29th June 2020 | 3 min read

Five ways to maximise your investment in Sage X3

As business leaders across the UK continue to deal with uncertainty, change and - for some - new opportunities, ensuring that the technology in place is working with them and not against them is key to unlocking insight and supporting the ‘new normal’. 

Datel’s Paolo Arcangelo, Sage X3 Services Director, recently shared his advice in a live webinar: ‘Maximising your investment in Sage X3’.  In this session he touched on how to ensure that Sage X3 is working in the way your business needs, what areas to focus on to get more out of your investment and how to utilise the current working environment experience to be a catalyst for change. 

Here are Paolo’s top five areas to consider when looking to maximise your Sage X3 investment:

1. Make the most of the investment you’ve made

“The first area of focus is to maximise on the investments you’ve already made in your software solutions. Take another look at the Sage X3 utilisation within your business or ask an expert from Datel to help you review areas you could make improvements with simple process changes or system tweaks. There might be features and functions you’re not currently using that could provide some significant benefits in terms of time saving and automation. Workflows could be set up easily to help teams at this time. 

Many Sage and Datel customers take a phased approach to Sage X3 implementations rather than going for a big bang implementation of all the elements they want to use at the start.  If this was the case for your business, revisit your wish-list and consider if it’s time to move on to that next phase.  This will allow you to take advantage of the benefits you need today through a shorter project and you’ll start to see ROI almost immediately.”

2. Review your reporting and analytics

“Now more than ever, deep insight into data is required to understand customer activities, supply-chain differences, and the effects of the economic downturn on your business.

Sage X3 customers have been investing, and continue to invest very heavily in reporting tools such as SEI, before and during the lockdown period. These reporting tools can help spot trends within your customer base, product ranges and sales. This deep insight allows you to focus on certain industries or sectors where you’re able to see your customers are most operational.

Many customers already have this investment within the SEI product and are using the Excel add-in for production of financial reports and statements. There’s also a huge piece of that software around management and analytics, which can provide that real customer insight to identify trends, from understanding what’s happening within the customer base to understanding what’s happening within supply-chains. All of this is available right now, in the reporting and analytics product that many of our customers already have. If you are not utilising it, get in touch.”

 3. Build workflow and automation tasks

“Everyone, from manual operatives to the business leader, is now thinking about how we automate tasks and move towards digital transformation. Lockdown has pushed businesses into a paperless, home-working environment and, whilst they might not have thought they were ready yet for this change, they have adapted very quickly now there’s no option but to have a ‘paperless office’.

We’ve broken our way from the office and the unthinkable is happening - which is massive amounts of people working effectively from home - it’s about building on that and introducing things like workflow and automation tasks in the organisation. Focus on removing all of those paper-based activities completely and replace them with electronic activities.

All this can be achieved reasonably simply with the Sage X3 solution to have things like payment authorisation and purchase order authorisation processes. It’s a case of getting in touch with a supplier and saying ‘don’t send me a paper copy of an invoice any more, I want those invoices electronically so I can push them straight into my Sage X3 solution’. These previously manual tasks and paper-based activities can and must be replaced by electronic activities.

It could be as simple as putting in a workflow to improve documents flowing through the organisation; It could be automating document distribution so you email your documents out to your customers rather than putting them in the post; Or automating a signature on a cheque and the process for authorising invoices. All of these can be fully automated with Sage X3, maintaining control and replacing a manual paper trail with a fully automatic electronic trail, reduced time and reduced effort.”

4. Take a look at Datel’s Fusion range

“Datel’s own products can help to speed up processes and reduce manual intervention. Lots of Sage X3 customers are using the Excel Connect solution to automate repetitive data entry tasks and reduce the amount of time spent keying in information. If you’ve not looked at how it could remove hours of work for your team, it’s worth taking a look at.

Other Datel Fusion products such as Carrier Connect mean you can automate the booking of consignments straight to carriers rather than using different carrier systems. So relevant to the current environment where businesses are seeing their distribution networks flip to home delivery from traditional channels.”

5. Consider upgrading your solution

“The latest versions of Sage X3 are stacked full of new features but more importantly for the digital world, they are designed for access in a cloud based environment either on PC/laptop, tablet device or phone.

Sage is constantly evolving the Sage X3 solution and planning an upgrade will enable the easy transition to remote working; and improve the accessibility of the application on tablets and mobile devices. It’s worth a look at the new features and functions, and how you can leverage the investment that you’ve already got in the application.”

To watch the webinar in full and hear from Paolo and Rob Sinfield, VP of Product - Sage X3 at Sage, take a look at it on demand here.