Oneir News

5 Must-Have Features Food Producers Should Demand from Their Business Software

The reality of the day is that food producers must not only maintain a strong defense against recalls, but also against increasing regulations, food sensitivities in the population, environmental consciousness and PETA agendas. All this squeezed against tighter operating margins brought on by extreme weather changes and ever-mounting business fees and taxes. Many famous food industry names populate the FDA and USDA’s “rap sheet” of food producers who have been required to issue a recall of possibly contaminated foods.

Surviving and prospering now requires excruciatingly tight control of all aspects of food production from the acquisition of ingredients all the way to delivery of the food product to the consumer. Legacy stand-alone systems for processing, inventory control, sales and accounting simply cannot keep up.

“What’s been done in the past is no longer good enough,” says Jon Mainwaring, executive vice president of Oneir Solutions Inc.—a Queenston, Ontario, provider of scalable ERP software. […]

3 Ways ERP Can Improve Your Supply Chain Management

The flow of goods and services within an organization is critical to ensuring optimal operations and inevitably substantial profitability. What’s referred to as Supply Chain management (SCM), this includes adequately moving and storing raw materials, inventory that’s still work-in-process, and completed goods from the point of origin to the point of customer consumption.

Supply chain management needs to be an integrated management system that offers a company-wide view of important activities and practices. At the end of the day, supply chain managers must be able to effectively monitor all aspects of the business.

Having an ERP system in place can help provide this vital integration, and here’s how.

1. Managing the Customer Relationship Management
Customer relationship management all begins with the first contact with a client, and is typically initially tracked within a Contact Relationship Management (CRM) system. Within the system is recorded a number of pieces of information, including the client’s name, and […]

How ERP & CRM Software Can Improve Customer Satisfaction

Just about every business in any industry relies on repeat clients to keep business going, and that entails ensuring that customers are satisfied with goods and level of service. But mid-sized distributors in particular may face some challenges that are unique to their business. Distributors are usually competing directly with much bigger companies that can get advantageous terms from suppliers and can get their hands on more resources.

As such, mid-sized distributors may find themselves charging higher prices and having less manpower compared to their competitors. Competing on price isn’t an option, so there are other ways that mid-sized distributors need to compete to attract new customers and keep them.

Taking advantage of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software with customer resource management (CRM) capabilities can give mid-sized distributors the opportunity to more effectively meet expectations for a high level of customer service.

Since good customer service translates into good business sense, an […]

Five “must-have” features food producers should demand from their business software

The reality of the day is that food producers must not only maintain a strong defense against recalls, but also against increasing regulations, food sensitivities in the population, environmental consciousness and PETA agendas. All this squeezed against tighter operating margins brought on by extreme weather changes and ever-mounting business fees and taxes. Many famous food industry names populate the FDA and USDA’s “rap sheet” of food producers who have been required to issue a recall of possibly contaminated foods.

Surviving and prospering now requires excruciatingly tight control of all aspects of food production from the acquisition of ingredients all the way to delivery of the food product to the consumer. Legacy stand-alone systems for processing, inventory control, sales and accounting simply cannot keep up.

“What’s been done in the past is no longer good enough,” says Jon Mainwaring, executive vice president of Oneir Solutions Inc.— a Queenston, Ontario, provider of scalable ERP […]

Affordability Is Trending in Distributor Software

For many mid-sized distributors eager to expand, yet loathe to drain their budgets in the process, a new generation of fully-featured sophisticated business management software with customized modules is allowing them to utilize tools that have traditionally only been accessible to larger enterprises.

Call it multi-channel sales, inventory control, and accounting software, because these new do-it-all systems cover the bases from the manufacturer’s warehouse to the ultimate consumer. For a growing number of companies the flexibility, speed of implementation, user friendliness, and scalability of these new business management systems is impressive, particularly when factoring in lower cost offerings that drop the price tag from $50,000 or more to, in some cases, less then $10,000.

With flexibility a byproduct of the modularization of these new systems, a wide variety of businesses are embracing the trend toward enlisting wholesaling software to expand. Just in time, as the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors reports that in […]

ERP Systems Help Businesses Take Advantage of Improved Lead Times

There are so many advantages to using an ERP system to take control of a business’s information. Many of these benefits will appeal to certain firms more than others.

For instance, certain companies will appreciate the fact that streamlined data entry is much more efficient, and offers executives much more time to deal with secondary projects. For other organizations, being able to reduce the number of errors made as a result of huge amounts of information having to be handled is a major benefit.

While certain advantages are more attractive to businesses than others, one common benefit of ERP systems that all can appreciate is improved lead times. The fact that decisions can be made long before specific activities take place makes it so much easier to deal with issues and come up with solutions well in advance of them happening.

Here are just a handful of tasks that are a lot simpler […]