When you are provided your ERP system from ERP FM you will be offered all the support possible from our trained professionals to get you up and running, but we understand that it’s your business and you are the master and controller of that and sometimes don’t want to schedule inexpert ERP assistance and just want to hit the ground running, which we are happy to say is possible with our Enterprise Resource Planning product. If you are looking to get started fast with your installation the following areas should be your concentration in this order

1. Setup your service lines
2. Add your customer and supplier companies
3. Add contacts for your internal divisions
4. Add a minimum of one contact to your suppliers
5. Add customer contacts should you require them
6. Set up staff payroll
7. Asset management and start adding company assets
8. Make sure you add addresses
9. Create a new task application
10. Add a new task

What follows now is a detailed explanation of what the purpose of seeing out each point is from above and what it achieves in getting you set up as speedy as possible

Understanding the purpose of divisions in ERP

Your ERP installation is for your company, but you may want to split your workforce into divisions such as Sales, Labor and HR, with ERP FM, you can achieve this easily. The purpose of divisions is so that you can have specific accounting and specific suppliers in divisions, it makes for a less crowded atmosphere and better positions you’re ‘Internal Staff’, so that they are recognized for their position and potentially miss assigned. To avoid miss assignment we also have the ability to geofence a user to a location so they never get recommended or automatically assigned to tasks that they shouldn’t

1. Setup your service lines

Service lines are arranged into sections of your service groups which can be interdependently managed via the attribute manager within ERP, to give yourself the best possible start go to Business and then Service Line Setup and proceed to add related services and standard unit sell and unit cost prices to each line, these will be piped into every corner of your installation discreetly giving you varying level of controls and customization wherever they are pulled upon.

2. Adding customer companies for the purpose of asset management

You as the system owner already have all your settings inside Division and System settings that impact who you are and how you will pass down data into things such as Internal contacts, but adding a company should be your first step, set up a few customers (customers are the trigger that can be added to asset management) and then you are ready for the next step. Remember to supply information regarding a supplier’s coverage region so you can get the system running like clockwork when it comes to recommendations in a task.

3. Adding contacts that are internal to you

In house staff, employees, people for payroll, however you name it, this is one of the most important steps, you should goto ‘New Contact’ and start adding your internal staff and all of their related Service Lines they offer so that you have a better opportunity at generating recommended resources for your tasks, this takes tremendous pressure off and turns tasking into a pure pleasure in ERP.

4. Adding contacts to suppliers and customer companies

It is important to know the contacts within your suppliers and customers, so for a company to work effectively you need to add at least one contact to a supplier company and a customer company. Creating these profiles can later be setup up for access to your installation so that they can oversee all of their work anytime of the day, which is covered in account management.

5. Adding customer contacts

You may have a database of customers, which are not related to customers that simply need to be represented, at this point just select them as customers and they will become added and available in all related task operations. Please note we have API insertion tools and ability to import data, but we cover that on other articles.

6. Set up staff payroll

Setting up staff payroll in your ERP system is essential to making sure that your tasks generate the right costs so that you can effectively see how your businesses finances are run, with staff payroll you can add contracts that have starts and expiration’s, set salaries or per hour rates and all other types of goodies that will give your business full financial transparency.

7. Asset management for your internal company and company customers

Asset management is another key area which requires immediate attention, from this section you can start adding your customer’s buildings, area assets and more (remember in step 2 you should have turned asset management on for them). Fill in the address information for buildings, that is very important, for invoices to work effectively, you need to add addresses and get a geolocation fix, without adding geography the system is at a disadvantage immediately.

8. Again, make sure you input address information

Purposely repeating ourselves, address information is everything, so make sure ALL of your buildings have their physical location and invoice address inputted as a bare minimum. Even go back to staff payroll and fill in your employee address information, and while you’re at it, go to your customers and make sure that’s filled in, you will have a much richer interaction by making sure address information is covered, and most of all, making sure invoice addresses are inputted is integral to the entire invoice process, without inputting these, your system can’t possibly know where to send physical invoices too or who they should be addressed to.

9. Create a new task application

Tasks are the heart and soul of the system, running all of your workload through our ERP Task component will not only lighten the load and give a level of transparency and clarity you have never experienced before in business, but it will provide a full financial tracking coupled with internal and external time tracking. First thing is though you need to setup a application, applications allow operators and field workers to simply click and select then be presented with all of the pre routine data you supplied and fill in the variables such as time and then allow for the over the top task management from the assigned contacts.

The key routine to watch out for is the ‘Intended Usage’ field, this will determine where the task application is presented to users of the system, if you are creating an application intended for an operator or field worker using their mobile to be able to create a task from you should select ‘New Task Application’ as the dropdown option, this means these applications can be created from any point, where the other options are only available in Geography and Certification selection components where there is a recurring element to it. You will notice scrolling through these options provides a different layout and option set immediately in the new application setup as each has a different impact, other articles discuss the depths and abilities of how applications work on the site.

10. Adding a new task from your newly created application

Now that you have an active task application set as the intended use of ‘New Task Application’, you can go to the menu on the desktop or mobile and select new task, you will then be presented with categories and can navigate in a click to your application, once located, select it and it will create the application with all of the settings from your task application leaving you ready to fill in the blanks and assign accordingly. If you set up everything correctly you should be offered recommended contacts for the task in hand and start dishing out work to your staff and suppliers while tracking.