Your Operational ERP system is about more than storing information — it’s about using your data to make forward-thinking decisions so you can see more ROI and more growth. Leveraging your data for success shouldn’t require the heavy lifting of cross-referencing and painstaking data entry. Are you using your Operational ERP system to cut back on time spent on tedious tasks?
Save time by utilizing classes and types
When you set up different classes and types for your customers, you shave time off of the whole data entry process. For example, if you receive a customer 
who meets the criteria for a “West Michigan Storefront” customer class, a true Operational ERP system will give you the ability to simply select a class to
designate the customer to. Assigning a customer to a class will auto-populate data for that customer into the appropriate fields (e.g. tax code, sales rep, etc.)
based on the customer class’s “master” data.
While using classes and types doesn’t completely take the work out of adding a new entity into your system, it will considerably reduce the amount of time and labor necessary to complete the process.
Data for daily tasks
Setting up different classes/types for your customers allows you to gather the data necessary for smart segmenting in the future. For example, a customer class based on location would take time off the front-end work of offering a special discount specifically to customers in a certain region/state. Instead of sorting through the customer list manually, you could identify all the customers within the appropriate class as eligible to receive the discount. Or maybe you’ve found that you need to move around inventory in your warehouse. Even if you’ve mapped out the new layout, shifting around your goods could mean warehouse chaos . Using classes or types could make setting up a transfer of items as easy as a couple clicks —select all of a certain type of inventory in your warehouse (“T-shirt,” “Jersey,” etc), and that’s it. No mind-numbing inventory spreadsheet sorting necessary.
Organization is key
Knowing what your different customers have in common (type of business, location, point of contact, etc) can save you a lot of time. You’ll already have much of the foundation in place when it’s time to find specific customers, offer a deal to a certain group, or enter new, similar customers into your system. And this is also true for your inventory and vendors. Being able to group your customers or vendors into different “classes” or “types” based on what they have in common will help streamline your operations, eliminate errors, and lighten your workload.
If you haven’t used classes or types to and gain more visibility, it might be a good time to evaluate your Operational ERP software.
Good software will save you time, not demand it from you, and if your current solution doesn’t offer simple tools like customer classes/types, it’s probably costing you valuable time in other areas as well.
Looking to learn more about what kind of data you should be able to get out of your Operational ERP system? Check out
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