Professional Services Catalog
Windward Software is committed to helping your business by providing professional services when you need them.
Whether you are restructuring, training new individuals, cross-training or adding new features, our professional services team is here to help you get the most out of your ERP
Get the Most from Your ERP - Windward System Five
Being successful with new functionality within System Five means planning. You have purchased a system with hundreds of features, many of which can help drive your business. We estimate that our customers only utilize about 30 - 40% of the systems features and functionality. If your team has an understanding and opportunity to utilize more of System Five, you will be better positioned for success. Our catalog of services will help guide you to opportunities that can maximize your software investment.
Professional Services are provided in the following categories
Efficiency and Usage Based Project plans
*highly recommended for cross-functional training
Custom Professional Services Consult
As your business grows and changes, you may become challenged with how to achieve your objective within System 5. Our Business Analyst will seek to understand your business challenge, capture and assess your requirements, and work with our development team to propose a solution. The solution may be existing functionality in the software that when a specific workflow is followed will provide results, or it may be achieved through our custom development process. If custom development is the solution, you will be provided with a formal Software Development Estimate outlining the proposed work and estimated cost.
Efficiency and Usage packages
Business Efficiency Check-In
- POS Assessment
- Inventory Assessment
- Accounting Assessment
Our Professional Services team will work with you assessing your current workflow using System Five. After understanding of what is important to your business, we will recommend where new processes can be introduced to make you, your staff, and your business work more efficiently. Depending on results, additional time may be required to execute on recommendations.
Inventory Efficiencies
- Physical Inventory Count
- Cycle Counting
- Inventory Adjustments
- Tracking lost sales
Inventory is critical to your business. Windward Professional Services can help identify methods to keep you in control of one of your most critical assets. Inventory level monitoring, making adjustments to maintain proper inventory levels, and understanding where you are losing margins are key to business success. These Professional Services sessions are meant to assess, recommend and coach you on Inventory Management within System Five.
Systematic Ordering
- Set Highs &
Lows based on
- Sales
- Lead Time
- And/or Cost
- Determine when it's ok to stretch your Order to make Minimum Freight
- Classify stock by performance to identify Dead Stock
Excessive stock can kill your cash flow; while not enough can lead to missed opportunities. Inventory reorder points and highs should be monitored at least quarterly. This 5-hour course will show you how to set Re-Order Points and determine how much to order when it's time. Your instructor will give you the formulas, guide you in the calculations, and import the results.
Marketing Strategies
- CRM
- Opportunity tracking
- Tracking lost sales
- Referral Source tracking
Inventory sitting on your store shelves will not sell itself! Our Professional Services team can help you with tools and techniques to market your merchandise, track your sales progress, and understand where your sales are originating from so you can maintain strong customer relationships.
Reporting
- Designing Inventory Reports
- Designing Customer Reporting
- Custom Ledger reporting
- Standard Sales reports
Transaction data is so valuable in today’s business, specifically if you can report in it. Many stock reports exist in System Five, however in this Professional Services package, you will also be coached on how to develop your own custom reports. In addition to creating your own reports, our team can assist you with recognizing the value of running various sales reports to understand where your revenue is being generated from.
Advanced Inventory Control
- Location Setup
- Assigning locations to stock
- Selling and Purchasing with AIC
- Inventory counts with AIC
Advanced Inventory Control allows you to manage locations against Inventory quantity. This is useful in a warehouse where you store stock in various locations based on volume as well as accessibility. This Professional Services package will begin with an assessment of your need for location management and then walk you through the configuration and testing of workflows to implement the functionality into your business.
Barcoding in Your Business
- Data load of barcodes
- Generating barcodes in System Five
- Barcode Labels
- Scanning for POS and Purchasing
Using barcodes provides efficiency and accuracy in your business. This Professional Services package will walk you through how to assign barcodes to your products, as well as techniques for scanning at Point of Sale and Purchasing. An assessment will begin the project to understand how best to delivery barcoding for your business and meet your objectives.
Inventory Reconciliation
- Stock adjustments
- Inventory Value reporting
- Matching PO’s to AP bills
Inventory value is an accumulation of stock on hand at the landed cost of the stock. Ledger value represents the accumulation of vendor invoices for stock received that has yet to be sold. Many vendors do not issue invoices at the same time the stock is received in your business, leaving Inventory value and ledger value not in sync. This Professional Services package will provide you with best practices for making any necessary stock adjustments, matching vendor invoices to PO value, and techniques for reconciling the two.
Managing Inventory Quantities
- Highs and Lows and reorder levels
- Using Inventory reorder formulas to manage stock on hand
- Exporting critical stock information and how to update High/Low values for stock
- Stock Management Report for Reorder levels
High and Low quantity against stock is an effective way of controlling re-ordering. Understanding the fluctuation of demand for your merchandise is key. This Professional Services package will guide you through analyzing your sales trends and using data to manage your high/low order points to keep the stock you need on the shelves.
Month/Year-end Best Practices
- Integrity Checks
- Bank reconciliations
- Inventory reconciliation
- Managing your AR and running statements.
Transactional data goes into System Five daily, and the result is reporting that helps direct business decisions. This Professional Services package will provide best practices around keeping your transactional data intact. Mistakes can occur, which is why we have reconciliation techniques to detect them and ensure your financial reporting is accurate.
Calendars/Task Management
- General Appointments
- Delivery scheduling for customer invoicing
- Printing from the calendar
Using the Calendar function in System Five offers scheduling capabilities, reminders for appointments and the ability to manage multiple resources and the time spent. Delivery drivers, technicians and sale staff can manage their daily activities and stay on top of business activities.
Fixed Assets
- Setting up your Fixed assets (units)
- Setup Wizard Configuration
- Fixed Assets vs Inventory Assets
- Generating the fixed asset report
- Understanding how the depreciation is applied to the ledger
Fixed Assets in System Five is a module that allows you to manage your assets life and depreciation. Assets can be owned equipment that may be rented to customers, or that is used internally to maintain business. When is it time to dispose of an asset or sell it because it has depreciated? This Professional Services package will begin with an assessment to understand your business need for Fixed Asset tracking, and then guide you through the setup and configuration to begin tracking asset values and depreciation.
Working With System Integrity
- Understanding error messages
- Addressing a proof outage
- Sub ledger reporting – (AR, AP, Inventory)
- Best Practices for reducing integrity issues
Data integrity issues can occur for a variety of reasons and can go unnoticed. Identifying errors that may have been caused by a user, or technology is critical to ensure accuracy of your reporting. This Professional Services package will guide you through a review of any integrity errors you may have in your software and understanding key area’s to monitor and keep the health of your software in tact. Bringing best practices for periodic integrity checks and maintenance will give you piece of mind that your decisions are based on accurate information you obtain from System Five.
Role Based Packages
Warehouse Role
- Shipping/Receiving
- Inventory labels
- Barcoding
- Location mgmt.
Your Warehouse manager or staff can learn through instruction on best practices for receiving stock, using deliveries for shipping, how labels can bring efficiency to the warehouse and barcoding. Location management can be utilized using the location field against inventory to assign locations to stock for label printing and picking stock.
Sales and Customer Management Roles
- Invoicing efficiencies
- End of day process
- Using Gift Cards
- Value of Touchscreen
Your customer facing staff are critical to your business and understanding how to best utilize System Five for Point of Sale and customer management will keep your customers satisfied and coming back. This Professional Services package will provide your staff with front line efficiencies at POS, best practices for end of day cash out, the benefits to using gift cards and utilizing the touchscreen interface design to streamline processing orders.
Accounting Role
- Accounts Payable
- Accounts Receivable
- Ledger postings
- Integrity
- Bank Reconciliation
- Reconciling clearing accounts
- Reporting
Accounting is not everyone’s favorite activity or expertise, but it is a necessary process in any business. Use this Professional Services package to learn best practices for using the accounting in System Five. From AP to AR, journal entries, understand ledger posting, closing the POS end of day and reconciliations, this will help you and your staff keep your ledger intact so you can rely on financial reporting at any given time.
Technical packages
Data Restart
- Installation of a blank Dataset
- Re-Configuration of System Five
- Data Imports
- Inventory Configuration
- Starting values
Professional Services will work with your business to provide you with a fresh start to System Five. This will be with a dataset clear of any data, just as a new customer to Windward Software. With the guidance of Professional Services, you will re-configure the new dataset making reference to the configuration of your existing dataset. Data, (Customers, Suppliers, and Inventory) can be extracted from the current in use System Five data. Your team can them audit the data to perform any clean up activities of obsolete or invalid records. With the guidance of Professional Services, the clean data lists are imported into the new dataset in preparation for use. Configuration of the inventory where necessary will be performed next (Kits, case breakdown, superseding parts, etc). All forms can be exported from the in-use dataset and imported into the new dataset, and lastly opening balances, (Inventory quantities, starting AR, AP, and Trial Balance) start your new dataset.
Note: No historical information is brought forward into the new dataset, however the historical dataset can be reserved on a workstation for lookup and reporting but will require a single Pervasive license.
Ledger Restart
- Integrity Checks
- Assess AR & AP Sub Ledgers
- Clearing Trial Balance
- Opening Trial Balance
If the Accounting section of System Five was not implemented fully or at all, use of System Five will still post transaction to the General Ledger. Without actively using and following best practices for the accounting section, any financial reporting will be inaccurate. This Professional Services package will guide your accounting team through the steps necessary to prepare the accounting module for use. This will include running and tending to any Integrity messages. These are errors within the system that will likely have gone unnoticed as checking integrity is part of best practices for the accounting module. Assessing the accuracy of any Accounts Receivable/Accounts Payable transactions. Your accounting team will then be guided through clearing the existing Trial Balance to zero as of a given date, entering an opening trial balance and any needed AR and AP transactions to start using accounting in System Five. Note: You will be required to provide the values for the opening Trial Balance. These values cannot be obtained from current data given the accounting was not in use. Consult your accountant for assistance if needed.
Server Migrations
- Pervasive Upgrade (if required)
- System Five update (if required)
- System Five Training program and data files migrated to new server
- System Five program and data files migrated to new server
- Payroll program and data files migrated to new server
- NetEpay installation and configuration on new server (if required)
- Windward Connect installation and configuration (if required)
- WEAR Installation and configuration (if required)
- API reconfiguration (if needed)
- Terminal mapping to the new server
A new server in your business requires duplicating everything from your current server to your new one. Professional services will work with a member of your team to transfer and reconfigure all products and services that are related to System Five. Prior to transferring any files, an assessment of System Five and Pervasive for the version will be completed and any necessary updates will be performed. The actual migration to move all System Five files will be scheduled and performed from start to finish to reduce the impact on your business as System Five will not be accessible during this work. The System Five application and all of your System Five data will be transferred to the new server. Subsequent activities will include any payment processing applications (NetEpay) and any supporting System Five applications will be transferred and configured (Windward Connect, WEAR, and Web API). Additional work will include mapping your existing terminals to the new server. This can be completed by our technical team, or we can show a member of your team how to perform this task and you can complete the mapping. Note: The cost of this service will depend on the work effort involved and will be quoted based on an initial assessment.
Change of Ownership (Ledger Restart)
- Integrity Checks
- Assess AR & AP Sub Ledgers
- Clearing Trial Balance
- Opening Trial Balance
- Reserved copy of System Five data for seller
If a business is sold that uses System Five to manage the business, it may be a a requirement that the seller retain a copy of the data for historical lookup, tax purposes, and even resolving outstanding AR and AP if this was part of the sale. For this unique situation, a Ledger restart is performed to provide a clean start in the ledger for the new owner. (Please see previous package for details) Prior to performing the ledger restart, a copy is taken for the seller who can have this installed on a separate computer for use. If the computers are not part of the sale, the installation will be for the new owner with a copy of the dataset being installed for continued use. Depending on the work effort involved in installation, additional charges may apply. The purchase of Pervasive licensing will be required for all installations that exceed the current user count for the business.
Custom Data Loads
- Assessment of data for import
- Test import into Training
- Import into Live
Customers, Suppliers and Inventory are the main types of data that can be imported into System Five. Kits, Units, Matrix’s and sell through allowances are less common but also are examples of data that can be imported into System Five saving hours of data entry. This Professional Services package will provide assessment of your data for compliance with our data load structure, recommendations for compiling or auditing data in preparation for import, and guidance through the import process. The initial import will be performed in a training directory for validation, followed by the import being performed in your production environment.
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