Indicators delivered daily by email Having a clear understanding of how your company is performing is essential. To be useful, any Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) need to be current and relevant. Arx allows you to specify the KPI’s for individual managers. A unique KPI daily performance report allows you to get a clear picture of your company’s current performance on a daily basis. The Managing Director can have a summary report and follow it up through the management structures. Lower levels of management will have had more detailed versions for their areas and will be prepared for queries regarding any exceptional results. The report is normally split into five sections: Sales Revenue; Financial Status; Sales Office; Stock Shortages; Warehouse; but this can be varied. Email lists can be specified to control which managers receive which sections. Here is a typical setup:

• Sales revenue section:
  Reported for current year and comparison with last year: total sales by day, week, month, year, broken down by order source. Credit notes issued and used. Lost sales. Returns, refunds, replacements.
• Financial:
  cash book balance, bank account balance, creditors, debtors, VAT liability, outstanding debt from credit card staged payment customers, unclaimed credits, purchase commitments, orders waiting to be despatched, orders suspended, orders received today.
• Sales office:
  comparison with last year for orders received, order lines split by order source. Catalogue requests this year compared with last year split by enquiry source. Time spent inputting orders and enquiries by day, by week, by month and by year. Trade customers on ‘stop’, unallocated credits, negative price changes, manual credits, overdue invoices, forthcoming credit card expiries for customers who have ordered goods on staged payments.
• Stock Shortage:
  items out of stock, estimated time of arrival and the orders affected.
• Warehouse:
  orders awaiting despatch, value of stock adjustments by day, week, month, and year. Quantity of stock adjustments by day, week, month, year. Staff clocking for all staff by day, week, month, and year. Deliveries due in this week, split by day and the next three weeks. Deliveries overdue. Stock value held at third party suppliers.

A comprehensive module that allows you to log employees’ time, this can either be basic hours clocking or identified by unlimited user-definable tasks. Detailed future booking of holidays allows managers to plan their resources accordingly. Working patterns can be used for departmental efficiency. On a minuteby- minute basis the operations manager can see the amount of picking and packing left to do, the hours available to do it, and relocate resources accordingly. Detailed breakdowns of where labour time is spent can then be reported. The efficiency of warehouse employees can then be analysed and bonuses worked out accordingly or manpower plans updated. Arx can print bar-coded employee badges which can be used to transfer between tasks or departments during the day, as well as clocking in and out. The badges can be used at Point of Sale and in the warehouse when processing orders. This allows individual employees to be tracked against an activity such as a sale or an order being picked.

Everyone accessing the Arx system is allocated a unique identity used for audit trails. Pronounceable passwords can be generated by the system for extra security or the policy can be relaxed to allow user defined passwords. Users are allocated to access groups to make setup easier where several people have the same system access. Arx menus can be customised for each access group and authorisation limits for discounts, returns, purchase invoice matching etc. can be defined down to individual user level. An instant messaging system, between users, is available within Arx and this can be optionally diverted to Internet Mail on an individual user basis. Diary, follow up alerts and message history is also available.

Context-sensitive help at each prompt, backed up by a fully cross-referenced, browser-based, online help system that can be modified on site, makes the features in Arx available to new users sooner. Options exist to customise screens and printed reports.

Safewire has Standard Minute Value (SMV) enabled programs. These are programs that generate work (orders to be picked, envelopes to be stuffed etc.). This module allows times to be entered for userdefined task elements that are used to calculate overall task times. These are logged and compared to actual times derived from the staff clocking module.