SME 7.2 - New features and functionality

NEW SME 7.2 FEATURES
NOTE: SME7.2 is in Beta and these features and functionality are subject to change without notice.

Hierarchical Order Items
SME7.2 now supports Hierarchical order items to provide more flexibility for displaying and managing orders. Some specific examples of usage are as follows:

• Group Items together for a project phase, "CLIN", or to relate labor, services, and parts together. There is no limit to the depth of the hierarchy so you can have a Parent item, with a child item, grand-child, great grand-child etc. This is similar to the hierarchy in the customer equipment module. For example, you could create a hierarchy to group two parts of an order, we will call it "Phase 1" and "Phase 2":
  • Phase 1 or CLIN 1
    • Widget Material for Phase 1
      • Labor for Widget Material for Phase 1
    • Labor for Phase 1
    • Expenses for Phase 1
    • Subtotal for Phase 1
  • Phase 2 or CLIN 2
    • Widget Material for Phase 2
    • Labor for Phase 2
    • Expenses for Phase 2
    • Subtotal for Phase 2

• Packages are automatically added as hierarchy for better handling. So Package items would look like this on an order:
  • Package Name
    • Widget Material for Package
    • Services for Package

• Create Subtotals as a special type of Text Order Item that gives a subtotal line in the order. This will allow you to have subtotals within the order for different project phase or parts. This works great with the hierarchical order items.
  • To add a subtotal, go to Order Items tab of an order, select "New Text" and select the subtotal option.

• Expanded text for order text items: A detailed description field has been added to text items to provide a longer description.

• New Reports to handle the Hierarchy and SME7.2 features:

Bill of Materials for Customer Equipment

• Bill of Material (BOM): This functionality allows the creation of bill of materials for customer equipment. Once the BOM of items has been created for equipment, this button will allow faster selection of replacement parts for specific customer equipment.
  • BOM setup:
    • First create kit item part in inventory, these will transfer to BOM items for customer equipment when initially added to a customer's equipment. For example, let's say you sell a typical Server with Windows 2008 OS, 8GB RAM, and 500 GB Hard Drive.
    • Next go to that customer equipment item and add or remove BOM items specifically for that customer's equipment. By default the Windows 2008 OS, 8GB RAM and 500GB disk will be added. However this customer upgraded to 16GB ram, so you would delete the 8GB ram and add a 16GB ram to the BOM.
    • Later when the equipment needs to be serviced, you would create an order for that customer, and select the equipment to service and then select the parts to service. So for the same example, let's say the hard drive failed, so you would create a Service Order for the customer, go to ORder Items tab and select "New from BOM", select the server, and then select the hard drive to service. This would add a new hard drive to the order with the same specifications.
• Customer Equipment can now be tied to all order item types, sme7.2 added customer equipment to Materials and Text items and was already on Labor and Service items.

Selected Item Print Selected item Print will allow print or email report/form with specific items from the order only. Select Actions>Selected Item Print, this will bring up a list of all items on the order to allow you to select specific items to print for the order. Only the items selected will show on the order. This feature will be great to go along with the hierarchical order items to print only items within one tree of the hierarchy.

Create PO for Selected Items Create PO for Selected Items: This will allow you to control which items to order for PO's. Select Actions>Create PO for Selected Items and then select the items to create a PO for, select the vendor and adjust the quantity to order in case you want more or less parts while you are doing a PO.

Rental Business Handling SME7.2 now makes it easier to run a rental business using barcoding on orders. before this release you could easily add items to an order with the barcode button in SME by selecting Barcode and then selecting item numbers or serial numbers with the barcode device. Now you can also RETURN items with the barcode button. Here is the process:

• Add Rental items to order: Create a new service or install order and select barcode and scan item numbers or serial numbers onto the order.
• Add the rental charge for the rental fees by adding service items to the order.
• Return the items on the order by going to the same order, select barcode and barcode the serial numbers to return items already on the order. SME will track that the items where added and subtracted on the order for historical purposes.

Improved Activity Handling SME Activities now appear in the bottom left of the main screen for quicker handling of tasks and activities. Quick buttons allow fast managing of activities: V = View the activity, J = Jump to the record for the activity, D = Dismiss the activity, S = Snooze the activity and remind again later.