Why Upgrade to Spire? Inventory profits (and losses)

I made my reputation in the SBT world with two related add-on products: Auto PO and SO-2-PO. Never heard of them? Pity. Both improve inventory management and boost profits. If inventory is a big part of your business, read on. If not, I look forward to ‘seeing’ you again soon.

Many of my clients spend far too much time managing inventory and do a poor job of it. The result? Lost profits. For these clients, the fastest way to stop the bleeding is to increase inventory turns. And the best way to do that is to let your computer do the work for you with automatic purchase order generation (“Auto PO”) for stock inventory and drop-ship special orders from your suppliers to your customers (“SO-2-PO”).

This is what the big boys do. They turn their stock inventory fast and push inventory holding costs onto their suppliers by drop-shipping. Too few of my SBT, ACCPAC and Sage Pro ERP users do this. Most of my clients have a veteran employee who “knows” the inventory better than anyone else at the company. This person watches inventory closely, keeps a magical inventory Excel sheet and, after all his efforts, orders too much or too little, orders too soon or too late, expedite delivery of missing items and stares at piles of wasteful surpluses.

To relieve these problems, I wrote Auto PO to automate replenishment and I wrote SO-2-PO to handle special orders and drop-shipments. Together, these add-ons cut the administrative cost of purchasing, improved purchasing accuracy, reduced waste and lost sales.

One reason I picked Spire Systems as a suitable replacement for my SBT, ACCPAC and Sage Pro clients is because automated purchasing is a standard feature. Spire comes with automatic replenishment purchasing (Auto PO) and Spire has a fine, built-in SO-2-PO feature. You get these tools for free with your Spire license and they are great.

Spire’s Requisitions module turns general and specific inventory demand into purchase orders. “General” demand is stock shortages. Specific demand is special orders. With a few clicks, these requisitions become purchase orders, one set of POs for stock and another set of POs for drop-shipments.

Here we see our Spire inventory list filtered on expected shortages. Clicking the Requisitions button on top converts these shortages into requisitions. No guessing!

There are many good reasons to retire your SBT, ACCPAC and Sage Pro ERP in favor of Spire. Squeezing more profit from your inventory is one of the better reasons.

— Matt Lefkowitz