“I run a small-sized company with 17 employees who sell medical devices and provide services. I have been using Quickbooks and Zoho for my accounting and inventory management. For the last few months, it is becoming a challenge to run my business using Quickbooks and Zoho. I like Quickbooks accounting, but I need an advanced solution for my inventory and purchase order management.” This is what the office manager of the Georgia Medical Device Servicing company told me a few months back. Besides keeping data in Quickbooks and Zoho she also kept some of the multi-currency pricing information in Excel sheets. So, most of the time it took her at least an hour to issue an invoice to her customers. Moreover, as her business is growing it is becoming untenable to sustain the status quo and needed to upgrade to a CRM solution that can streamline her business processes and issue invoices within minutes.
Main Pain Points
After a few rounds of discussions, we came up with the main pain points of Georgia’s business operations:
· Invoice pricing took hours due to the mix of local and US-based drop ship purchases from the single sales order
· No tracking available for sales to purchase order
· Multi-location inventory tracking was manual — inventory was maintained for limited items only
· There was no customer assets visibility and so upsell to customers was difficult
· Medical equipment recall report was manual and took days
Solution
Datamoto, a cloud-based CRM solution provider, listens and analyses customers' pain points to find a better solution that can transform their business processes. We discussed with Georgia their pain points and finally came up with a plan that Georgia accepted to execute. As per the plan, the following was implemented in Georgia:
· Georgia brought all their inventory data and imported it to Datamoto
· Georgia also brought their customers and vendors data and imported to Datamoto
· Georgia configure the Datamoto and their Quickbooks accounting so that all the invoices and bills from Datamoto can be sent to Quickbooks with a click of a button (Quickbooks Sync)
· Multi-currency was enabled, and multi-location inventory was configured
· Georgia’s sales and purchase managers started using Datamoto inventory and order management
· Georgia started using the Datamoto field service application to schedule field tech resources
· Work order tickets are created, all activities including materials or spare parts are tracked in the field service app
· Service reports and invoices are instantly generated
· Field service tech able to maintain customer assets in the field service app
· Maintenance checklists are added to assist field tech to provide services
· Field service app generated recall report instantly
· Field service app also allowed service tech to maintain vendor catalog
With the above implementation, every item in the inventory can be tracked and every sales order, inventory, and purchase order are linked with the inventory. Having bills and invoices in the Quickbooks allowed the accountant to continue to use Quickbooks which she was most familiar with.
Benefits
Georgia got many benefits by using Datamoto CRM. Some of the main benefits are:
• Central place for parts and price calculation with multi-currencies
• Purchase order system which supports dropship and batch goods receiving
• Invoice sync to Quickbooks online for faster payment
• Paper-less service tech including recall report on the site or at the office
- An auditable system of records with digitized checklist and signed PDF report for field technicians
Overall Outcome
With the Datamoto CRM solution in place, Georgia’s overall benefits can be summarized as:
• Better scheduling of service tech
• Better customer’s asset visibility and so new revenue stream by upselling
• Reduce time to invoice from hours to minutes
More detail about the purchase order application is described in my previous blog. Also, you can find more about FSM in another blog: field service application
You can find more here:
Manufacturing Inventory Management
What is Field Service Management?
Medical Equipment Field Service Software
Field Service Software for Medical Device
