What have you started using Phocas for that has surprised you the most? Managing dead stock? Identifying low margin customers or products? Phone system integrations? Commissions? Managing Pricing matrixes? We want to know what you DIDN’T buy Phocas for - but couldn’t live without now!
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Tracking the frequency of our pricing methods. We can track what percentage of items are being manually priced, priced via the system matrix, or priced via contractor net. We have used this to greatly reduce the amount of manually priced items. We will continue to use it to police our order entry teams and lock in net prices. This helps when it come to price increase time and prevents margin erosion.
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In the last couple of months we just had a new database built for our FX Exposure, this database captures data from Pronto for Purchase Orders, Sales Orders, Debtors and Creditors in foreign currencies and allows me to achieve a couple of different things. I use it for our month end revaluation of foreign debtors and creditors, but the main reason was an FX Exposure report I do for our parent company once a month which allows us to forecast our foreign currency exposures and therefore mitigate our risk for these exposures through the use of FEC’s or hedges.
Could not live without it now! 
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Great use case @bgregory - do you track any other sales related KPI’s to assist in implementing price changes?
^^^This 
Very cool.
We skin that cat from 100 different angles. The commodity side of our business will likely always be manually priced by management based on market direction. We’ve been PHOCASED on minimizing manually priced stock items as a percentage of sales. We have went from north of 40% manually priced to less than 10%.
We will use the transaction view and export it to excel. Then we run formulas to find items that have been manually priced 3 or more times in a given time period. Usually between pricing events for the specific priceline. Same customer same price 3 time or more prompts a Net being set.
If you know of a way to write that within Phocas instead of exporting to excel I’m all ears.
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An issue we had with our lighting showrooms were to determine whether or not we had items that were sitting in our warehouse but not on display. I was asked to create an inquiry that compares our stock in the warehouse versus what we have displayed in our showroom. The idea being that it is hard to sell what you’re not showing. Since we have different ‘warehouse numbers’ assigned to items in the showroom vs the warehouse, this was a simple matter of a little advanced search logic that compares quantities in both and takes into consideration quantities that have been committed to orders already. The showroom managers use it frequently. I have it broke down by vendor so they can ‘Phocas’ their time on the product line they are most concerned with. Warehouses were set fixed at this point.
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@bgregory Interesting. Do you have some advice on how you reached this type feedback from the system. In Eclipse I use UET codes to look at price overrides, but how are you doing this in Phocas.
Love that I can perform custom calculations to calculate different ROIs based on the variables that Phocas can pull from our database. Would like to see more excel type functions as the product is developed over time.
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Phocas added two dimensions for us. Price and Cost Override. I think the data links to the character in Eclipse. Here are screen shots of ours.
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Thanks for the feedback. I will look into having this added and playing with it.
If you are using job management or strategic pricing you may also want to insure that the Phocas data accounts for those figures.
Steve Shuman
Nelson Electric Supply
262-504-3617
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We are using job management and have looked at strategic pricing. Didn’t realize there was separate Job Management data (assumed it was all part of the ERP source.
I will have to ask about that. Thanks for pointing out.
I use for all our purchasing purposes. P21 does not work for us via PORG etc. I have an EDA report show qty on hand, on PO, qty sold per year, values, then calculations for avg sold per week etc… Then I use transaction mode to get all my open PO#'s, Qty on that PO, and Due date of that PO. Then I copy and paste into my own Excel template. It’s more hands-on, but keeps in more involved in our inventory needs etc. Then of course dead inventory, and normal sales data.