Up Close and Personal

by Doug Deane, President of DSD

Happy New Year from all of us at DSD Business Systems! We hope that you had a safe and joyous holiday, and that 2004 will be a very prosperous year for you. DSD held its annual holiday party on December 13, and a really great time was had by all. Jon Reiter and his wife Kylie were wonderful and understanding hosts. Their beautiful house in north San Diego was just built, and the crew at DSD broke it in nicely.

All of our staff particularly enjoyed being Santa for two needy families in the San Diego area, and our customers actually stepped up to the plate with donations that were greatly appreciated. Our two families received a mountain bike, gift certificates, a boom box, clothing and many other fantastic gifts. Thanks to all of our staff and to our customers for making December 2003 a great holiday for those two families.

I think that 2003 was a challenging year for all of us, as well as for me personally. We endured fires that nearly cost many of us our homes, there was a war in Iraq, there was a recall election and there is still great uncertainty over California's budget, I had a motorcycle stolen (it now seems trivial in comparison to these other events), and our staff had some family members pass away, including my "daughter" Tiffany, and Kathy Moreno's "son" Duke (both beloved family dogs), but...

...we're all looking forward to a great 2004! The Dow went from about 7,200 to over 10,000 in the span of 9 months, there are a lot of new faces in Sacramento and hopefully they'll be able to fix Worker's Compensation, the school crisis and the migration of businesses out of California, and Sage Software continues to amaze us with their success in the business software marketplace.

Our first MAS 90 User's Group in over a year took place on Tuesday, January 13, and it was a huge success, thanks to the hard work of Ron Hutzul who organized it, and to Stephanie Smith, Jim Woodhead, Jennifer Phillips and Jon Reiter who were the featured presenters. This is a great opportunity for our customers to stay on top of all things MAS 90-related, and to get valuable information regarding how their MAS 90 and MAS 200 system operates, and what is in store for it in the future. We hope that you'll set time aside to be at the next meeting, scheduled for April 20th.

We certainly hope that DSD will be a part of your success in 2004, and all of our staff wish you a very prosperous New Year.

-Doug

Existing Customers

• Receive Up to a 15% Discount on Manufacturing Modules*

• Receive a 15% Discount on the Purchase of the Starship Module*

*Some restrictions may apply. Please contact Stephanie Smith for further details and other available promotions.

MAS 500 Version 6.3 was released in September and over the next few months DSD will be spotlighting some of the powerful new features made available. In this month’s feature, we’ll outline improvements to the MAS 500 Migration tools, and MAS 500 usability and workflow in the Core Financials package.  

In order to make your transition to MAS 500 as smooth as possible, Best has added a number of new APIs to allow migration of your financial, distribution and manufacturing data. These new import capabilities include: GL Transactions, Inventory Transactions, Open and Closed AP Transactions, Open Sales Orders, Vendor Items (alias items) and Manufacturing Employees, Tools, Routings, Work Centers and Operators.

All of these features are available through the Assisted Company Setup Application, which guides you through the configuration of your MAS 500 system step by step. Using Assisted Company Setup’s migration option, MAS 500 will extract this data and place it in a grid, which you can then manipulate. Once you’ve made any necessary adjustments, your data is quickly and easily pushed into your MAS 500 database. Any discrepancies print to exception reports and data that is not imported remains in the grid to be edited and completed.

In addition to the new migration capabilities in MAS 500 6.3, Best has improved usability across all of the inquiry forms. Now rather than continually having to re-configure your selection screens, you can save your selection criteria as a new view and it will be available the next time you use that inquiry. And with the quick search fields you’re able to save a quick inquiry setting that will allow you to always jump down and search on that criteria. Ultimately, this improved workflow gets to your critical data in fewer keystrokes.

For more information on MAS 500 please contact Josh Thigpen of DSD Professional Services at 619-683-9900 or JoshT@dsdinc.com.

A CRM system is more than just a system for tracking people in the sales process. A CRM system encompasses at a minimum marketing, and customer service / support. However, a great CRM system contains all information available on a given customer or prospect in one place. This can include accounting information, a "customer score card", comments and notes made by all persons at the company, customer support incidents, shipping tracking numbers, and anything else that pertains to that customer.

Most CRM systems are customizable enough to hold much of this information. However, some of the lower end CRM products, such as ACT, GoldMine, and TeleMagic have limits as to how much information they can hold. Most SQL based products, such as SalesLogix, are uniquely positioned to perform these tasks.

Customer Service / Support is a great first step to extending the usefulness of your CRM system. Customer Service and Support can operate on a "Ticket" system. When a service or support issue arises, the representative opens a ticket, logs the issue, and logs the resolution to that issue. Many systems can add that problem and resolution automatically to a knowledge base, so that the next time the same issue arises, there is an easy way to identify answers quickly. Managers of these departments can also keep tabs on what open issues there are, and how long it is taking to resolve these issues. These incidents should be available for viewing by the sales staff, so that they can identify the issues getting in the way of closing a sale.

Many people have purchased SalesLogix version 6, and have implemented it for their sales teams, but do not realize that they have the licenses to run the support client included. As such, anyone with that program can begin a customer service ticket system immediately.

The "Sales Edition" from SalesLogix is an inexpensive way for smaller businesses to harness the power of a full CRM system without the full system price tag. For just under $3500 (excluding sales tax), you can get a 5 user SalesLogix system that includes an SQL based engine, a full featured sales client - Account records, Contact records, and opportunity records. Also included are automatic processes for streamlining the sales process, a complete integration to Microsoft Outlook's E-mail and Calendaring capabilities, literature fulfillment features, activity and task management, an a full mail merge and e-mail merge capability. You can even deploy remote users on their laptops with a copy of SalesLogix, so that your road warriors know what's up with a given customer. Additional users for this system are just under $700.

Contact Nicole Stone (NicoleS@dsdinc.com) for more information on this affordable way to get the best - SalesLogix.

SalesLogix has announced the release of Service Pack 1A for version 6.1. Our tests have shown that numerous issues in version 6.1 have been resolved, and the system runs a bit faster than previous versions of 6.x.

Those clients with support and maintenance contracts valid with SalesLogix can download the update from http://support.saleslogix.com. Be sure to read the implementation guide prior to installing the service pack. Those with remote users that use synchronization MUST read the implementation guide, as there is certain steps in regards to remote users that need to be performed in a specific order.

For those clients whose maintenance and support have expired, please contact Stephanie Smith (StephanieS@dsdinc.com) for information on renewing you maintenance contract.

Count Tip: Keep track of the number of words in your document with the Word Count toolbar. Use View | Toolbars and select Word Count. Drag the floating toolbar to the right side of your existing toolbar so that it remains embedded at the top of your screen. You can resize the window that displays the number of words by choosing Tools | Customize | Toolbars and resizing the window while the Customize dialog box is open. You can update the count by clicking on the Recount button.

Have a Good Case? Some people Tend to use UpperCase and lowercase cREATIVELY. Some misguided folks like to emphasize Words they consider Important. Others like to SHOUT. If it only happens once in a while, it's no big deal to change the text manually to the case you want. But if it happens in a long string of text, Word comes to the rescue with its Change Case command. To alter the format, you can position your cursor in the word or select the sentence, and choose Format, Change Case. Then you're given the option to change the case to UPPERCASE, lowercase, Title Case, sentence case, or tOGGLE cASE. Handy!

But when you have a document loaded with case errors, you don't want to futz with menus and dialog boxes. Instead, select your text and press Shift-F3 until you get the case you want. This key combination toggles among upper, lower, and title case, and it's a handy little devil.

Indenting 101: Are you still indenting by pressing the spacebar or the Tab key? For shame. Word's Ruler bar provides a handy, visual way to indent paragraphs. (If your ruler isn't displayed, choose View, Ruler.) On the left side of the ruler, you'll notice two triangles sitting atop a box. The triangles and box are actually three distinct icons that you can individually click and drag to indent a paragraph (or selected paragraphs). The top triangle indents the first line of each paragraph; the bottom triangle sets a hanging indent (every line of a paragraph is indented more than the first line); and the box indents the entire paragraph while preserving the size of the first line or hanging indent. There's also a right-indent marker on the right side of the ruler.

To give it a go, click inside any old paragraph--or type a new one for practice--and drag the top triangle to the half-inch mark on the ruler. Word automatically indents the first line of the paragraph a half-inch. Better yet, whenever you press Enter at the end of the paragraph you're in, Word automatically indents the next paragraph as well. That means you could open a new Word document, drag the first-line indent marker to the half-inch location on the ruler, and type 200 pages, without ever having to indent manually. And I hope you do.