SAFE/7 Feature Overview: 'The F/M Buckets'
SAFE can store an unlimited number of monthly period totals for every product at every Site. But these monthly totals (or 'buckets' as we call them for short) are often misunderstood. So we'll talk today about how these work and how you can use them to set up new clients for forms management.

Usage Is Not On Hand!
Let's start by defining usage. Usage in SAFE is defined as a change in On Hand Quantity over a period of time. Typically, this period is either a month, a quarter or a year. So for you scientific types, usage is really a rate; the rate at which your customers are going through product.

Now the period of time is interesting because SAFE can calculate this in one of three ways for each product:

These days, very few of our customers use any option besides 'Shipped'. Why? One reason: not too many clients go through the formal process of taking counts any more.

Secondly, although the Between Releases option is technically more accurate, it is also less intuitive for many users not accustomed to forms management. What do we mean by that? When you use the Shipped method, you can print a Sales History Report for the month and the total quantities released will match the quantities used. You can't do this with the Between Releases method because the usage recognized when you release is the quantity from the previous release and not from the release done on the given date. (On the other hand, however, we say it is more accurate than the Shipped Method because you're assuming that, regardless of what they reorder, it is only the quantity from that last order which was actually used.)

Usage Is Calculated At The Customer Site!
The next important thing to realize is that your usage is being calculated based on shipments to a particular Site. This is necessary in order for SAFE to be able to provide information for each branch in a large account. You can run F/M reports showing usage from various warehouses, but the usage SAFE displays on screen will always be by destination because, after all, the destination is where the product is being used right? So each Product will have a separate set of buckets for each Customer Site.

When Is Last Year This Year?
At the end of the customer's financial calendar, SAFE will automatically update the Last Year buckets with the Current Year buckets (makes sense right? This year is about to become last year.) and then zero out the buckets for the current year. Note that this is the customer's financial calender; not yours! Each customer can have their own financial calendar---including starting day of month (see the Customer Master for details.)

Note: The buckets are only good for 24 periods. If you need to save more monthly totals than that, you should use the Export function in Products to save this information to a text file when you close each customer's financial year.

Getting Set Up: Part One
The first thing you'll want to do is create Products that are unique to each Customer. (Duh!) But an often overlooked next step is to link the Product to the various Customer Sites you'll want to track (remember: usage is tracked @ Customer Sites!) The easiest way to do this is:

1. Open the Customer Browse (yes, the Customer Browse)

2. Select the Products button to open a browse of that customer's Products.

3. Right click within the Products Browse and select Link All Products To All Sites. Et Voila! Now SAFE has created 'the buckets' it needs to actually store monthly usage information for every Product at every Site.

Getting Set Up: Part Two
Next challenge: When you're setting up a new account, you will usually have no transaction history. So SAFE has no way to calculate usage. What to do? SAFE lets you fat finger monthly usage into the twelve monthly buckets for the current year and last year. You can also use the new Import Option in SAFE/7 to automagically do this for you from a spreadsheet. If you do this, you should definitely uncheck the Automatically Calculate Usage For This Year and/or the Automatically Calculate Usage For Last Year boxes. If you don't SAFE will overwrite your efforts the next time you run the Calculate Usage function! Regardless of how you get the Last Year buckets populated, since usage is calculated at each Customer Site, you'll need to enter/import usage for each customer site for each product.

Now, what if you only have yearly totals for each Site? No problem. Simply enter the year end totals into the Period 12 bucket. Sure you won't have month by month reporting, but all your report showing yearly totals (and most importantly Average Usage) will be correct.

Getting Set Up: Part Three
The other thing you'll want to do is to enter an F/M Count for every Product at a Site you wish to track making the Transaction Date the beginning of the time when usage should be calculated. You should do this for every Site you wish to track usage (including Vendor Sites where product is actually stored) even if the on hand quantity is zero. Why? If you enter monthly totals into the buckets, you need to tell SAFE precisely when that usage started occurring. For example, even if you only put a yearly total for a Product/Site in Period 12, if you enter your Count with a Transaction Date of 'January 01', SAFE will know that you meant for this total to be spread out over 12 months. And by the same token, if you enter your Count with a Transaction Date of 'July 01', SAFE will know that you meant for this total to be spread out over only 6 months. This is critical to getting the Monthly Average Usage correct when you have no history!

Head Spinning?
Hopefully not. It's really quite simple once you think it through (and actually do it.) This system gives you the flexibility to track usage just about any way you like. The hardest part is usually preparing the data to import into the buckets before using SAFE. Next time we'll go into a few more advanced ideas on how usage is calculated, including how to have a do over when you need it, correcting errors, and why every month has 30.46 days.

Til then!
 

Cool Product: Imation Stakka You Need It!
This fantastic product isn't exactly brand new, but it is so cool that it bears mentioning again. So what is Stakka? Well, it's something like a CD/DVD jukebox. As it's name imply it's lets you 'stack' up to 100 discs inside it. It automatically catalogs the content of each disk as if it were one single gigantic hard disk! When you need a file, just click on it and Stakka delivers the proper CD or DVD to you instantly!

As if that weren't enough you can stack Stakkas! That is, you can stack up to five Stakkas one on top of each other to create a massive tower of data.

One important note: Stakka is not a 'drive' per se. It is a catalog. It gives you the disk, but it can't read data. For that, you need a normal CD or DVD player. That said, it's still the single best way we've found to safely store precious disks and instantly find the data you need when you need it! This is a real boon to all graphics professionals or anyone who needs to track large amount of data (Basically everyone these days!)

And here's the best part: the price. We're offering Stakka until October 31 for only $129.00!

To learn more, go here: http://www.imation.com/products/disc_stakka/index.html or call Suntower Systems today to place your order.

Til Next Time!
 

Ciaran's Corner: Are You Getting Your Updates?
Not a lot of time this week, but I wanted to get this in under the wire because it's a problem for many of our customers and occurs with alarming frequency.

Right. You're responsible. You know how important it is to keep your desktops and servers updated with the latest Microsoft Windows patches. You enabled Auto-Update on your server and desktops. You're home and dry, right?

No, you're not.

Many, if not most Microsoft updates require a system re-start in order to update. At least twice a week, we'll log into a customer site and find a message box indicating a Windows Update that needs a system re-start. This makes me think that many of you are not checking your server console at all. Ever. That's bad for a couple of reasons:

1. As I just said, you're not getting your patches. So you're not protected from the updates that you think you are. Microsoft gets a lot of really unfair criticism for being 'unresponsive' to security problems. Truthfully there were about 300 holes built into Windows. However, Microsoft has done a much better job lately in plugging these holes and the time they take to fix problems after they are identified has dropped to usually less than a week.  Unfortunately, you can lead a horse to water, but...

2. Also, in general, it is a good thing to re-boot your server from time to time. Some Windows programs tend to <ahem> leak over time (it happens to the best of us) and if left running for long periods can slow down your system.

So remember, if you don't reboot, you may not be getting your updates!

Till Next Time!

Ciarān Marron
Technical Support Manager
cm@suntowersystems.com

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End of E-News From The Suntower, Volume VII #19