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My Office Apps Talks SMB Manufacturing ERPs

My Office Apps Talks SMB Manufacturing ERPs

Cloud-based Kechie ERP software advanced features a host of features and automation that can revolutionize how a company operates its business. Not just enterprise resource planning software but a true business solution system.

With over thirty years of business solutions, Kechie is a proven leader in business transformation software with the use of one or more of its software packages – inventory and warehouse management (which includes CRM, sales, procurement, and logistics), manufacturing, finance – or a fully configured ERP system to include all the available modules.

Read more about the New Kechie 2021 ERP SaaS Software System.

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MOA Introduces Kechie™ 2021 ERP SaaS Software

My Office Apps Introduces Kechie™ 2021 ERP SaaS Software System

Cloud-based Kechie ERP software advanced features further automate workflow, tracking, and scheduling, eliminating error-prone manual processes.

With over thirty years of business solutions, Kechie is a proven leader in business transformation software with the use of one or more of its software packages – inventory and warehouse management (which includes CRM, sales, procurement, and logistics), manufacturing, finance – or a fully configured ERP system to include all the available modules.

Read more about the New Kechie 2021 ERP SaaS Software System.

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meals on wheels delivers food using My Office Apps - Kechie ERP

See How Meals on Wheels Can Deliver 30,000 Meals a Day in San Francisco

See How Meals on Wheels Can Deliver 30,000 Meals a Day in San Francisco

Meals on Wheels of San Francisco will be able to reach more people than ever before this Thanksgiving. See how an ERP developed by My Office Apps and built on Progress OpenEdge helped them help thousands more.

When we think of Meals on Wheels, we think of homebound senior citizens getting important nutrition they otherwise would go without. But it’s even more than that. Meals on Wheels provides a friendly face and a much-needed check-in to break up the isolation and ensure that everything is OK.

Today, that friendly face is behind a mask, and the challenges of hunger and solitude are even steeper as the COVID-19 pandemic surges into the holidays and winter months.

Read the Full Story on Combining Technology and Compassion to Help People in Need.

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Meals on Wheels San Francisco

Meals On Wheels San Francisco Selects Kechie™ ERP

My Office Apps, Inc. Announces Meals On Wheels San Francisco Selects Kechie™ ERP To Expand Meal Production For Homebound Seniors

SANTA ANA, Calif.June 23, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — My Office Apps, Inc. (MOA), an industry leader in business improvement software, today announced that Meals on Wheels San Francisco (MOWSF), a provider of nutritious meals and professional social work services, is streamlining inventory management and meal production with Kechie™ ERP to manage the supply chain in their new state-of-the-art kitchen facility.

Read More about Kechie™ ERP and Meals On Wheels San Francisco


Two Critical ERP Challenges with Credit Card Processing Systems

Secure ERP Credit Card Processing Solutions

Two Critical ERP Challenges with Credit Card Processing Systems

In today’s always on world, seamlessly accepting online payments is no longer a differentiator but a basic success requirement for manufacturers, distributors, and service businesses. This means as part of your ERP system you must be able to accept credit card payments from your customers. Credit card sales allow your business to easily increase the size of potential sales, reduce the labor associated with sending out invoices, and improve cash flow.

Accepting a credit card for payment, however, introduces two critical risks to the business – fraud and operational complexity.secure credit card processing systems

At the top of every business owners list should be security. Developing a security strategy is especially important today because of the increasing amount of attempted fraudulent charges. The loss of trust from stolen identity or criminal transactions will have many years of impact beyond a bad transaction.

In order to provide the highest levels of security, credit card payments must be encrypted. In addition, to prevent the possibility that a malicious person gains access to a customer’s account and steals their credit card information, no credit card information should be stored in an ERP system.

How is this done? Instead of storing a customer’s credit card information, the system can use a concept of tokens through a credit card processing company utilizing the PCI (Payment Card Industry) security standard.

These companies create an account for the customer and send your business a token that you store with the customer’s account information in your ERP system. Every time the customer orders, the token is sent to and verified by the credit card processing company. Once the token is verified, the transaction is approved without having to enter or store the credit card information on your site. Follow-on and add-on sales happen just as quickly.

Another risk of accepting credit card payments is operational complexity. Back end ordering, shipping, and accounting systems need to be synchronized with the processing of the payment. Otherwise, manual accounting and auditing practices will be required to match invoice with payments, issue refunds, or answer customer questions. Many businesses have had to implement expensive, complicated programming efforts to interface their business to these credit card processors.

In order to make it easy for you to accept credit cards and not have to worry about possible issues, My Office Apps has established partnerships with two well-respected credit card processing companies. We’ve invested in developing a seamless integration between our cloud-based Kechie ERP software and their credit card processing platforms. This tight integration provides the highest level of security while eliminating operational risk and the need for your business to initiate expensive software development to match payments with orders or manage returns and RMAs.

These two companies are CardConnect and Century Business Solutions. We have incorporated their token system into the Kechie cloud ERP software. Both companies provide highly secure transactions that are compliant with the PCI security standard.

Providing a built-in interface to credit card processing is another example of My Office Apps’ commitment to incorporate innovative features using partnerships and smart algorithms in the Kechie ERP system. Our goal is to provide the best ERP solutions for small and medium sized businesses using the latest techniques in order to help make our clients more efficient and profitable. For more information, you can visit www.myofficeapps.com or better yet, call us at (714) 486-1487 and ask us to schedule a demo so we can show how we can help solve your business issues you face, both today and tomorrow.

 

About My Office Apps, Inc.

My Office Apps, Inc. (MOA) is a leader in business improvement software solutions to automate your organization.  Building on three decades of software design and development, MOA delivers Kechie™, a transformative business tool.  Kechie is a fully integrated Enterprise Resource Planning Software as a Service (SaaS) platform with a simplified user experience and the latest in cloud technology.  It is quick and easy to implement without the expensive price tag.  Sold in separate packages – inventory and warehouse management (CRM, Sales, Procurement, Logistics included), manufacturing, finance – or a fully configured ERP system to include all of these individual tools.  Kechie is easily configured to the scalable needs of your growing business. For more information on managing your business processes more efficiently and effectively, visit www.myofficeapps.com.

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Business Dashboard: 4 Management Tips from Warren Buffett

warren buffet giving advice

Business Dashboard:  4 Management Tips from Warren Buffett

The billionaire Berkshire Hathaway CEO has offered some sage advice over the years.  Every year, Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett writes a letter to the company’s shareholders.  Although the letter is mainly about performance of the business, it’s also packed with sage advice from Buffett’s 60-plus-year career.  Here are some of his best management tips from the past decade.

1. Base decisions on business needs, not fads. 

In his 2014 shareholder letter, Buffett wrote: “That old line, ‘The other guys is doing it, so we must as well,’ spells trouble in any business.”

2. Recognize your employees. 

Every shareholder letter from the last decade ends with Buffett thanking his team.  “I regularly extol the accomplishments of our operating managers,” he wrote in his 2011 letter.  “They are truly All-Stars.”

3. Don’t surround yourself with enablers. 

CEO’s keen to close a deal seldom seek dissenting views, Buffett wrote in 2020.  “It would be an interesting exercise for a company to hire two ‘expert’ acquisition advisors, one pro and one con, to deliver his or her views on a proposed deal to the board.”

4. Prepare ahead to avoid debt. 

“I never will operate Berkshire in a manner that depends on the kindness of strangers,” Buffett wrote in his 2017 letter. “Or even that of friends who may be facing liquidity problems of their own.”  Instead, he suggests, build a cash reserve for lean times.  Or, as the billionaire calls it, a “cookie jar” fund.

Buffett has employed a laissez-faire or free reign approach to managing his company.  It’s a style that allows employees to carry out tasks without much guidance from leaders.  Much freedom is given to the employees to make the right decision about what they are going to do.  With Kechie™ ERP, management decisions can be swift and powerful with real-time information available at your fingertips.  Let us help you make meaningful and prosperous management decisions to grow your business.  Visit myofficeapps.com and schedule a demo today.

4 Free Management Tips From Warren Buffett’s Annual Shareholder Letters.  (2020, March 4).  Retrieved from Management Tips From Warren Buffett’s Annual Shareholder Letters

 

About My Office Apps, Inc.

My Office Apps, Inc. (MOA) is a leader in business improvement software solutions to automate your organization.  Building on three decades of software design and development, MOA delivers Kechie™, a transformative business tool.  Kechie is a fully integrated Enterprise Resource Planning Software as a Service (SaaS) platform with a simplified user experience and the latest in cloud technology.  It is quick and easy to implement without the expensive price tag.  Sold in separate packages – inventory and warehouse management (CRM, Sales, Procurement, Logistics included), manufacturing, finance – or a fully configured ERP system to include all of these individual tools.  Kechie is easily configured to the scalable needs of your growing business. For more information on managing your business processes more efficiently and effectively, visit www.myofficeapps.com.

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WFH: Chapter One - The Dog will Bark during your Meeting

Working from Home Series

Chapter One:  Your Dog will Bark during your Meeting

If you’re a person who spent your pre-pandemic work life in a cubicle or office, right now is a good time to throw yourself into looking on the bright side. Working from home is what you dreamed about every morning and evening when you were stuck in traffic or jammed onto a crowded bus or subway car.  Yes, it’s all terrifying and apocalyptic right now — but you can sit in your pajamas all day. You can hang out with your dog. You can make a snack anytime you want, and you can eat it with the TV on in the background.

person working from home with their dogAs companies adjust to the “new normal” of remote work amid the COVID-19 pandemic, maintaining a strong culture and engaging employees is critical.  Embracing remote-work opportunities can deliver positive changes to business metrics, including reduced expenses and increased productivity, but requires a willing and motivated shift in perspective from management and staff.

The effectiveness of working from home has been a debated topic for decades. Only about a quarter of the US workforce works from home on a consistent basis. Concerns around productivity, collaboration, connectivity and distractions have all been cited as reasons working from home is not effective.

However, it has taken a pandemic to force a distributed workforce to come together and use online collaboration and technology tools to their full potential. An estimated 900 million people around the world are now working remotely to slow down the spread of the virus. Tools like Zoom, Slack, Google Hangouts, and Microsoft Teams are being rediscovered for their value in supporting video, messaging, conferencing, document sharing, virtual white boarding and many other features.

As we begin to better understand the real potential of working from home, we could now be looking at the future of work. In this new business model, offices may become a fixture of the past and relegated to an occasional pit stop to greet colleagues and process administrative tasks.

The result? Work is actually getting done remotely! And benefits around flexibility and reduced commute times may actually increase productivity and effectiveness.  In fact, those of us who work from home often find ourselves overworking.  We tether ourselves to our desks and stress ourselves out more at home that we do at work.  That’s why it’s important to make sure we take care of ourselves and don’t burn out while working remotely.

During this time, stay connected with friends and build in healthy distractions.  Keep perspective and give yourself permission to prioritize information flow.  Focus on others and keep moving.  Today’s challenges will shift and we will return to a new normal with plenty of new learning and expanded adaptability.

At Kechie™, we can see a shift in how the coronavirus pandemic will permanently change the way business will be done in the future.  Our belief is that working from home will become a permanent aspect for many of us.  Employers, who were previously reluctant to allow work from home, may also observe the productivity benefits.  We will have more to share on this topic in the coming weeks.  Until then, please take care of yourselves, follow all the guidelines, and do your best to remain healthy.


Win Big with ERP: AI Solutions to Influence Your Bottom Line

Win Big with ERP: Artificial Intelligence Solutions to influence Your Bottom Line  

AI and Human shaking hand

One of the hottest topics in IT today is Artificial Intelligence (AI).  By continuing to automate certain functions using sophisticated AI algorithms, one can free up employee resources for more creative activities that will add further value for your business. Although some believe that AI may replace more mundane jobs, our belief is exactly the opposite. AI will help create an increased number of less-repetitive jobs in your organization making it more innovative, more responsive to your customer’s needs, and more successful. AI will also bring operational benefits with an ability to reduce errors and improve processing times for various transactions that will decrease costs and improve customer satisfaction.

AI incorporates the ability to find trends in a large collection of data and provide insights that may not be obvious to a person looking at gigabytes of data.  Many AI programs incorporate the ability to learn from previous activities and allow one to develop more accurate forecasts and predictions.

AI technology can make a positive impact in multiple areas of your business.  These can include:

  • Inventory Management – By helping to provide more accurate forecasts — optimizing supply chains — figuring out the most efficient way to store the inventory — and tracking product lifecycles, various AI techniques can improve costs, decrease waste, and improve cycle times.AI data helping business with decision making
  • Production Management – Figuring out the most optimal way to process your backlog in your manufacturing plant can become a horribly complex problem. Utilization of AI techniques can figure out the best ways to select what order to process the jobs in your backlog, which machines to use, maintenance scheduling, and overall logistics as the work-in-process moves through the manufacturing cycle.  These optimizations can help decrease the amount of capital equipment needed, improve cycle times, and lower costs.
  • Sales – One of the most profitable ways of improving your sales is to implement sophisticated upsells and cross-selling approaches. A sophisticated AI algorithm can help by analyzing, in real-time, what additional products to recommend based on previous customer history and other information.
  • Financial Management – Besides automating various financial functions, an AI program can help a financial manager make various key decisions, such as how much cash to keep on hand, whether a capital investment will pay off, and double-check financial statements for accuracy.
  • Marketing – A key marketing function is to develop the best and most effective message for your marketing campaign based upon a variety of factors. These include customer demographics, competitive challenges, historical performance, product attributes and many others. Analyzing these factors can involve looking at a great deal of data. By utilizing advanced analytics, a good AI program can help a marketing manager sift through all these factors and create the most effective marketing campaign.

As part of our mission to be a business process improvement company, My Office Apps, Inc. is committed to providing continued improvements and incorporate various advanced AI techniques in our Kechie™ ERP software. Our goal is to provide the best solutions for small and medium sized businesses with the latest techniques to contribute to the success of our customers.  In the coming weeks, we will post additional articles that describe some of the specific AI features we have already incorporated into our Kechie software and also provide a roadmap for other features we expect to implement in the near future. Our focus is not to provide AI for AI’s sake, but rather to implement practical AI functions that can make a real difference to your bottom line.  For more information, visit www.myofficeapps.com, or better yet, call us at (949) 486-1947 and we will schedule a demo so you can view these features for yourself.


A Trail of Digital Bread Crumbs Can Lead You Home

A Trail of Digital Bread Crumbs Can Lead You Home

breadcrumbs for traceability In the tale Hansel and Gretel, the two went hiking in the forest and dropped bread crumbs to find their way home.  Wouldn’t it be nice if you could do the same thing with your ERP system to backtrack and figure how you ended up in this place?

These capabilities do exist in the Kechie™ 2020 ERP system with logging and traceability functions.  The logging capability provides a record of every transaction and change in the system.  This includes new order entries, product receipts, product shipments, RMA’s, purchase orders, as well as administrative changes such as adding and removing users and changing the privilege levels of a user.  The logging record includes the date of change, who made the change and the value before and after the change.

The logging capability is a powerful tool in helping correct errors and manage your business.  Suppose, for example, one of your employees had an incorrect price for one of your products — and for a two-week period, entered new sales orders at the wrong price.  The logging capability would allow you to quickly identify all the orders that had the incorrect price and take action.  Or, perhaps a customer calls with a complaint that they were shipped the wrong product.  How did this happen?  Were there changes made to the order after it was originally entered?  The logging capability will allow you to figure out exactly what happened and take corrective action to prevent a re-occurrence.

Additionally, the logging capability can provide further analytic data that will allow for deep insights to improve your operations. What percentage of orders needed to be changed before they were finally shipped? Who changed an access privilege for a particular user? How many times has a vendor changed the expected delivery date for a purchase order?  When did that vendor notify your company of the change?  Having a log data base available makes it easier to find the answers to these types of questions.

inspecting traceability

Traceability is another related function that is particularly useful in manufacturing environments. Many manufactured items are created with a collection of different parts created internally or purchased through a vendor. Depending upon the nature of the business, each individual part could have a serial number or a lot code from the vendor to track the history of the part.  When manufacturing a new item utilizing a collection of many different parts, you will assign either a serial number or a lot code to this new item or assembly.  The traceability function provides a data base to associate the serial number or lot code to all the component parts used to manufacture this part.

The traceability function can be extremely useful with a quality problem or customer complaint.  Sometimes, a quality problem can be traced to an occurrence with a specific lot or component purchased from a vendor. With this information and the traceability data base, the ability to quarantine other items manufactured or issue a recall to customers in receipt of a bad component.

The logging and traceability capabilities built into Kechie™ 2020 ERP are very advanced and not commonly found in other ERP systems. For those companies seeking excellence in operations and customer satisfaction with the quality and service, these functions will raise the bar.  For more information, visit www.myofficeapps.com, or call us at (949) 486-1947.  Let us schedule a demo so you can view these features for yourself.

 

About My Office Apps, Inc.

My Office Apps, Inc. (MOA) is a leader in business improvement software solutions to automate your organization.  Building on three decades of software design and development, MOA delivers Kechie™, a transformative business tool.  Kechie is a fully integrated Enterprise Resource Planning Software as a Service (SaaS) platform with a simplified user experience and the latest in cloud technology.  It is quick and easy to implement without the expensive price tag.  Sold in separate packages – inventory and warehouse management, manufacturing, finance – or a fully configured ERP system to include all of these individual tools.  Kechie is easily configured to the scalable needs of your growing business. For more information on managing your business processes more efficiently and effectively, visit www.myofficeapps.com.

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Breaking News

My Office Apps, Inc. Launches Kechie™ 2020 ERP

My Office Apps, Inc. Launches Kechie™ 2020 ERP

SANTA ANA, Calif.Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- My Office Apps, Inc. (MOA), an industry leader in business improvement software, announced the availability of Kechie™ 2020 Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, a cloud-based solution, enabling business owner/operators quick access to business-critical information in real time. The company has raised the Software as a Service (SaaS) bar by delivering innovative features to make small-to-medium sized businesses more productive and competitive, while increasing efficiency and effectiveness.

Read More about Kechie™ 2020