Seeing the whole chain, from the order to what clients owe

A general manager wants to know how the month is going. Sales has a figure for orders. The depot has one for what has gone out. Accounts has one for what is invoiced, and finance knows, more or less, what has been cashed. Each region keeps its own spreadsheet. The month’s real figure arrives once the month is over, and receivables and pending cheques arrive later still.

Everyone here is doing their job, and the company is still steering by looking in the mirror. By the time a problem can be read in the figures, the decision that could have prevented it was due some weeks ago.

Why the figures arrive late

Each tool does its own task and ignores the others: the till, the stock, the client follow-up, the shop, the accounts. Between them, people act as the connection. They export, retype, reconcile and phone, and that takes the time that makes the figures late. When an order passes through several tools, each one holds a slightly different version of it. Asking “which one is right?” then becomes a piece of work of its own.

More reports will not fix this, since a report on separate files is still a reading of separate files. The figures become current when the operations themselves happen in one place.

One chain, where each step picks up the one before

DeepComm, made by FlexiGlob, holds the order, the delivery, the payment, the invoice and the commission in one app. The order is entered once, by the person who took it. It becomes a delivery note, then an invoice, then an accounting entry, with nothing typed twice.

Each person works in a space that fits the job. The rep takes orders in the field. Sales administration delivers, cashes in and invoices. The stock manager handles his depots. Finance management validates cheques and promissory notes. Each of them, in doing their own work, is also feeding the figures the direction reads, and nobody has to compile anything for anyone.

Order, delivery note, invoice and payment stay linked to one another, so at any moment you can see what was ordered, delivered, invoiced and cashed.

What the direction sees on one screen

Revenue, orders, stock per depot, receivables and pending cheques sit on one screen, up to date to the second. Revenue can be read as invoiced or as delivered, and the same figures reach a computer, a tablet or a phone at the same second.

Some things that a director tends to look for:

• The sales curve, by week, by month or by year.
• Achieved against forecast, month after month, and against last year.
• Each depot’s stock, in quantities and value.
• What is delivered and not yet cashed.

Every indicator opens onto its list. A figure that looks wrong can be followed down to the orders behind it, without asking someone to pull the detail. The regional director gets the same screens, limited to his own region.

Asking when the screen is not enough

Some questions are not on any dashboard. General management can put them to the assistant, in French or in Arabic, by text or by voice: which orders are delivered but not yet paid, which clients are late. It answers, or does the work, and before it writes anything at all it asks for agreement. It only sees what the role of the person asking allows.

When a decision needs checking later, the history on each important record shows who did what, and when. That history is open to general and regional management.