Pmc is a proud sponsor of an exciting upcoming event hosted by SAP.

SAP’s Run Better Tour 2011 makes a stop in Southfield, MI on March 3, 2011.
8:00am – 5:00pm
The Westin Southfield Detroit – 1500 Town Center, Southfield, MI 48075

SAP’s Run Better Tour 2011 offers valuable presentations and insights for business professionals, managers, process experts, and IT decision-makers. Get the latest on SAP solutions including a heavy focus on Automotive, while networking with industry thought leaders, SAP customers, solution experts, your peers and pmc America – SAP’s first Automotive Partner.
Also, be among the first to test drive the hottest business analytics, mobile, and in-memory technology at the SAP Innovation Bar.
There is no cost to attend the SAP Run Better Tour, but space is limited and will fill up quickly. To register and for more information, click here.

To schedule an on-site meeting, please contact: Kacy Shoaff, Senior Marketing Specialist, 248-359-3000. We look forward to seeing you there!

SAP EcoHub Announcement

We are excited to announce that our solution pmcNavigate Automotive is now listed on SAP EcoHub!

SAP EcoHub is an online solution marketplace which allows customers to discover, evaluate and buy solutions that help address business issues or deliver industry specific requirements; enhancing the value of their current investment in SAP applications.

We encourage you to check out our solution listing on SAP EcoHub at http://ecohub.sdn.sap.com/irj/ecohub/solutions/pmcNavigateAutomotive.

Visualize Every Aspect of Your Business

The numbers don’t lie, but they sometimes struggle to tell a story clearly. Scheduled and ad hoc reports exist to provide insights into your business – from financial management to customer care. Yet, reporting practices don’t always reflect these priorities. With enterprise reporting tools from SAP, you can streamline your reporting and gain a new perspective, thanks to features that help you see the implications of the data.

As important as reporting is in almost any business setting, many companies tend to neglect it. A bias toward action sometimes leaves little room for contemplation. When reports are prepared, especially across many data sources or business units, the hours invested can accumulate quickly, particularly when a manual component requires some massaging of the data.

The simple act of getting answers about company performance or operations can not only cost you, but also divert employees from other responsibilities, creating backlogs that spread throughout the company, impeding productivity, and deferring initiatives with ROI potential.

And despite all this work, it’s still tough to figure out what the data means! You can spend even more time interpreting the results before finally understanding their meaning and defining the next steps. Enterprise reporting capabilities can change this situation.

Automate your reporting processes to cut the time needed to gather data into a form that can yield actionable business intelligence. Then use the data in this legible form to derive meaning and define the next steps faster. In addition to reducing the cost of your own information effectively, the speed at which you can take action can accelerate the ROI associated with the resulting courses of action.

Take control of your data with SAP reporting solutions and put your data to work for your business. Having the right tools at your disposal can supercharge decisions and results.

How to Decide If On-Demand Software Is Right for You

Businesses of all sizes are moving toward on-demand software, but how do you know if it’s right for you? It can be a daunting move. Despite the many advantages, it still means adopting a new approach to IT – with the servers and system located outside your data center. The upside of local has always been control, but these days, it makes more sense to focus on reliability and results.

If you’re thinking about moving to an on-demand model, take a look at the four points below. They’ll help you get a sense of whether this approach is right for you.
1. Your IT resources are limited
If you have a small IT department or rely on outside consultants to manage your technology for you, on-demand can help you reduce your costs and complexity. On-demand is ideal for businesses that do not
want or cannot afford a large IT footprint in their organizations.

2. Reliability cannot be compromised
For smaller businesses, system reliability can be a challenge. Downtime translates to lost revenue and degraded employee productivity, not to mention the costs associated with getting your systems back up.

3. Implementation has to be fast and smooth
You need a new system – and you need it now. At the same time, you can’t afford to disrupt your business operations and distract your employees from the job at hand. On-demand software has no infrastructure
component, which drastically reduces implementation time and consumes fewer IT department resources. As a result, your business users experience minimal support and project disruption.

4. Cost predictability is crucial
Aggressive hiring, mergers and acquisitions, a spike in sales, or a new product line can result in a surge in system utilization. In addition to purchasing new equipment to support the increased load, you’ll need to
integrate the equipment into your data center and adjust your software solution – all of which will keep your IT department busy. On-demand software keeps these additional expenses from creeping up on you, with
fees based on system use (seat licenses, for example), making your costs predictable and easy to manage.

Software on-demand can alleviate the burden on your IT department and your budget. Contact us to learn more about the opportunities that await you.

Five Ways to Improve Financial Discipline

Even with the economy showing signs of recovery, there’s still intense pressure to maintain financial discipline. Businesses are eager to exploit every opportunity to save costs in order to preserve resources and make possible the investments that can help you capture market share while the competition is merely trying to tread water. With the right enterprise business solution, you can find financial inefficiencies that would otherwise have escaped your watchful eye. Pmc America offers enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, based on the rich business framework of SAP, that helps you uncover your company’s potential for savings.

Prepare for success. Here are five ways to streamline your business and find savings you never knew you had:

1. Integrate your finance and accounting systems: Use SAP software to manage the data in all aspects of your financial operation – from inventory to taxes – to reduce manual workload and secure the insights you need faster. Spend less time searching and more time making the decisions that will advance your company in the marketplace.

2. Sales and order workflow: Optimize your sales and delivery processes to increase efficiency, accuracy, and, ultimately, customer satisfaction. ERP solutions from SAP provide an integrated quote-to-cash function that facilitates management, tracking, and rapid reporting.

3. Take charge of your supply chain: Don’t let swift market changes leave you scrambling to respond. Flexible and adaptable supply chain management features in SAP solutions enable you to optimize for a business environment that doesn’t stand still – while maximizing insight into your business.

4. Understand your suppliers: Monitor orders and pricing to find places where you can seek more favorable terms to reduce costs and bolster your margins. The analytics functionalities available from SAP can help you secure the information you need to support the case for price reductions.

5. Know your customer: Don’t rely strictly on anecdotes from the field to learn what your customers want. Use customer relationship management (CRM) functionality from SAP to gain a comprehensive view of your company’s relationships. Use this intelligence to develop account acquisition and penetration strategies that deliver revenue and improved margins.

SAP software supports a fully integrated environment for managing your business and taking it to the next level. Use the intelligence that you gain to improve financial performance through cost savings, budgetary discipline, and smarter sales and service. Financial efficiencies are in your company, just waiting to be discovered.

Are You Trying to Manage Without Measuring?

Many smaller business owners and executives can fall into the habit of managing by a combination of instinct and anecdote. Based on what you hear from your teams and your sense of how the business has always operated, you may feel you have all the information you need to make important decisions. And sometimes, you do. Especially in smaller companies, executives are close to the business and learn a lot by keeping an ear to the ground. Yet, there’s always something that slips through the cracks, and this kind of occasional incident can cause large or costly mistakes.

Security is easy to achieve, however, and in the process, you can gain additional insights to help you capitalize on hidden opportunities that might be missed. Effective reporting practices can turn a small investment into a powerful analytical and decision making tool – and take advantage of small situations to generate outsized returns. Managing without measuring is risky – and it’s a risk you simply don’t have to take.

Being able to see data from various sources in one place is powerful. You could assign an employee to spend a lot of time entering data into spreadsheets and then merging the spreadsheets. But you could also use an automated process to free up your team and provide you with valuable information that might have been unavailable otherwise. Automated and robust reporting capabilities offer a level of clarity, consistency, and accuracy that can accelerate decisions while leading to better results.

A well-planned, automated reporting framework can open doors to data across your company. Solutions can integrate data from several sources, including enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems, custom applications, relational databases, and even blog files. Such integration pulls everything into a single environment that makes comparison fast and easy. With all the data in one place, you can create dashboards and reports for executives and other leaders, ensuring that they have the information they need to make the decisions that will advance your company in the marketplace.

You may be able to manage without measuring – for now. But, business as usual may come at the expense of cash-flow optimization or an improved lead-closure rate. Get more out of your business with diligent reporting, and you’ll find opportunity throughout your company.

Fabricated Metals unique challenges and solution

As a fabricated metal products company, you operate in an environment characterized by ongoing market consolidation and growing government regulation. You strive to satisfy continuously changing customer needs and rising customer expectations while participating in a complex network of partners. At the same time, you must respond to competitive pressure to lower prices – even as raw material costs are rising.

To succeed, you must quickly respond to customer needs by increasing efficiency and adaptability while streamlining operations across development, procurement, manufacturing, distribution, and sales. You must also embed risk and compliance management into your core business processes, while gaining better insight into costs and profitability organization-wide.

pmcNAVIGATE Metals, an SAP All-in-One solution, is based on SAP’s 30 years of experience working with fabricated metal products companies. This comprehensive enterprise resource planning solution delivers proven SAP software that is built on the SAP Best Practices for Fabricated Metals package. SAP Best Practices for Fabricated Metals is based on the best business practices of fabricated metal products companies that SAP has identified in several thousand implementations.

With pmcNAVIGATE, you can manage processes from development, sourcing, and manufacturing to customer service and financial management, and get every facet of your business running smoothly. This solution comes with tools and methodologies that enable you to tailor the solution to meet your needs and enable a safe implementation that minimizes time and costs.

pmcNAVIGATE Metals, based on SAP delivers preconfigured software with documentation and implementation methodology that reflect the industry best practices you need to maintain a competitive advantage. SAP Best Practices for Fabricated Metals includes the following specific elements:
• Complete preconfiguration settings that let you run your software with minimal installation effort
• Extensive reusable documentation that you can use for self-study, evaluation, and project team and end-user training
• A clear implementation methodology based on a logical step-by-step process

pmcNAVIGATE is pre-configured, affordable, and quickly implemented, allowing the ability to streamline business processes, increase efficiency, and achieve a rapid return on investment. Because they are based on the highly scalable and powerful mySAP Business Suite solutions, pmcNAVIGATE Metals can grow with your business, protecting your investment for the future.

Welcome to our blog

We just wanted to introduce ourselves and let you know what you can expect to find here on our blog.

pmc America is an SAP All-in-one Business and Services partner that specializes in consulting and software solutions designed to improve the business efficiency, profitability and flexibility of manufacturing enterprises.  We will take turns giving you information that will give you a better understanding of your business’ potential for growth.

Some topics you can expect to find our expert opinions on: Sales, Distribution, Purchasing, Manufacturing, Procurement, Inventory, Forecasting & Planning, and Finance, to name a few. Check back often and let us know if you have questions on any subjects explored.

Please visit our website by clicking here.