Cheap Internet has hidden secondary costs for SMEs

Cheap Internet services may initially save you money, but they can be detrimental to your business in the long term.

Peter Gradwell, Managing Director of award-winning Internet services provider Gradwell, explores the pros and cons of taking up a cheap internet service provider.

Businesses may be doing everything they can to cut their costs and maximise their profits but unfortunately, if you’re considering cutting the cost of your business Internet provision by switching to a cheap Internet service, you may find yourself counting the cost and not the saving.

Ofcom recently published a report that investigated the most popular broadband products and revealed that despite customers being sold faster connections, due to an increase of more than 25% in the average fixed-line residential broadband speed, many providers were unable to deliver their advertised speed to customers.

These providers may say they can provide fast speeds in your area, but they will really slow you down, as many cheap Internet services can only manage as little as 1-2MB, which is simply not good enough for today’s business broadband user. If you’ve signed up for a long contract with these cheap, slow Internet providers, you’ll be regretting it when you can’t get the speed you need. Therefore if your business relies on speedy Internet, choose a business Internet service with speeds that really match your requirements.

If, like many businesses, your company relies on the sending and receiving of considerably large amounts of data each month, you may come unstuck with a cheap Internet service as they often impose unrealistically low download limits and charge you heavily if you go over your agreed usage. A business broadband user often needs to have capacity for downloads that can grow with their business, so you should consider how much information you currently need and how much more you will require in the future.

You should also ask whether your cheap broadband provider offers the kind of service that can support high quality voice telephony. If you experience patchy quality with frequent drops in service, then you should consider changing your business broadband provider to one that offers a stable, reliable service for all your VoIP telephony requirements, as a poor reception is not suitable for customer contact or client calls.

When you choose to sign up to a cheap Internet service you may discover to your cost that their service is down more than it’s up and running. To most businesses these days, downtime means a serious dent in the profits, so always choose a business broadband provider with the very best connection stability.

When you choose a cheap Internet service, you often have to pay a premium price to call their customer service; when you do finally reach one of their operatives, they may be based outside the UK and English may not be their first language.
Before signing up for any business broadband package, check that all of the above areas have been satisfactorily discussed. If your business depends upon excellent communication and connectivity, choosing a cheap Internet service for your company could end up costing you much more than you save.

Source: SME Web

Think twice before you make the switch! Cheaper isn’t always the solution!

Intelligent Information Systems Company Days

“Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much”

Helen Keller

All the teams within IIS are coming together on Monday and Tuesday to catch up on the latest, share ideas and make plans for the coming months and 2011.

With three new members having joined the team since June, myself included, and another one set to join in October, it will be a good chance for everyone to put faces to the names that they’ve been hearing and corresponding with over the summer months and also those which to introductions haven’t been made.

IIS places a high emphasis on team work and recognises the importance of open communication, the sharing of knowledge and ideas which supports the continued innovation which we are committed to achieving in relation to our products, services and in house activities.

The company days provide a chance for each department to converse with each other, recognising the importance and contributions of all included.

“By sharing information, teamwork enhances business, makes it more informed, creates harmony and alleviates resentment between the different factors that need to work hand in hand in order to make a business work.

Teamwork has been proven to be the secret to a successful business and if you were to imagine each person within that team as a little cog in a machine, without one of the cogs working, the whole machine stops. Equally as important as this, the communication between each faction means that the shared information adds value, oils that machine, and makes the teamwork more effective.”

Rachelle de Bretagne

Blog posts and social media activity may come to a slight halt over the couple of days next week in case anyone thinks we’ve given up or are failing to keep up the effort, far from it! We'll back with any highlights and revelations from the days on Wednesday!

SAP compare themselves to Apple, staying true to their core

SAP's rival Oracle are making an executive suite reshuffle which from SAP's point of few sets the companies on diverging paths.

Oracle is bringing in a top-shelf executive who knows computer hardware, both from his years at H.P. and at NCR before that. That strategic and operational know-how is crucial to Oracle, since it acquired Sun Microsystems earlier this year.

Mr. McDermott, co-chief executive of SAP called the Sun purchase “Oracle’s wild move into hardware.”
By contrast, he said, SAP is “staying true to its core” in software.

The software-only strategy, Mr. McDemott said, insures that SAP’s major corporate partners, which are also hardware makers, like I.B.M. and H.P., remain allies. “For Oracle, they are enemies now,” he said.

SAP, according to Mr. McDermott, will focus primarily on three product lines. The first is business applications, its mainstay business of supplying the software companies use to manage their finances, customer accounts, manufacturing and procurement.

The second is business intelligence software, which companies use to mine data for insights that can increase sales and cut costs. Its Business Objects subsidiary, acquired in 2007 for $6.78 billion, is a leader in business intelligence software.

The third, Mr. McDermott says, is mobile applications for business. Sybase software is already widely used in transporting messages to and from smartphones, and SAP plans to invest heavily in the mobile business. The idea, he said, is to link workers with mobile devices — like smartphones and Apple iPads (SAP has already deployed 2,000 to its workers) — to all the back-end business operations software SAP makes.

“What Apple has done in the consumer space, we’ll do in business applications,”McDermott said.

Adopting ERP, “Best step for SMEs to increase productivity and ROI”

Nowadays, almost every organisation is using cutting edge ERP solutions to manage their business with ease.

Even, small businesses have started adopting custom made ERP solutions to handle their crucial business processes in a more professional manner.

As the government is making efforts to help UK SMEs expand and grow their businesses they will need the architecture to support such growth. Rather than having disparate systems integration will become key to increasing productivity and efficiency and creating true visibility across the organisation.

Small businesses constitute a major segment of overall business productivity. Adopting ERP is the best step that SMEs can take in order to increase their productivity and ROI. There are several operations at a small business enterprise that needs to be automated. In absence of proper ERP implementation, some of the key business operations like finance, inventory, human resource, purchase, or payroll need extra manpower and productive time.

SMEs are considered as major economic players and a potent source of national, regional and local economic growth (Taylor and Murphy 2004). Most small firms still under-utilise the potential value of IS innovations by only restricting them to administrative tasks Brock 2000). Enterprise systems (ES)provide Small to Medium-sized Enterprises(SMEs) with opportunities that are largely unexploited.

Women in the UK to receive equal pay deal in 2067

UK businesses are still more than five decades away from paying men and women equally. Though female salaries are on the rise at a rate slightly higher than those of men it is still going to be some

The 2010 National Management Salary Survey, conducted by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) and XpertHR, shows that female salaries increased by 2.8 per cent over the last 12 months, compared to 2.3 per cent for men. However, with the average UK salary for a male manager currently £10,031 more than that of a female manager, women face a 57 year wait before their take-home pay is equal to that of their male colleagues.

Although this year marks the 40th anniversary of the 1970 Equal Pay Act, data collected from 43,312 individuals in 197 organisations reveals that male pay outstrips female pay by as much as 24 per cent at the most senior level.

Even at a junior level the gap still persists with male junior executives receiving £1,065 more than female executives. Across the regions, women in the Midlands fare the worst, taking home £10,434 less while those in the North East fare the best, where the gap is smallest at £8,955.

Looking at different industry sectors, female executives in the IT and pharmaceutical industry experience pay gaps that are higher than any other sectors, at £17,736 and £14,018 respectively.

CMI’s head of policy Petra Wilton says: ‘We want to see government take greater steps to enforce pay equality by monitoring organisations more closely and naming and shaming those who fail to pay male and female staff fairly.

“Competitive businesses need to attract diverse workforces and appeal to the most talented employees. To do this managers and employers need to recruit from a wide talent pool but they cannot expect to attract the UK’s best female talent if they continue to undervalue it.”

Original Article: smallbusiness.co.uk

SAP expands university reach

As companies throughout the world continue to adopt on-demand technologies, universities and higher education institutions are finding it necessary to restructure their curriculum. In order to provide practical experience for students of business administration, SAP AG announced the start of a pilot project that incorporates the SAP ® Business ByDesign solution into the curriculum for universities taking part in the SAP® University Alliances program. This global initiative is offering selected university faculties access to SAP software and educational resources, and helping students gain practical skills in applying state-of-the-art enterprise software to real-world business scenarios. Instructors at 18 pilot universities in Germany, France, India, the United Kingdom and the United States now can supplement their curricula with innovative teaching methods and hands-on practice with business process modeling using the on-demand solution specifically developed for small businesses and midsize companies who want to work with an integrated, complete business application without the need to invest in IT infrastructure.

"Business graduates at the beginning of their careers typically lack practical experience and therefore have difficulty with business processes," said Helmut Krcmar, professor of Information Systems at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM)."

"By incorporating SAP Business ByDesign into their studies, our students can create their own company and design its business processes in a short time through the system's self-learning capabilities, enabling them to quickly see for themselves the inter-organizational relationships. This opens up entirely new teaching methods for us as, in the future, we can impart practical business knowledge by first using SAP Business ByDesign before we look closer at the theory."

"The on-demand solution from SAP simplifies the modeling of a business from the very beginning with a friendly user interface," said Daniel Pittel, business administration student at RheinMain University of Applied Sciences in Wiesbaden. "Even without technical skills and knowledge, you are led step by step through the business relationships. Right from the beginning of your studies you merge practice and theory, which clearly boosts successful learning and your motivation."

"Over 1000 colleges and schools use SAP software for education and research," said Oswald. "By including SAP Business ByDesign into our SAP University Alliances program with initially selected universities, we provide today's youth with the best foundation for a career in business administration. By transferring knowledge between technology and industry, we get feedback from different areas of expertise, which allows us to continue to optimize our offerings to the advantage of our customers."

Source: SAP AG

Follow a SAP Business One implementation and business transformation

A Boutique Bicycle Company, Torelli Bicycle, will be the first company to have their SAP Business One implementation and business transformation tracked and documented in the first of a series by Information Week.

The entire process – from planning and business process mapping, to go-live, to the company’s first experiences using its new software – is being documented by InformationWeek over the next few weeks as part of its "SMB Location Makeover" series, co-sponsored by SAP AG (NYSE: SAP). This implementation is being supported by SAP channel partner Navigator Business Solutions.

InformationWeek will follow the transformation at Torelli step by step via weekly updates, blogs, videos, interviews and feature stories. To help streamline business processes, pave the way for future growth, and help focus more on its core business and customers, the bike-maker is implementing the SAP® Business One application.

Torelli Bicycle, now entering its 30th year in business, runs a frame-building operation, in which it designs and builds custom road bikes and frames for professional racers and biking enthusiasts, as well as a parts and accessory business. The small shop of four full-time employees has experienced consistent growth, but its current computing systems and business processes were not keeping pace. The solution will help Torelli integrate its entire business across financials, sales, customer relationships, inventory and operations.

The InformationWeek documentation of Torelli Bicycle’s implementation is the first in a real-time, multimedia series that will showcase real-world technology deployments of enterprise resource planning (ERP) offerings to small and midsize businesses (SMBs). To follow in Torelli’s tracks as it plans, implements and runs SAP Business One, visit InformationWeek SMB On Location Makeover.

Source: SAP AG

Online Trading with SAP Business One and Intelligent E-Commerce

With the rise and increasing precedence for SMEs to consider E-Commerce SAP Business One and Intelligent E-Commerce provide the functionality can support you in your quest to enter the growing world of online trading.

The Powering Small Business Britain report from online payment service provider PayPoint.net revealed that 27%, over a quarter of those surveyed believe ecommerce to be the future of their business yet they haven’t yet made it central to their commercial activity.

SAP Business One designed specifically for SME’s along with Intelligent E-Commerce, the standardised add on from Intelligent Information Systems, will help you overcome the initial hurdles and support you throughout the online trading process helping you to manage it and your presence more effectively and efficiently.

Intelligent E-commerce provides users of SAP Business One with a robust and easy to use solution to provide information to customers Business 2 Business E-commerce. Using Intelligent E-commerce companies can provide their customers with an on-line portal. Customers can log onto the website, enter their username and password and view products on offer.

Business Challenges

•Providing customers with an online portal.
•Offering service via the web.
•Displaying products with customers’ prices online.
•Providing self service customer account information.
•Providing Reps with a web portal to place orders and access customer information.

Key Features

•Web Store with product pricing in multi currency and customers special pricing.
•Robust and easy to use.
•Service management online.
•Sales Rep order entry for their customers only.

Business Benefits

•Lower cost of sales by enabling customers to buy online.
•Allows customers to get their own copy transactions.
•Displays your products on the web.
•Gets customer to interact online for support.
•Lets your sales reps enter orders and check stock in real time.

See related blog post: Small Businesses saved by E-Commerce http://intelligentinformationsystems.blogspot.com/2010/09/small-businesses-saved-by-ecommerce.html

Small businesses saved by ECommerce!

Shop owners who have decided to sell their goods online say the move has saved their businesses.

Some four-fifths (79 per cent) of retailers claim they couldn’t have kept their high street presence alive without being online at the same time, according to a survey from eBay.

Mark Lewis, managing director for eBay in the UK, says retailers can’t afford to ignore e-commerce. ‘To ensure businesses continue to thrive on the high street, they must raise their game and exploit new sales channels. The internet can provide a lifeline to all businesses, connecting them to customers across the globe.’

UK consumers spent a staggering £250 billion shopping online in the last decade. That’s according to the IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary.

Our love affair with online retail therapy shows no signs of abating, with sales during 2010 alone expected to hit £56 billion.

The Index’s performance over the last decade tells the story of e-retail success in awe-inspiring numbers. It has grown by 5,772% since launch and continues to track the rise and rise of an industry that still continues to grow, despite the continued challenging economic conditions.

The Powering Small Business Britain report from online payment service provider PayPoint.net unearths a broad range of changes that are forecast for British entrepreneurship over the next five years.
PayPoint.net and YouGov surveyed over 800 UK small businesses about the critical business issues they face today. The findings provide a snapshot of business thinking and highlight a number of changes that have to take place as the UK economy emerges from recession.

The report yielded some interesting key findings…

•35% of small businesses across all sectors see the majority of their revenues coming from online income over the next five years
•58% of survey respondents predict that the greatest growth in their turnover will be through online sales
•Access to more customers is the top benefit to moving online for 59% of businesses
•36% of businesses have been able to grow through access to global markets as a result of trading online

Looking forward, over a quarter (27%) of the businesses covered see e-commerce as the future for their business but have not yet made it central to their commercial activity. Meanwhile, 44% acknowledge the importance of online revenues but are still only at the early stages of developing an on and offline presence to maximise revenue opportunities.

Have you made the move yet???

Sources: Smallbusiness.co.uk, Electronic Payments

Increasing your Twitter followers

As a business the idea behind using Twitter is to connect with as many interested parties and customers as possible so that you can update them regularly with news, insight, company activities and also to provide a more humanistic aspect of your business. It’s free marketing and potentially will support you in managing your customer relationships so why wouldn’t you use it!?

You want to make the most of the large community, extend your reach and gain as many followers as possible.

Here are some tips on how to gain more followers!

Tweet during rush hour – catch people on the move when they have the time to catch up on twitter, tweet and retweet themselves

Follow Others – they may return the favour

Follow those with the same interests as you – you want to have some common ground and based upon the shared interest the audiences you’ll be reaching will more likely to be interested in your company, what you offer and what you have to say

Interact with your followers – this will help to spread your messages and twitter presence to a wider audience as your interaction will be viewable to their followers

Target power tweeters – these tweeters are those which are well established, widely known and respected. Interacting and following them will spread the your presence on Twitter, potentially reaching a wider audience

Put links to your twitter page everywhere – putting links to your twitter page on your website, within Ezines and in the signature of all your mailings will drive traffic to your twitter page and support you in gaining more followers

Use the # functionality – using the # key before the name of the topic you are tweeting about or the key words within your tweet will help visitors to find you and for your company and tweets to be suggested to them when they input or search for the given topic/s.

Happy tweeting!!!!

Follow Intelligent Information Systems on Twitter –http://twitter.com/iisystems

Upgrade hurdles conquered with SAP Business One

The word “upgrade” has historically been an unpopular word amongst SAP customers due to the associated time, pain and cost of moving to a new version of the given software.

SAP Business One overcomes these issues as you can now reintegrate your modifications into new versions of the solution with minimal effort, virtually eliminating the frustration and costs typically associated with upgrades.

Once the hurdles have been overcome the benefits of upgrading can shine through. Why would you not want to take advantage of new innovative solutions which have been designed to better meet your needs? Improvements have been made with you in mind and the upgrade has been developed to increase and build upon the benefits that your current system provides. Upgrades are designed to support you in keeping your business in line with external environments and help you overcome the changing business challenges which you face.

Sports equipment designer, manufacturer and distributor Unicorn Products reports a successful upgrade from SAP R3 to SAP ECC6.

Unicorn managing director Ed Lowy explains that the company has been running on a SAP ERP system since 1999, but that it needed a system capable of managing the growing complexities of the organisation and improving efficiency.

"Unicorn Products has gone from strength to strength over the last 10 years and an upgrade was necessary to provide us with the maintenance and functionality we need to sustain our growth," he says.

According to an Upgrade survey carried out by Panaya, 2010, 79% of companies surveyed have definitive plans to perform an SAP upgrade in the next 16 months and 45% of those are upgrading in the next 6 months.
SAP Business One 8.8 is refined, simplified and faster.

The new SAP Business One release accommodates the continuous demands of the changing market by including an upgrade wizard that is simple and straightforward, reducing customer’s downtime to a minimum. In addition, the new release integrates to partner applications and business services. Based on the flexible business platform of SAP Business One, small businesses can quickly start with core business management applications and add additional capabilities over time with easy-to-consume business applications from SAP partners. In the future, customers will be able to more easily extend their solutions with cloud-based applications, mash-ups and mobile integration.

The upgrade takes less than four hours, and the benefits are immediate with more speed, nice new user interface, and embedded Crystal Reports.

To find out more about SAP Business One 8.8 and how you can upgrade, Contact sales@iisystems.net.

ERP supporting critical CRM within SMEs

“Brands are built by what people are saying about you, not what you are saying about yourself”, Guy Kawasaki, one of the original Apple employees.

Businesses spend 80% of their marketing funds going after new customers and clients rather than nurturing, retaining, and maintaining the customer relationships they already have.

It is important to build relationships with the customers you currently have as they are your assets and potentially the key to future growth. Consider the following facts…

•Repeat customers spend 33% more than new customers.
•Referrals among repeat customers are 107% greater than non-customers.
•It costs six times more to sell something to a prospect than to sell that same thing to a customer.

Companies that fail to nurture and retain their customer base ultimately fail. You will also spend twice as much to get new clients as you will in maintaining your existing customer base as well as being limited in your ability to attract new clients if you can't hold onto and satisfy your existing customers and clients.

The bottom line is that one of the key components in marketing and business growth is to spend the majority of your time and effort nurturing customer relationships, so that you get business from existing clients and customers. This is a strategy that will move you forward in increasing your sales by 50% without increasing your budget.

As a small business CRM is even more important as you are more likely to depend upon repeat business rather than sales volume.

CRM is one piece of the new wave of ERP that focuses on outward facing processes, tying them together with the inside-the-enterprise transaction processing engine of the original ERP systems.

With the popularity of the Web and Web-based business, companies operating in a mass production world were able to truly personalise relationships with customers. The ability to build strong relationships with customers is causing renewed efforts among businesses to achieve lifetime value from current customers and to put strategic plans in place to go after lifetime value for new customers in new markets.

In the world of eBusiness, companies can replicate the personal customer relationship that existed prior to mass markets by using knowledge of the customer to personalise customer service while continuing to sell standard products.

The SAP Business One CRM application provides the tools to turn prospects into customers, grow customer sales, and profitability, and increase customer satisfaction.

To find out more visit www.beabetterbusiness.com or contact sales@iisystems.net

Sources: ERP Bandit.com, Ezine Articles.

Intelligent Scheduler - Schedule and assign your activities within SAP Business One

The latest Intelligent Essentials element, Intelligent Scheduler is now available!

Intelligent Scheduler allows you to schedule your activities and updates them within SAP Business One permitting you to manage your diary more efficiently and cross check your schedule against those within your department or across the whole company.
As with all Intelligent Essentials elements this a standardised enhancement designed to make your SAP Business One solution even better.

Functionalities

•Uses your SAP Business One Login to connect to the database.
•Calendar allowing to you to select a single or range of dates to be displayed.
•Filter employees that are presented by department or turn on and off by individual employee.
•Creates a list of activities that are open, scheduled and those within the specified date range.
•Colour coding of activities according to due date.

Key Features

•Easily assign activities to employees from a predefined, user created list.
•Assigned activities automatically updated in SAP.
•Notification of conflicting appoints to user before activities are scheduled.
•Scheduled activities are displayed in a different colour depending on their status.
•Choice of daily, weekly or monthly view.

Business Benefits

•Efficiently manage multiple employee diaries.
•Readily access information regarding your own or employee activities.
•Schedule activities for employees without having to request information regarding their schedule.
•Promptly organise team meetings without having to individually consult employees individually.
•Saves you time by automatically updating SAP Business One with any changes made to activities and schedule.

To find out more about Intelligent Scheduler and other Intelligent Essentials elements visit www.beabetterbusiness.com, or contact michelle.hunt@iisystems.net for a brochure!