse personnel sitting around waiting for something to happen. You’re paying too much if you have a management solution that cost you a year’s profits and can’t adapt to the odds-&-evens of daily business. You can pay just the right amount and gain accuracy, ease-of-use and confidence FROM your inventory solution. SIMMS Inventory Management Software provides you with an affordable solution that shows your increase in effectiveness and profits immediately. Results are all you need worry about, and SIMMS has your back. Let it work for you today — contact KCSI for more information on how to implement this robust and immediate improvement for your future.

Inventory Management

Are Your Inventory Vendors Supplying You Fast Enough?

In today’s rapid requirements from your customers, you require equal or more speed from your suppliers. If you place an order from a supplier that gets promised in a week, your customer is waiting for that interval to get the goods from you. If it surpasses the allotted time, your customer will not wait; if your supplier takes longer, you would not wait for them either. In such cases, you would probably drop that vendor from your list of suppliers and get the items ASAP from someone else.

Any such dishonored purchase orders in your system can clutter up your paperwork in SIMMS, and possibly backlog items also ordered from them for other customers. Thus, one bad vendor can gum up the works for everyone.

SIMMS Inventory Management software can help cure this problem by allowing administators to set age limits for purachase orders, which, if they go past a certain age in the system, are automatically deleted to clear the decks for new orders from quicker vendors.

But if you place vendors — some of whom may be defaulted in the system as reliabe — all it will take is one cancelled order to remind them whom they value. If they want back in your company’s graces, they can earn it, exactly like any new vendor has to. This easily-set condition will lead to prime performance from your vendors and will make your company a reputation for reliabilty and leadership. This feature is just one of many features that SIMMS Inventory Management software can help supply for you in the conduct of your business. Contact KCSI today to learn more about how SIMMS can lead the charge for you as your prime inventory and management solution.

Product News

SIMMS Inventory Incorporates Invention

A man arrives at the warehouse before anyone else on a Monday morning. He knows that he will — according to orders left for him at the previous day’s end — have to order, place and pull ‘X amount’ of stock from the warehouse shelves before his work day is complete. Using many inventory systems, he will have to guess, borrow, or imagine various amounts in place to be able to achieve his goal. His lots for the day — the REAL target/goal/finish line — will have to be invented as the day progresses, and that he will have to invent tomorrow just as he was forced to invent today.

SIMMS Inventory Management software allows him to begin or continue or resolve numerous challenges presented to him from all departments of the company as they arise. Provided that the program has been used properly, and defaults set up for him (and BY him) on the previous day will come across his desk today. The tasks ahead of him will be plainer, simpler and easier to complete than if he were using any other system. This situation is due to him realizing that all the options have been already set to guarantee him less time on the computer and less time worrying.

SIMMS achieves this by providing more real-life, actual time examples for him, and lets him believe that tomorrow will be better than today. He can trust that his work day will be both practical and something that he can idealize. Contact KCSI to find out how challenges, both large and small, can be reduced and eliminated. Let your requirements become our solutions — today.

Inventory Management

Historical Data That Helps You In Future

Managers and administrators often have to look back at patterns of previous sales and other transactions. Their quick criteria needs to be quick: previous month versus this month, previous quarter versus this one. SIMMS Inventory Management software permits users to set a default to the amount of transactional history that is readily viewable. Once they know there are only so many screens of historical data — chosen based upon their needs — their research and comparisons are then equally quick and easy.

From the Global Settings screen inside SIMMS, users can set how far their history display will go back. Choose a week, a month, a quarter — all set easily from a single screen that becomes a default until it is changed by a program administrator.

This display history option is just one of a large range of settings that can make SIMMS the easiest program of its kind anywhere in the world. Contact KCSI today to learn more about more features that make SIMMS Inventory software solution the best choice for you.

Accounting Software

SIMMS: Your Transaction Numbers Are Up To You

Companies often have a numbering system established regarding their transactions, bank accounts, check numbers, and so forth at the time they realize the need for inventory control and management. Rather than making new users change their numbering system, SIMMS Inventory Management software solution lets new users continue from where they left off with their own indexing numbers.

One additional option available is that SIMMS permits transaction reference numbers to begin with established sequencing references, including text, numbers and typographic characters so that unique indexes can be continued seamlessly from the first day that SIMMS is installed. Further, an established indexing/transaction number can be entered onto the first transaction screen (of any type) and the system can be instructed to increment future transaction to follow the incrementation pattern.

These attributes that your business establised long ago should be allowed to continue so that your future references match those from your past. SIMMS lets you be yourself, and continue as uniquely as required. Contact KCSI today to find out more ways that the SIMMS Inventory Management solution can serve you best.

Industry Insights

Inventory Management

With SIMMS Inventory Management software, as with other programs, competent inventory management incorporates a simple philosophy: having enough stock while concurrently not having an excess of it.

Inventory exists so that we never suffer a ‘stock out’. That is its sole purpose. Holding costs come to bear directly on the amount of stock we have. When do we reorder to keep from having a stock out? Suppliers’ lead times, combined with the uncertainty in the demand for the stock, are the primary factors in making that decision toward a guarantee that a stock out does not occur.

The ‘Service Level’ of a company would be at 100% for a complete guarantee that stock outs never occur. However, many companies do not have the means nor do they feel the need for an 100% guarantee. Remember, if such a Service Level has already been proven to exist from the supplier of the stock, then the need is very low for the warehouse to continue to bulge with extra stock (so-called Safety Stock) that was purchased only for the purpose of ‘your’ guarantee against a stock out. Your supplier’s 100% rating is their concern, and thus many firms choose to only apply an 80% Service Level in-house. Service Levels can, by use of formula, be reduced to a ‘z-value’, which is a ratio, and as such is easier to apply to the calculation of reorder points.