Healthy business relationships are part of what makes a successful business. And like any other business relationship, it's important to be able to connect with and trust your Managed Service Provider (MSP) in order to maximize your partnership with them and your company's own productivity and growth.

Business relationships are cultivated. Grown. That's what you do – at least if you want your business to flourish. The healthier your business relationships, the more productive and efficient your operations become.

Naturally, this applies to your relationship with your Managed Service Provider (MSP). Your IT is an important part of your day-to-day operations, and contributes greatly to how productive your business can become – so establishing good working rapport with your MSP is especially essential. Here are a few pointers for building and maintaining a great relationship with your current or prospective MSP partner.

Assess what your MSP can provide for you Sit down with your MSP to learn their ideas for your business, then carefully assess whether the services they offer support and augment your operations – current and planned. Look closely at contracts and make sure you understand the fine print, and carefully evaluate whether the service agreement meets your needs. Do some research about prospective MSPs (which is easy to do through the Internet) to verify their claims. Making sure you have the right fit is an important first step in getting the most out of an MSP.

Define roles and manage expectations Make sure that roles and responsibilities are clearly defined and understood early in the process, especially if your MSP is integrated with or augmenting an existing IT operation. This will help minimize overlapping job roles (which is ultimately unproductive for the both of you), as well as territorial disputes and misunderstandings.

Communicate constantly While your MSP will essentially manage your IT, it's still YOUR IT department. Make sure that you open healthy channels of feedback and communication. It's also recommended that you keep your MSP informed of any new directions or strategies that you feel will affect the IT operations that your MSP partner handles. It's a good idea to schedule regular planning sessions and meetings with them so that they will be able to anticipate what you need – and provide it – in line with your own goals and timetables.

Establish trust and respect your MSP's decisions Treat your MSP like you would your IT manager. Give them general direction, and then let them do what they do best: manage IT. Entrusting your IT to an outside contractor can be a difficult decision, but as long as your MSP is reliable and secure, it may very well be one of the best business decisions you've ever made.

In today's highly competitive environment, innovation plays a key role in staying ahead of the game. Fortunately, you can rely on help of business tools such as Dynamics ERP and SharePoint to help your teams collaborate, create, and deliver quickly and creatively.

The key to competitive advantage in today's connected world is innovation. Companies that can continually offer new product features and services will win and hold the attention of customers. To support innovation, how do you keep your employees thinking outside the box and building for the future?

Share the knowledge

Connect your employees to each other no matter where they are. When employees can collaborate in real time instead of emailing documents — not knowing who has the latest version and who contributed what — they keep innovation flowing. Dynamics ERP and SharePoint will give your teams the power to share their ideas in a central location without any slowdowns.

Lack of information, dated information, or disjointed information all keep people from making the best decisions. When you get the right information to the right person at the right time, you allow them to focus on productivity instead of data crunching. With business intelligence built on an integrated ERP system, you deliver information that fuels innovation.

Connect departments

When one department doesn't know what the other is doing, duplicate efforts, wasted time, and poor decisions follow. Dynamics ERP and SharePoint together allow you to share information from all departments across your organization. Help your team move forward together, basing decisions on the whole picture.

You can stay ahead of the competition by supporting innovation and creativity with a connected ERP system. Microsoft Dynamics ERP will help your teams collaborate and connect. Let's talk about how we can help you find creative solutions to get ahead of ever changing markets.

Now that you have signed up to test drive Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, what's next? Here are a few ideas to help you get the most from your free trial.

1. Take the time to watch the instructional videos. There are some valuable tips in the videos and they are short. A few minutes of your time up front will help you get more value from your test drive. 2. Upload some of your own data. Data familiar to you will make the processes more "real" for you and your team. 3. Work through the processes that you think will help your organization the most. Whether it's sales management, customer service management, or marketing, focus on the processes that will make the most difference to productivity. Practice, so that you feel comfortable showing the process. 4. Show your team or manager. By taking the initiative to demonstrate the improvements that could come from implementing CRM, you will help them open their minds to improving the business. 5. Be sure to show them the dashboards. Set up a few of the dashboard charts the way you would use them – it's quick and easy, and they pack a punch when demonstrating the valuable at-a-glance information Dynamics CRM can provide.

By test driving Dynamics CRM online, you are obviously interested in helping to improve the processes that are holding your company back. Once you have started the conversation with the decision makers in your company, an experienced Microsoft Dynamics CRM Partner can assist you in taking it to the next level. Let us help you make the most of CRM for your organization. Talk to us today.

Are you able to track the true profitability of the projects that your business delivers? If your business provides services that are delivered by multiple people or departments in your organization, you may not be charging enough. Estimating costs to cover salaries, sales time, travel time, and other hidden expenses may be eating up your profits without you realizing it.

Take the guesswork out of project costing with a systematic review of the projects that you have delivered. Evaluate how you should capture and assign actual costs to specific projects, including:

• Project definition. Projects take different forms for different organizations, and it's helpful to have a good understanding of what yours entail. A manufacturer could define a project as a custom-made machine. A marketing campaign is a project for an advertising company. Each wedding would be set up as a project for a caterer.
• Assign the costs that should be allocated. Direct costs, such as materials, are easy to allocate to projects, but other costs might be less obvious. Think through all the steps of your project activities, from conception to delivery, to capture the full cost of delivering that project.
• Determine how to track time, costs, and expenses. Rule of thumb: keep it simple. Consider how much detail you really need to capture to accurately track costs. And be sure to make it easy for your employees to enter and assign time and expenses to each project, no matter where they are – you'll get more accurate results.
• Monitor. Check the results of your project costing regularly to make sure that your employees are using the system consistently. Use reports to monitor the profitability of each project, and then adjust your prices accordingly.

Project costing is a critical business management technique that most companies today need for at least a part of their business. A business management solution such as Dynamics ERP can help you manage projects and the expenses that go with them automatically. Give us a call and let us help you get a handle on project profitability.

Distributors around the globe face similar challenges with inventory. These common problems put distributors at a competitive disadvantage as customer expectations rise.

Common challenges include:

• Too much of some products – excess inventory and dead stock lead to decreased turnover and profitability.
• Stock-outs of other products – resulting in backorders, lost sales, and dissatisfied customers.
• Knowing what is in stock – the on-hand quantity in the computer system does not agree with what is actually on the shelf in the warehouse.
• Material misplaced in the warehouse – material is "out there somewhere" but can't be found when it's needed.

Effective inventory management A systematic plan to achieve effective inventory management will allow you to meet and exceed customers' expectations of product availability. In addition, effective inventory management will maximize net profit by minimizing total inventory investment. Effective inventory management results from the balance of inventory control and inventory management.

Inventory control is managing the inventory that is already in your warehouse, stockroom, or store, including:

• Knowing what products are "out there" and how much you have of each item.
• Knowing exactly where each piece of each product is located in your warehouse.
• Ensuring that all inventory remains in salable or usable condition.
• Storing products to minimize the cost of filling customer orders.

Inventory management is determining when to order products, how much to order, and the most effective source of supply for each item in each warehouse – that is, ensuring that you have the right quantity of the right item in the right location at the right time. Inventory management includes all of the activities involved in forecasting and replenishment.

Customers expect you to know what is in stock and when you can ship. Let us help you find the right balance of effective inventory management with a financial management system that helps you deliver on time and on budget.

The big difference between Android and the iOS is the fact that, on an Android device, you can play Flash videos. There are times however when this seeming advantage can be a disadvantage as Flash (such as Flash ads) can slow down your browsing experience or even crash your browser. There is a solution.

You can turn off Flash if you choose to. Simply go to your Browser's Settings by pressing on the Menu/Options button, then go to Advanced and change 'Enable plug-ins' setting from "Always on" to "On demand." Flash applications will now appear as an arrow that you must touch to start.

There are times when you may want to capture what is currently being shown on your iPad's screen. That’s easy to do on an iPad.

Simply press the Home button and then the Sleep/Wake button simultaneously. When you hear a click, the screenshot has been taken. You can then go to the photos gallery to see all of your captured screenshots.

As an owner or manager of a small or mid-size business struggling to keep up with technology and changing business environments, it's easy to get overwhelmed. Should you keep limping along with multiple, unconnected systems, or bite the bullet and implement an ERP system? The ERP evaluation process isn't easy, but with a few guiding principles you can prepare your company for the future.

Practical advice for ERP selection

1. Define critical requirements first – Don't get sidetracked with the bells and whistles of the applications you review. Before you start, define the functionality that is critical to your organization and stay focused. Communicate your requirements to your vendors and require that they focus on those requirements in their presentations.
2. Double check references – Go the extra mile when you check references provided by a vendor. The more clients you speak to, the better picture you will get of not only the vendor's products, but also their level of customer service for all their clients – and not just their best clients.
3. Don't overthink it – It's easy to get into "analysis paralysis" with such an important decision. Once you have decided to take the plunge into ERP, keep moving forward and find the best fit for your requirements. Create a realistic project timeline to maintain momentum and keep the project on track.
4. Choose the evaluation team carefully – Choosing a new ERP system is a business decision, not an IT decision. While IT should be involved, the evaluation team must make certain that the product fulfills the critical business elements that are needed for the organization's success.
5. Partner for project success – Once you have found the right solution for your organization, make sure that you have the right partner as well. The implementation partner you choose will make the difference between success and failure. Choose an organization that understands your business.

Prepare for the future Selecting an ERP system is a big step for a modest business organization. Choosing the right ERP system will build the foundation for growth for many years to come. Find out how you can transition from spreadsheets and disconnected software to a fully integrated ERP system. Call us today.

ERP Drives Manufacturing Innovation It's the start of a new year and 2012 forecasts for manufacturers are starting to look more promising. To stay ahead of the competition, you need to respond to the market with innovate product additions. A fully integrated business management system should enhance innovation to improve your responsiveness to the market.

Improve innovation When you can identify opportunities for new products at an early stage, you can respond with new, innovative products or product variants. Your ERP system should provide you with information from across the organization, with deep insight into product preference trends. With industry-specific and customer-specific KPIs delivered to your key decision makers, you can get a jump on the competition to meet changes in customer preferences.

Innovation in most manufacturing environments requires collaboration between outside partners as well as multiple internal departments. Spending time fighting outdated systems makes it hard for teams to keep communication lines flowing. An ERP system that integrates with collaboration solutions like SharePoint and common applications like Office gives teams the tools they need for easy collaboration.

Reduce time to market Fast and accurate planning is a must for the innovative manufacturer – budgeting and planning cycles can't last weeks and months anymore. Real time inventory, production, and supply chain information presented in one easy-to-use dashboard gives managers the tools they need to plan and execute quickly.

Coordinating multiple facilities and departments to support new products from production to delivery requires an integrated ERP system. Automated workflow ensures that products move from development to production environments by eliminating delays and miscommunication. A fully integrated ERP system will support new products entering the production schedules and adjust inventory levels at key distribution points.

Get ready for leaps of innovation in 2012, and improve your responsiveness to the market with a fully integrated ERP system. Call us to talk about how we can help you build a better business.

If you own an Android phone, you can use it as a substitute for an external drive or a USB key. You can load files into your phone simply by plugging it in to a PC with a USB cable, then tapping on “Mount” when you are prompted by the system.

This mounts the internal storage of the device as an external drive relative to the PC, and you can easily drag and drop files or create folders on the device as you see fit. Of course, it is recommended you do this on the SDCard that likely came with the device, or one that you buy for your phone.