The Comprehensive Range Of Capabilities Offered By ALERE ERP

ALERE ERP delivers a vast range of business-wide advantages and user-specific features — do you know what it has to offer your organization? Forthright Technology Partners can help you migrate to ALERE ERP, configure it for your purposes, and maintain it on an ongoing basis to ensure it is optimized.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems like ALERE ERP have been helping businesses get a better handle on their resources for many years by allowing for the integrated management of core business practices through software and technology.

Once limited to multinational corporations, ERP solutions such as ALERE ERP are becoming more accessible, cost-effective, and user-friendly in the modern business world. That’s why the ERP market is set to reach a value of $95.37 billion by the end of this year alone.

Effectively housing all of your business’ important data, systems, and applications in a central and accessible location, an ERP simplifies your business technology in ways other solutions simply cannot. That’s why 88% of organizations that use ERP solutions like ALERE ERP believe they help them succeed in their daily business processes and long-term goals.

What Is An ERP System Like ALERE ERP?

ERP systems handle the management of core business processes, in real-time, using a combination of various software and technology.

An ERP system is a class of enterprise software that will ease the real-time management of data from across the different departments of your organization. These may include:

• Sales
• Purchases
• Accounting
• Manufacturing
• Device Management
• Employee Management

ERP software systems will greatly simplify individual functions throughout your organization by automating them. ERP systems will also keep track of your business resources.

How Do You Know If Your Organization Could Benefit From ALERE ERP?

There are some minor frustrations and annoyances that feel like just another part of running a business, but they’re not unavoidable — they’re indications that it might be time for your business to look at adopting an ERP system. Here are five signs that an ERP solution is something your business needs:

Each Process Has Its Own Software

When accounting uses one system, sales uses another, and warehouse staff uses yet another, the process of taking and fulfilling orders can quickly become drawn-out.

When your various front-end and back-end systems run independently of one another, the processes that are supposed to help your operations run smoothly instead become a confusing, counterproductive mess. ERP software such as ALERE ERP integrates these different systems and processes, creating a central database for these components to operate from.

Business Information Isn’t Easily Accessible

If your business relies on systems and spreadsheets that need to be updated and reconciled manually, a simple request may not be so simple. An ERP system like ALERE ERP offers a complete view of your operations from the top down, making sure that every employee has fast and easy access to all your important information.

Accounting Is A Long, Difficult Process

Relying on paper-based invoices and sales orders means your staff has to devote hours of their time each week to manually updating various systems with sales data. The same goes for manually updated spreadsheets that track department-specific data. An ERP solution (e.g. ALERE ERP) eliminates the need to cross-post data, creating a central database and leaving your staff free to focus on other tasks.

Your Sales And Your Customers Are Suffering

If you run out of a popular item or can’t verify the status of an order when the customer asks for an update because that information isn’t readily available, you’re left with unhappy customers and a frustrated staff.

An ERP system such as ALERE ERP that consolidates sales, inventory, and customer data into an easy-to-access database allows your staff to always have the answers they need, exactly when they need them.

Your IT Is Overly-Complicated

When your IT environment is made up of a grab bag of systems and solutions, maintaining your environment and keeping software up-to-date and functioning can be a huge, time-consuming challenge. Rather than making a complicated setup even more complicated, an ERP system such as ALERE ERP gives your business the ability to adapt and scale resources as needed, simplifying your technology without compromising function.

5 Reasons To Choose ALERE ERP

1. Detail-Oriented Optimization: ALERE ERP puts emphasis on all the details your organization requires to make sure all your day-to-day business activities run as smoothly as possible, logically, and with a minimum amount of confusion.
2. Comprehensive Capabilities: ALERE ERP is a single fully integrated product complete with a range of necessary tools, integrated modules, services, and functionality, allowing organizations like yours to grow and manage their business.
3. Industry-Leading Functionality: ALERE ERP is one of the most popular ERP solutions used by many of the top businesses across the United States and around the world. It comes complete with robust applications and customization capabilities to support a full range of business operations.
4. Real-Time Processing: ALERE ERP can handle a range of activities in real-time, from GL journal entries to inventory transactions. By handling these processes immediately, you can save your organization thousands of dollars in reduced timelines, and print financial reports with data accurate right to the day.
5. Easy Modified Architecture: ALERE ERP is fully compliant with SQL database standards, can integrate with object-oriented programming, and is entirely table-driven.The benefits of ALERE ERP’s extensive modifiability include:
   • Vastly quicker timelines for modification when compared to source code-based methods.
   • Modifications can be ported directly from one version to the next, meaning you don’t have to rewrite code.
   • Defaults can be configured on a per-user basis.
   • Data (sales, invoices, receipts, and more) is consistently up to date with the most recent transaction.
   • Critical information from account balances to cash flow is always available for review.
   • You no longer have to worry about massive batch transactions putting your network integrity at risk.

3 User-Friendly Features Offered By ALERE ERP

1. Convenient Language Configurations: ALERE ERP allows you to customize language preferences for a given menu, screen or user. This is ideal for businesses that operate with staff members or clients speaking different languages, or that manage operations over international borders.
2.  Simple Screen Sizing: ALERE ERP doesn’t expect its users to put up with inconvenient, rigid interfaces. Screen sizes can be easily adjusted as need be by dragging the corners. Advantages of this capability include:
   • Easy viewing of long lists and inventories.
   • Simple comparison of one data set with another, side-by-side.
   • Screen sizes can be customized for each user’s preferences.
3. Multi-Tasking Functionality: ALERE ERP offers Multiple Document Interfacing, which makes it easy to work on and switch between multiple documents at the same time. This reduces or altogether eliminates the time that users would otherwise spend opening and closing modules simply to reference a given document.

4 Powerful Features Offered By ALERE ERP

1. Retrieval Tool: ALERE ERP also offers a tool designed specifically to help users find what they’re looking for more quickly. Users can enter their search query and then choose from the narrowed list of choices offered by the tool in response.
2. Seamless Email Integration: ALERE ERP integrates seamlessly with your email client, allowing you to automatically convert orders to a PDF file format and send via a connected email account. This feature also allows users to add notes and personal messages to send along with the PDF.
3. Activity Tabs: Process-based pages in ALERE ERP come with Activity Tabs, which display a range of critical information (according to preset user filters and preferences), such as quotes, shipments and returns, and more.
4. Advanced Browser Functionality: ALERE ERP offers users browsers that can help them find the specific piece of information they’re looking for. The browser will provide a spreadsheet-style view of a given table of information, which offers a range of benefits:
   1. High volumes of data can be reviewed quickly.
   2. Spreadsheets can be resized according to user preferences.
   3. Records matching search queries will be immediately highlighted.
   4. Filters based on relational logic can narrow results.
   5. Modifications and saved searches can be set on a per-user basis.

11 Modules Included In ALERE ERP

1. Manager: ALERE ERP’s Manager Module provides the top-down view of the entire ERP system for managers, owners, and executives. A range of data can be viewed at a glance, including:
   1. Business to business relationships.
   2. Important financial figures.
   3. Global codes (units of measurement, product classes, etc.).
   4. Configuration of email and order approval rules.
   5. Payment terms, tax tables, and units of measurement.
   6. Banking activities.
   7. Time and labor postings.

Essentially, everything your organization’s leadership needs is available via the manager module, easily found and reviewed to help inform decisions and processes, track performance, measure efficiency, and more.

InTouch

Almost any business owner you ask will agree that the customer always comes first. It’s a proven, effective strategy for succeeding in business, but it’s not always as simple as it sounds.

The key to putting the customer first is knowing who they are and what they want, which is why Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is so important. An effective CRM system gathers all crucial company information on customer interactions in one place for analysis and reporting, allowing savvy business managers and owners to learn what they’ve done well and what they could improve on.

The InTouch module is ALERE ERP’s CRM solution, helping to keep you in touch with your customers. ALERE ERP’s advantage over conventional CRM software is that it offers all the data, processes, and features of a full-fledged ERP system to benefit its capabilities.

Benefits include:

1. 1. Business contacts, from prospects to customers, are accessed and viewed in one convenient location.
   2. ALERE ERP maintains a direct connection with your business’ Microsoft Outlook accounts, seamlessly integrating for communication, scheduling, and task-based purposes.
   3. Contact-centric data such as previous quotes, meeting notes, and more are conveniently organized for your review as need be.

If there’s a pattern to your business’ success, no matter how subtle, ALERE ERP’s InTouch module will help you identify it. By knowing how and why you succeed, you can implement processes and procedures to ensure further success.

On the other hand, if there’s an opportunity for improvement, ALERE ERP’s InTouch module will help you identify that as well. With this valuable information in mind, you can implement changes in the way your staff does business to ensure that your company is learning from its mistakes instead of repeating them.

Sales

In this module, ALERE ERP streamlines your sales processes. From quoting to sales orders to invoices to receipts, every step is automated, informed by previous interaction with the contact in question, and expertly managed to reduce timelines and eliminate errors.

Repeat processes, template forms and more can be standardized to drastically reduce the time your sales team spends entering data and preparing documentation. This module also allows you to mass process a range of functions, from releasing and picking to invoicing and statement generation.

SOC

Even though ALERE ERP offers a Sales module, it also provides a specific Sales Order Configurator (SOC) to further optimize your sales order processes.

This module ensures your sales orders are accurate both in terms of features offered and part numbers in use. This is all handled automatically, helping to reduce the time your team spends on sales orders.

This module makes it easy for low-level and new employees to handle tasks that once would have required an experienced and skilled salesperson to carry out.

Purchases

ALERE ERP’s next module handles the next step in your processes after sales: purchasing. From requisitions to purchase orders to payables, this module streamlines the process from end to end.

Each and every purchase document generated in ALERE ERP’s Purchase module comes complete with its full history, helping to keep each and everyone in the process properly informed. This careful, automated management of core processes will reduce errors and speed up the purchasing initiative as a whole. As with other modules, repeat processes, template forms and more can be standardized to drastically reduce the time your sales team spends entering data and preparing documentation.

Inventory

Inventory is a key component of any business’ processes, which is why ALERE ERP offers a module designed specifically to help manage it. This module optimizes the process of creating inventory items, generating mass shipping orders, transferring inventory, and more. The Inventory module also offers a real-time log of changes, and ins and outs, which only further improves the user experience for those managing your inventory.

General Ledger

A well-maintained Chart of Accounts is critical to your financial management processes, which is why ALERE ERP also offers a General Ledger module. This module graphically constructs your Chart of Accounts (using ALERE ERP’s Treevision™ technology), and incorporates an extensive range of document management features:

1. 1. Real-time functionality makes closings automatic.
   2. Year-end procedures are convenient and optimized.
   3. An associated invoice can be easily found in a given account.
   4. Notes can be added to journal entries as needed.
   5. Budgeting can be carried out in a fashion that is native to the Chart of Accounts, or via an unlimited number of spreadsheets, helping to support analysis processes.

It cannot be overstated how critical ERP systems are for accounting purposes. 88% of businesses that use ERP solutions like ALERE ERP say their primary use is for accounting.

Analytics

With this module, ALERE ERP helps users harness Big Data and put it to work for the good of their business. Big Data is the collection and analysis of data collected such as department productivity, overall growth, sales trends, and customer behavior. Applications of this data can range from something as simple as Spreadsheets for the organization, and storage of data to Online Analytical Processing or Reporting and Querying software. Each has a specific use and offers various benefits to your business.

Reporting and querying software extracts, sorts, summarizes, and presents selected data. This data could range from sales reports of specific items to a measurement of the efficiency of marketing plans.

Online analytical processing (OLAP) is part of the broader category of Big Data practices, which also encompasses relational databases, report writing, and data mining. This is beneficial to your business as it saves you time and money by constantly retrieving data and reporting its findings to you and your analyst in clear ways that help you improve your business.

Digital dashboards give you a dashboard view of your data and sources. This is important when you need to view numerous reports and data sources, or when you need to present these findings in one location to numerous employees. This provides a clear representation of the data findings of your business, to anyone from the top level to the temporary receptionist, ensuring that everyone is on the same page and working towards the same data-driven goals.

Commissions

ALERE ERP’s Commissions module offers robust ruleset creation and combination capabilities, all of which are designed to help you reward your sales team. This module supports multi-tier split commission structure, as well as fixed commission generation based on meeting goals in revenue, margins, or number of items sold. Ultimately, this module helps you better define and track the conditions under which you incentivize your salespeople.

Multicurrency

This module allows ALERE ERP users to work with currencies different from their base currency. It makes it easy to process transactions with customers dealing in other forms of currency at each step of the process, from sales orders to payables.

This module also provides up-to-date rates on a daily basis, and a detailed history of rates as they have changed over time. All of this helps to better streamline your financial processes, without expecting your team to manage the conversions in every multicurrency situation.

Mobility

Mobile devices have made it easier and easier to get work done while on the go. Laptops, tablets, and smartphones offer simple ways to share and review data, stay in touch with employees, and more while on the road.

That’s why so much of today’s workforce operates outside the office — they can do so, thanks to a combination of the cloud and mobile devices. By the end of this year, the number of smartphone users around the world is expected to reach 15 billion. However, if your staff is going to use mobile devices, you want to be sure they’re incorporated into your centralized ERP processes.

ALERE ERP’s Mobility module organizes and manages all mobile devices that interface with the solution through the cloud. Its robust support for web development ensures you control which data is uploaded to the webserver, and keeps everything synchronized. Furthermore, you can use this module to update and store ALERE ERP data in the cloud according to your preferences

As powerful as ERP systems can be, they’re not always easy for a business like yours to set up. They’re complicated, and require careful configuration and management to ensure they run properly.

Forthright Technology Partners will help you streamline the process by managing your ERP implementation for you. Our team has extensive experience working with ALERE ERP, and can remove any obstacles you encounter with IT projects like this.

If you want to make use of ALERE ERP’s many capabilities, you have to be prepared to undertake a complicated process (or ask the experts from Forthright for help).

5 ERP Implementation Challenges You Need To Address Before You Move To ALERE ERP

• Project Management: The implementation process for a system like ALERE ERP is so complex that it often vastly exceeds the scale and scope of any past projects your internal team may have handled. Without direct experience with this type of project, a team can easily underestimate the time and resources needed to see it to fruition.
• Data Quality & Integration: A critical step in your ERP implementation is the migration of all your firm’s data. It forms the foundation for how effective your ERP system will be. That means having an accurate inventory of all your data, including where it is, and what it concerns. Given how detail-oriented this process is, it tends to be the most time-consuming part of the implementation. Furthermore, you need to attend to your data quality as well. You can’t just port over all the data from every department in your firm, as there will invariably be duplicates of files that are used by more than one user or team. That means addressing your “data hygiene” as well, ensuring there are no duplicates, that files are named properly, and more.
• Change Management: Adopting an ERP system such as ALERE ERP concerns more than your data — it also affects your users. In order to harness the full range of advantages offered by the solution, you need to change the way your staff operates. This means adapting and developing new business processes and training your team to engage fully with the new system.
• Cost Overruns: In relation to project management, it’s important that you budget for more than you may think you need. ERP projects are notorious for going past deadline and over budget. When this happens, businesses tend to enlist expert third-party support, which comes at an even great expense. When planning out your implementation, make sure to give yourself room to operate.
• Continuous Improvement: It’s important that you understand that implementing an ERP system like ALERE ERP effectively is not a one-time thing. While you may finally succeed in launching an ERP system for your business at the start, the system needs careful maintenance and management in the long term as well.

What’s The Most Important Factor In The Successful Implementation Of A System Like ALERE ERP?

The highest priority in any ERP system implementation (whether with ALERE ERP or another solution) is understanding how it integrates with your organization. You need to consult everyone who will interact with the system and document each and everything they will do with the system. That allows you to pinpoint the most important considerations, and migrate successfully.

ERP implementations often fail because the organization either didn’t know or failed to communicate their needs, or had unrealistic expectations about the implementation or legacy data migration. That’s why analysis and information gathering are so important — our team can help.

Why Choose Forthright As Your ALERE ERP Partner?

Forthright Technology Partners has excelled in supporting and implementing ALERE ERP for our clients across the United States for more than three decades. With us, you get a team that offers countless years of expertise working ALERE and our clients to extend the ERP platform’s overall capabilities from the manufacturing floor to the front office.

Over the past thirty years, we’ve gained extensive experience working with key business applications, including:

• SBT Pro Series
• SBT Vision Point
• Quick Aviation
• IAS

Want To Discover More About ALERE ERP?

Are you one part of the 50% of businesses worldwide that are investigating potential ERP solutions like ALERE ERP? The good news is that you don’t have to do it on your own.

Forthright Technology Partners is here to help guide and support your manufacturing firm with implementation, customized, and ongoing support for ALERE ERP. As your ALERE ERP management partner, our primary function is to maintain those systems and keep them running 24/7/365.

Get in touch with our team to get started.