It would be an understatement to say that we’re living in critical times. All businesses and most individuals are affected by the present economic downturn triggered by the COVID–19 pandemic. The banking industry is looking for ways to help their clients weather the storm while keeping their own institutions solvent. There’s little doubt that we’ll be seeing more problems loans as the trend continues.
was developed to help lenders identify and assist distressed borrowers and reduce the risk of loan defaults. Crowe Problem Loan Management enables lenders to be proactive by providing powerful tools such as:
Deferral tracking flags any repayment problems in the early stages. A postponement prompts a follow-up action allowing the lender to consider best options. Automated and aggregated reporting ensures that all problem loans are managed consistently.
Watched asset reporting documents the full story of each loan, updating each customer record when any activity takes place.
Reserve calculator eliminates guesswork with managed impairment calculations and supports collateral-dependent and net-present value of future cash flow valuation methods.
Relationship monitoring allows you to record notes and conversations about your borrowers in a central location available to all stakeholders.
Action item tracking allows you to compose checklists that can be automatically populated as milestones are achieved. You can also add and assign tasks manually.
Reminders alert both the lender and the borrower at agreed check-in times.
Problem loan queue gives you an overview of the status and critical metrics for all problem loans and allows you to drill in to individual accounts to see what’s being done.
Optimized problem loan onboarding ensures that you are only entering necessary details. Help text clarifies ambiguous accounting requirements.
Standardized assumptions allow you to set business-wide guidelines for consistency in various areas such as liquidity discounts and selling costs.
Crowe Problem Loan Management for Microsoft Dynamics 365 helps you automate reporting, systemize best practices among team members, calculate reserve amounts in compliance with standards, centralize communications, and set consistent procedures for dealing with problem loans.
Now more than ever, your lending institution needs to have the tools in place to identify and act on problem loans for your benefit and the benefit of your distressed clients.
Change will come to your organization anytime you implement a new Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM project or enhancement. That change isn’t a one-time experience but it’s an ongoing process of user adoption, adjustments, productivity, and engagement.
Anytime there is a project or enhancement change — the end goal is to empower users to adopt the new technologies. You need to align the right resources and drive improved values and strategies within your organization.
If you are part of that team leading a CRM deployment or enhancement you need to understand the typical stages that many organizations go through when adopting change. This article will help you gauge your efforts and manage the progress as you adapt to challenges that arise.
Let’s look at Change Management and deploying (as an example for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement). We will go over the typical CRM project lifecycle (see image below) which is also known as the Change Curve.
The Project Kick-off: This is where you have invited stakeholders, the end-users, and management to help kick off the project. Expectations are all over the place here. There is excitement, fear, confidence, and a level of uncertainty. On the standard Change Curve, you need to set a base level of expectations, performance, and motivation.
The Requirements: Go ahead and capture all of your wish list items here. Make sure you are being heard by your Microsoft Partner and Project teams. Keep the excitement level high!
The Development: Your Microsoft Partner and Project team are busy building the system requirements and sticking to the approved project plan. As the development begins and moves forward it is natural to wonder if all the requirements were gathered correctly. Move forward with confidence and together with your Partner and make smart changes. Don’t worry about doing everything at once. Work in sprints and phases based on your Partner recommendations.
Testing and UAT: When the point comes to User-Acceptance Testing (UAT) you are going to run into failures. You will be running test scripts and seeing items that are passing and others that are failing. This is common and part of the process. This Change Curve reaches its lowest point in performance around this point and needs to be used as motivation for helping your users to succeed.
The Training: As users go through training, they will increase their confidence with the CRM system—learning new areas and seeing new features. If you have followed some basic User Adoption tips, you have successfully used the technology of Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement to create a system that will aid users in their daily job. This will build confidence and will allow performance to move in the right direction. Note that during this process you are looping back around to the starting point in the Change Curve of performance & motivation.
Your Go Live & Beyond: You’ve returned to your starting point on the change curve and surpassed it! Move forward with confidence. Learn from your mistakes and be committed to creating a culture of change at your organization.
The most important point — Change is a PROCESS. It is not a destination. There will always be a continuous need to improve technologies, strategies, and user adoption. While the graphic above represents one cycle, be prepared for the curve to adapt as your team continues to use and enhance your Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM system.
In future articles, we will dive deeper into other topics including being ready for change, designating a change management team, and how to do ongoing change management training.
JourneyTEAM, (MS Gold Partner and MSUS Partner of the Year) has been down this path a number of times and has a methodology that helps you address the different stages of change management. We can help you at any stage of the user adoption and change management experience. Contact us for more information –
Article by: Dave Bollard – Head of Marketing | 801-436-6636
JourneyTEAM is an award-winning consulting firm with proven technology and measurable results. They take Microsoft products; Dynamics 365, SharePoint intranet, Office 365, Azure, CRM, GP, NAV, SL, AX, and modify them to work for you. The team has expert level, Microsoft Gold certified consultants that dive deep into the dynamics of your organization and solve complex issues. They have solutions for sales, marketing, productivity, collaboration, analytics, accounting, security and more.
Everyone in the banking industry is following the news, you see the statistics and the predictions. There is no doubt that there are going to be problems in your loan portfolio. Smart lenders should be asking:
Have my policies and procedures kept pace with the changes of the last decade, and am I prepared to execute them in a digital space?
Is my staff assembled, aligned, and trained to work out problem loans according to best practices and the chosen strategy of the bank?
Are we equipped with technology to enable efficient problem loan management at a high quality?
I know problem loans are coming, what should I be doing right now?
To help answer these questions, Crowe has developed a Problem Loan Management Framework.
In our recorded presentation “” we discuss these three different areas in detail:
Identification
Problem Loan Management
Covenant Testing
Annual Review
Financial Statement Receipt and Review
Delinquencies Review
Assessment and Monitoring
Loan Documentation Review
Site Visits
Financial Condition Assessment
Borrower Conversation
Security Perfection Assessment
Collateral Valuation
Pre-workout Agreement
Strategy
Bankruptcy
Foreclosure/Liquidation
Restructure/Return to Lending Group
Exit (Borrower driven or loan sale)
Plus, we look at the kind of people, policies, procedures, and technology that can help.
To address the issues outlined in our Problem Loan Management Framework, we have developed the . This solution makes it possible to stay on top of, and even be proactive with, distressed borrowers in good times and bad, including:
Deferral tracking
Watched asset reporting
Reserve calculator
Relationship monitoring
Action item tracking
Touchpoint reminders
Problem loan onboarding
Take action now to prepare for a wave of problem loans.
With the right guidance and technology, you can take care of your borrowers, your organization, and your books. Crowe services and solutions can help you find and address your credit portfolio risk.
By Ryan Plourde, Crowe, a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Gold Partner
As any London Underground rider can attest, “Mind the Gap” is a message reinforced many times on every trip. Yet when it comes to filling today’s pervasive data management talent shortage, minding the gap often seems like a journey without a destination.
But let’s face it, data management is a challenging arena covering a diverse data landscape that spans myriad technologies, multiple disciplines, and every business domain. The phrase, “It takes a village,” comes to mind.
Further, these challenges are growing exponentially as massive data trends, such as the ten I identified in a recent blog, combine to make data management more complex and difficult than ever. This puts a premium on finding and retaining the best data management talent, including data architects, data engineers, database administrators, data stewards, and so on.
As a provider of data management software solutions, we see how much our customers struggle to attract and retain the right data management talent. While recognizing there is no one size fits all approach, this blog seeks to help our customers “mind their ‘data management talent’ gap” in three important ways.
1. Radically simplify your complex data management processes
Data management solutions have evolved over many years resulting in a hodgepodge of sometimes adjacent/sometimes overlapping tools. These silos of data management functionality along with aging, inefficient processes conspire to consume extra resources without providing extra benefit. But what if you could free up a large share of those resources by radically simplifying your data management processes?
Take your data integration process for example. It is significantly simpler and faster to integrate data with TIBCO® Data Virtualization than it is when trying to make traditional physical integration with all of its complex mappings, ETLs, staging schemas, and destination schemas work. In fact, data engineering staffing savings of 40 percent are typical.
Rather than using three or more distinct tools to support metadata management, catalog services, and data governance processes, what if you could use one product to do them all as you can with TIBCO Cloud™ Metadata? This lightens your data management workload by reducing set up, administration, and execution efforts, while also speeding up new employee learning curves.
When it comes to today’s complex data landscape, IT doesn’t have the resources to go it alone. Your business staff can add value in a number of ways. One way is by developing citizen data engineering talent on the business side to complement your overworked IT data engineers.
Let’s drill down on this citizen data engineering opportunity. As mentioned above, your IT data engineers can use TIBCO Data Virtualization to efficiently provision hundreds of reusable business views. From these views, your business analysts can quickly find the data they need, improving analytics productivity. But when just a bit more data engineering is required to further prepare and refine the business view for a unique need, you don’t need to add that to your IT data engineering queue. Instead, your business analysts can use specialized, citizen data engineer targeted functionality to finish the task.
Another way your business can address the data management talent shortage is by enlisting business domain experts, since who knows more about your data than your business users who create and use it every day. For example, at Panera Bread, store managers who know their store layouts better than anyone, use TIBCO EBX™ to maintain their individual store configurations in the master data repository. Similarly, corporate chefs maintain menu, recipe, and ingredient master data.
With this new business-IT partnership, both sides work together to assess your needs and skills. They then collaborate to close your data management skills gap by proactively maximizing the value add each side can contribute.
By adopting modern data management solutions, such as TIBCO Unify, you can take advantage of embedded AI/ML capabilities to automate multiple manual activities across metadata discovery, data quality, model design, code generation, query optimization, resource allocation, and more.
Closing your data management talent gap
When it comes to managing your data if you are like most organizations, the skilled resources you require far exceed your current resources, which puts your ability to be a data-driven business at risk.
But you don’t have to settle for the status quo when you can help fill your data management skills gap with the three approaches outlined above. For more on how to effectively and intelligently manage your data and enable your teams with better access, trust, and control for all your data, check out these helpful resources.
Verint on Tuesday announced new capabilities within its workforce management solution that automate compliance with CDC guidelines to reduce the risk of COVID-19 infection as employees transition back to the workplace.
New workflows automatically create a comprehensive schedule that is prescriptive, while including traditional workforce management criteria such as skill level, channels and peak hours.
Among the recommended modifications:
Implementing staggered start times;
Managing a mix of work-from-home and in-office agents;
Adhering to safe distancing scheduling recommendations for buildings’ capacities, by floor, workspaces or zones;
Instituting employee health checks, and allocating extra time for hygiene;
Providing equal opportunities for employees to rotate in and out of the office;
Ensuring employees who are not ready to return to the office are not scheduled to do so; and
Accommodating mobile scheduling requests and notifications about schedule changes.
“Effectively managing today’s workforce is crucial for improving customer experience, operational efficiency and compliance,” said Kelly Koelliker, Verint’s director of solutions marketing.
“Yet currently rising expectations of both customers and employees have made forecasting and scheduling contact center agents and customer engagement resources exponentially more challenging.” she told CRM Buyer.
Verint’s solution “leverages artificial intelligence-infused automation and mobile tools to streamline forecasting and scheduling,” Koelliker remarked, and its flexible workflows let customers “transition back as slowly or as quickly as regulations and business needs warrant.”
Getting Ahead of the Game
“The inclusion of new capabilities makes [Verint] more competitive,” observed Evelyn McMullen, research analyst at Nucleus Research.
“Some large human capital management and workforce management vendors have rolled out contact-tracing functionality, but not much else has been done to address reopening operations beyond Q&As instructing users on how to use their existing capabilities to navigate new regulations,” she told CRM Buyer.
Verint’s solution is tailored for call centers, McMullen said, so, although it’s “ahead of the market in its response to reopening measures, this could be overlooked due to the fact that it is not a primary workforce management provider and is not optimized for most industries.”
The retail industry “will absolutely need these types of automated workflows in their workforce management applications, especially as schedule planning is expected to be one of the greatest challenges upon reopening,” she pointed out.
Various workplace hygiene protocols, including conducting a hazard assessment of the workplace;
Improving building ventilation systems; and
Coordinating with state and local health officials to ensure compliance with local requirements.
Employers also must check the CDC website regularly for guidance updates.
The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) also prepared guidance for reopening workplaces.
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOCO) has issued 00000guidelines on a variety of pandemic-related workplace issues.
State and local governments hav issued their own guidelines. Here are the guidelines for Massachusetts, for example.
“Regulations are in flux worldwide,” observed Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group.
“From a global perspective, they should be — and likely have been — changing far more rapidly than they usually would, to address the expanding pandemic problem,” he told CRM Buyer.
Forty-seven percent of the respondents to the Challenger, Gray survey said they would follow the lead of their state governments with regard to reopening for business.
Another nearly 14 percent said they would heed the advice of a combination of local, state and federal leaders, as well as leading scientific experts and internal research. Of the remainder, 13 percent said they would adhere to the federal government’s guidelines, and nearly 13 percent said they would follow the advice of leading scientific experts.
Good Things Come in Small Companies
Although Verint does not crack the top 10 list of workforce management vendors, “the true advantage of a smaller player like Verint is that because they’re small, they tend to spend more time understanding and engaging with their accounts,” Enderle pointed out.
“Their power is the ability to better listen to and respond to unique customer requirements and aspirational needs,” he said. “They may never be the most feature-rich, but they should be more responsive than their larger competitors.”
The pros of Verint’s approach “include a significant amount of capability to deal with the new normal — the highly customizable nature of the offering, and how it anticipates the coming needs,” Enderle noted.
“The cons are that Verint is a relatively small company and may become spread too thinly as firms come back to market and collectively need a lot of help to adjust. They could exceed Verint’s consulting resources,” he said.
The new capabilities are for current Verint customers, whether they are using its solution on-premises or in the cloud, said Koelliker.
The new workflow “is a low-cost services package,” she noted, and a “small services engagement” will instruct customers on how to configure the solution so they can manage it for themselves.
Richard Adhikari has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2008. His areas of focus include cybersecurity, mobile technologies, CRM, databases, software development, mainframe and mid-range computing, and application development. He has written and edited for numerous publications, including Information Week and Computerworld. He is the author of two books on client/server technology. Email Richard.
Microsoft Power Automate provide users the ability to quickly create and integrate applications within the enterprise. With this ability comes concerns with governance to ensure users are allowed the appropriate permissions as well as identifying and highlighting specific connections created across the organization. Flows offer a wide array of connectors and the ability to identify which of these are used is essential.
This article is designed to examine common operations that administrators would use to govern environment flows and how best to work with both the Power Automate Management and Power Automate Admin Connectors.
The Common Data Service and fundamental concepts, such as packaging and distributing customizations with solutions, are paramount to providing an automated and auditable delivery process. With that in mind, we will also explore how the Management and Admin connectors are impacted by the usage of both My Flows and Solution Aware Flows.
Power Automate Management Connector and Actions
Inside of Power Automate and Canvas Apps resides the Power Automate Management Connector which allow administrators the ability to manage flows.
[Author’s Note: Click on each image for clarity]
With this connector within Power Automate Flow, administrators can schedule or run instantly a report of activities within a specific tenant, environment or even a flow itself. Reported items include listing environments, connections, flows and their owners and users. Actionable items include creating and deleting flows, turning flows on and off and modifying permissions and ownership on a flow.
Permissions
The Power Automate Management connector, dependent on DLP Policy, can be used by makers who may not have the appropriate permissions. If the maker does not have admin access they will get an error. This is important to address before we move further into common operations and scenarios with both connectors.
“Office 365 Global Administrator or Azure Active Directory Global Administrator permissions if you need to search through another user’s resources. (Note that Environment Admins only have access to those environments and environment resources for which they have permissions, and global admins can see all resources across the tenant.)“
Common Operations and Differences between Solution Aware and My Flows
Some of the actions I find useful regularly within this connector include List My Connections, List Flows as Admins, Get Flow as Admin and List Owners and Run-Only Users of Flows. For this section we will focus on utilizing these actions and how they can be used with both My Flows and Solution Aware Flows.
List Connections
List My Connections will list the connections and provide user context and connection status. If a connection has an error code, it can be found here and reported.
List Flows
List Flows as Admin provides a list of flows within an environment. Each flow returned contains the current state, the flow name and when it was created and last modified. For solution aware flows, we can also find the workflow primary key for use with the Power Automate API.
The Common Data Service API call, utilizing the WorkflowEntityId, shown below can be used to find further information about the flow.
Solution Aware Flows will have the WorkflowEntityId as shown above as well as another value to help distinguish it from My Flows. As shown below, the sharingType property will be “CommonDataService” for Solution Aware Flows.
Get Flow
Get Flow as Admin can help admins determine the different triggers and actions that define a flow. This could be helpful to retain a sort of history of My Flows allowing versioning with source control. Get Flow and Get Flow as Admin seem to both return My Flows or Solution Aware Flows. Remember, solution aware flows are packaged within solutions and can also easily be stored in source control with the Solution Packager tool.
Here is a Solution Aware Flow using the List Flow Owners action.
That said, let’s continue to modifying flow owners to understand how we can leverage additional connectors to help out!
Modifying Flow Owners and Run-Only Users
Modifying My Flow Owners allows Flow makers to add (put) or remove (delete) other makers or users to become owners. This works the same with Run-Only users as well.
For Modifying Owners for a Solution Aware Flow, the Modify Flow Owner action not only doesn’t work as expected it will throw an error.
Sharing error:
Sharing through Flow is not currently supported for solution-aware flows. Permissions management should be conducted through the environment-linked XRM instance.
However, referencing back to our knowledge that Solution Aware Flows are CDS (XRM) records, we can leverage the Power Automate (CDS) Web API to help. It just so happens the reference to the Power Automate Web API provides examples to listing users who flows are shared and how to share and unshare a flow.
First, let’s review the Flow as is from the Flow Portal. The image below shows a single owner of the flow with no run-only users.
Moving into the Common Data Service, we can see that by locating the flow within the Common Data Service, the flow is not shared with anyone.
Using the Common Data Service current environment connector, we can call an unbound action (GrantAccess) to modify the PrincipalAccess of the Flow to use a systemuser or team.
Now, reviewing the Common Data Service record for the workflow we can see the updated principal access. The image below is not an accurate representation to the one above. To find out how permissions and AccessRights work, review this document.
For a complete example of this flow, showcasing how to share access to a solution aware flow, click here.
Looping back on Listing Flow Owners
Now that we have discussed the Common Data Service, let’s circle back to the listing flow owners scenario. Reviewing the Power Automate Web API we can see that to list users we need to use a CDS function called RetrieveSharedPrincipalsAndAccess. Here is the CDS documentation. Unfortunately the Common Data Service (current environment) connector currently doesn’t allow for calling functions. In this case we can leverage an Azure Function custom connector or call the Web API using the HTTP connector.
Using the HTTP connector with the CDS Web API, you’ll have to make a call to get the authorization bearer token which can then be used for subsequent calls to the API. The image below shows this conceptually.
NOTE: This technique is based on the documentation found here in the article “Power Automate Web API“. That said I cannot speak to nor guarantee the supportability of what is shown here.
Turn On and Turn Off
The Turn On and Turn off actions, as described, can be used to enable or disable flows. From my testing I was able to successfully turn on and turn off both My Flows and Solution Aware Flows using the two actions.
If desired, a sample showing how to update the flow workflow CDS record to turn on or off can be found here.
Power Automate for Admins Connector and Actions
Operational differences between My Flow and Solution Aware Flows
Enable and Disable
Enabling and Disabling flows using the Power Automate for Admins Connector look to work very similar to the Power Automate for Management actions. However, the Power Automate for Admins Connector actions will not work for Solution Aware Flows as they will for the Power Automate for Management connector. Below are example error messages when attempting to start or stop a Solution Aware Flow.
Error:
“CannotStopUnpublishedSolutionFlow” – “An unpublished solution flow cannot be stopped.”
“CannotStartUnpublishedSolutionFlow” – “An unpublished solution flow cannot be activated. Please authenticate the flow connections and save the flow to enable activation.”
Edit Flow Owner
This flow action allows an administrator to assign a edit (CanEdit) or view (CanView) role to a user. Unfortunately this action will not work with Solution Aware Flows and like the Management actions, will require the Common Data Service API.
Error:
“EntityFlowSharingNotSupported” – “Sharing through Flow is not currently supported for solution-aware flows. Permissions management should be conducted through the environment-linked XRM instance.”
Actions Tested
Power Automate Management Connector
Power Automate for Admins Connector
Common Data Service (current environment) Connector
HTTP Connector
Action
Description
Send HTTP Request
Used for the CDS Web API for calling functions and other unavailable actions
Button triggered flows are not available in solutions.
Flows triggered from Microsoft 365 applications such as Excel are not available in solutions.
Flows that connect to SharePoint are not available in solutions.
Importing a solution containing a flow will not automatically create or associate required connections. The flow must be edited to fix the connections.
That said, there are benefits to using Solution Aware Flows such as enhanced capabilities like Child Flows or even additional monitoring with Get-FlowRun (more on that in a future article!). If its needed to move a My Flow to a solution and as long as the known limitations do not apply, there are a couple of options an administrator has.
The first option is to manually add a flow from the Flow Portal. This process is fairly straight forward, simply click Add existing, locate the flow in the Outside of Solutions tab and add. This process will create activity records in the Office 365 Security and Compliance Center which can be used for auditing purposes.
The second option which works well with our goals of automation and continuous governance is to use the PowerApps Administration for PowerShell cmdlets. Included in the Microsoft.PowerApps.PowerShell module is a cmdlet called “Set-FlowAsSolutionAware“. This allows us to programmatically add a flow to a solution by providing the environment, flow name and the solution.
This technique can allow us to automate the migration of My Flows using DevOps platforms such as Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions to building custom webhooks with Azure Function or Azure Automation.
Next Steps
In this article we have covered working with the Power Automate Management and Admin Connectors. Each offers unique actions to help administrators report and taken action on environment flow. Based on the type of flow we are working with, each connector action provides us different outcomes.
The actions tested have been listed out for a reference and sample flows have been provided. Finally, we wrapped with the steps needed to migrate My Flows into solutions.
Your feedback is extremely valuable so please leave a comment below and I’ll be happy to help where I can! Also, if you find any inconsistencies, omissions or have suggestions, please go here to submit a new issue.
Inogic is one of the leading ISV partners for Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM and has been providing solutions to enhance its productivity. Over the years, many applications like , , etc. have been developed. These apps have been a huge hit with businesses and industries all around the world. And recently, Inogic came up with a webinar series that gives insight into how these Dynamics solutions work, what they are for and, why everyone should have them installed in their Dynamics 365 CRM environment.
One of the highlights of this ongoing webinar series is the popularity of our app. Viewers showed a great deal of interest in this particular application so its time we quickly summarize all the important features of Attach2Dynamics.
Attach2Dynamics is an application that increases productivity and efficiency of Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM by providing integration of cloud storage within Dynamics 365 CRM. It currently supports three different cloud storage – SharePoint, Dropbox, and Azure Blob Storage. This has multiple features that help in managing documents, notes, files, and folders, etc.
Let’s walk through some helpful features of Attach2Dynamics which makes it different and a must-have app for your Dynamics 365 CRM:
Drag and drop single as well as multiple files and folders at a time to the configured cloud storage.
Create anonymous sharable links of files/folders and copy for external use.
It allows renaming of files and folders.
It also allows downloading of documents from configured cloud storage easily.
One can use Deep search filter for entered keywords and also delete files from Cloud storage.
The app allows configuration of multiple connectors and also supports single sign-on.
One can email a file’s link or file as an attachment from within CRM.
Attach2Dynamics supports hierarchy structure to store all the attachments/documents in SharePoint.
User actions can be controlled on Attach2Dynamics by administrator.
Attach2Dynamics supports all types of entities.
With help of these bunch of features, one can organize all documents in cloud storage according to their needs. From features, Attach2Dynamics is sure to increase productivity of your Dynamics CRM users.
Attach2Dynamics is supported in the latest versions of Dynamics CRM 365 including On-premises, Online, and Partner-hosted.
Safeguard and manage your attachments and documents now by downloading Attach2Dynamics from our or from . With the free trial experience the seamless benefits of the application yourself.
To register for our webinar series, . We also have provided video links to our concluded webinars on Attach2Dynamics. .
For a personalized live demo email us for a walk through how Attach2Dynamics makes document management an easy task on crm@inogic.com.
Large corporations with global operations define their global supply chains with the intent to match supply with demand. More importantly, they consider material flows, established manufacturing and co-manufacturing sites, storage locations, cash flows, technological advantages and restrictions, regulations, tax benefits, and market opportunities.
These supply chain operations run in technology systems of record, planning and analytical applications, and global trade management systems that support solutions to resolve a complex set of regulations to maintain compliance with export and import processes.
Many use global intelligent transfer price supply chain (GITSC) business processes to:
Optimize the landed costs for every product to the customer destination
Define the total costs of ownership
Define the relationship with the market and customers in terms of customer acceptance
Understand and manage customer satisfaction and market share
Here is an example of a GITSC that represents the flow of a product manufactured in China, reprocessed in the European Union, and finally sold in the United States of America.
The transfer pricing strategy in this model shows how the product flow gains tax advantages by using operational ports in Singapore and the Netherlands to offload the tax revenue.
In this example, the GITSC model shows that the total global tax accumulated is $ 29.50, for a total accumulated profit of $ 611.50. If the same supply chain did not use the tax advantages of Singapore and the Netherlands, the estimated tax rate would be $ 192.30, with a net profit of $ 448.30. This example GITSC offers an 85% reduction in tax payments and 36.30% net revenue increase.
The following figure shows the GITSC transfer pricing model in blue and the standard supply chain transfer pricing model in yellow.
Companies running GITSC models implement business processes supported by IT systems that allow the execution of transactional operations to comply with tax, foreign trade, and customs regulations.
Areas of opportunity for global intelligent transfer price supply chains
The first area of opportunity is the inclusion of an intelligent business system that supports decision-making to manage changes in the supply chain. This is both a challenge and an area of opportunity. These business-intelligence systems rely on the ability to collect transactional data across the supply chain. The objective of increasing the current analytical capabilities of the supply chain is to maximize global after-tax profits by determining the flow of goods and the transportation cost allocation between each of the supply-chain actors. The inclusion of simulation models is the first attempt to stabilize the decision making, with the changes inflicted on the supply chain elements, and the addition of artificial intelligence heuristic expert systems.
The second area of opportunity is to enhance current GITSCs based on lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic. The opportunity lies in managing the supply chain ecosystem, not in an isolated and disintegrated industry ecosystem model.
This industrial ecosystem integration is considered the most important priority to enable supply chain ecosystems to efficiently operate in this new reality characterized by fast, dynamic changes.
Join us in our exclusive webinar session on May 19 to get an overview of the SAP Readiness Check tool, which gives a first analysis of your existing SAP ERP application, highlighting key project activities.
In our previous, blog we have seen how with the help of creating territories sales managers can distribute workload amongst the sales team. With the distribution of work load every sales person has a clear picture of what prospects they need to chase and what strategy they need to follow to generate maximum sales. This also gives the managers a clear picture of how each sales person is performing.
However, in some cases the sales manager might distribute Dynamics 365 CRM leads to the sales persons unevenly due to imbalance in size of territories. Therefore, one sales person might have to chase more leads than other in order to meet their target. This obviously leads to a lag in performance. In this scenario, with the help of Maplytics, territories can be easily balanced in order to provide equal workload to all the reps.
For instance there is a Sales Manager Becca, she has two territories assigned to the sales reps Jacob and Serena. Serena plots the territories on map to visualize how both the territories are distributed. Upon plotting the territories Becca realizes one territory covers greater region than the other.
To avoid the imbalance in the distribution of workload, Becca decides to balance the territory using alignment tool. With the help of alignment tool Becca moves one region from second territory to first.
After moving the geography one Territory 2 to territory 1 now Becca has balanced territories with which workload is distributed between both the territories evenly.
Therefore, you have seen how with the help of Territory Alignment managers can quickly distribute the workload among the reps evenly. Both Sales and Service teams can leverage this feature of Maplytics to balance workload and create motivation amongst team members.
Let’s delve into the benefits of territory management:
Even work distribution: With the help of territory management teams can distribute the work evenly amongst the team members and weigh their performance. With even work distribution the top performing employees can be sorted out and training program for other reps can be launched.
Territory Alignment: By aligning territories equal opportunities can be created for all the team members to showcase the best of their performance. They can pursue leads and clients of their territories and make the best of their opportunities.
Territory Distribution: With territory distribution all the areas, leads and clients in the client/lead base is covered and maximum benefit is acquired from the business.
High ROI: Since reps are allotted territories evenly, there is a balanced work allotment therefore improving the chance of acquiring clients. Therefore, the overall ROI is high and maximum business is generated.
Thus, you have seen how with the help of territory management you can take your business to another level. In order to acquire maximum leads and clients with the help of Maplytics drop a mail at crm@inogic.com.
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Posted by Courtney Kang, Nonprofit Industry Marketing Lead
The Boys & Girls Club of Lawrence, Kan., does what it does very well. Almost too well. One of the most successful outposts of the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, it boasts one of the highest per-capita participation rates in the country, with 1,500 K-12 students served every day, and more than 3,000 active members.
Over time, that kind of reach brings challenges.
“It takes a tremendous amount of resources to manage and serve that many members,” said Megan Hill, director of donor engagement. “It also requires a significant management tool in order for us to effectively manage our entire organization, especially finances.”
But the Boys & Girls Club of Lawrence lacked such a tool, and as a result, a few years ago it found itself at an inflection point when it came to grant management. In particular, the organization had seen its roster of major grantors (those providing at least $ 500,000 of the annual budget) grow from one to three, each requiring strict reporting on how its funds were being used.
Upgrading its accounting system would have required significant upgrade fees to improve its grant management, but the club still would have been left with a disparate assortment of disconnected applications, and staff would have continued manually working with spreadsheets to merge data.
Inaction Not an Option
Still, it had to do something. At the time, staff had to manually separate data on matched funds and reimbursed funds, and that task was becoming complex enough to raise the possibility of error.
“We can’t risk being wrong,” said James Lawrence, director of finance & human resources. “If you report funds wrong, grantors can come back and ask for their money. We weren’t meeting the reporting expectations that each grantor had.”
What the club really needed was a more comprehensive and integrated system that it could use to run the entire organization. Lawrence had worked with NetSuite at a previous job, and he knew it was up to the task, but he assumed it was out of the club’s price range and was looking at affordable options, none of which met the organization’s needs.
It was then that he was pointed toward Oracle NetSuite’s Social Impact program, which provides discounted software licenses to nonprofits. After a three-month in-house deployment, Boys & Girls Club of Lawrence went live on NetSuite in April 2018.
Organizational Lifeblood
Lawrence and Hill both said the implementation was a great experience, and that NetSuite resources were there to answer questions every step of the way. That said, they did come away with one important lesson: They wished they’d have spent more time with the system before porting all of the club’s historical data over, as they would have done this differently once they knew how the system worked.
“Scrubbing the data as much as possible before conversion would be my advice,” said Hill.
NetSuite has become the technology lifeblood of the organization. The club uses NetSuite for everything from grant and donor management to workflow of purchase orders to enablement of automated payments to staff and vendors.
Later this year, NetSuite will be integrated with a new member tracking system the national organization is rolling out, and the club also is testing the ability to import bank statements into NetSuite for reconciliation.
A Night and Day Difference
The contrast in the organization pre- and post-implementation is like night and day. Financial reporting is cleaner, donation tracking is simplified, and a paper trail has been replaced by an electronic trail. The budgeting process has been streamlined, grants are growing thanks to the improved ability to record and track them, and reports that use to require days to assemble are now ready in minutes. On top of all that, improved access to quality data has led to improved communication with stakeholders and constituents.
And Hill said it’s clear that NetSuite can do so much more.
“We haven’t even scratched the surface of what we do,” she said.
According to Lawrence, the combined impact on the bottom line, on efficiency, and on the ability to continue improving as an organization has made NetSuite invaluable. And perhaps the greatest benefit is yet to come: He said that NetSuite will free up Hill and the rest of the development staff to spend more time on interacting with donors in person rather than sitting at their desks struggling with technical issues.
And if donors are happier, everything else the club does will be more effective. That, Lawrence stressed, is the whole point.
“We’re in the business of changing lives,” he said, “and NetSuite is helping us do that.”
Article by: Dave Bollard – Head of Marketing | 801-436-6636
