Author: yuancheng

How the ERP system works in our production and ads posting process? When a production contract made between sales and customer, operation team would be noticed to do the further work. In the peek time, since the high volume of productions and posting jobs, it’s hard to finish the job on time, and more importantly, hard to trace the current status of a customer job. If six sales want to get the updated information of their orders’  production and posting ads, they have to communicate with the operation team personally, and cause unnecessary workload and pressure for the operation team. Sometimes the operation team cannot give you the exact time when ads are fully produced  and when ads are fully posted on metro. An ideal ERP system would be implemented historical  data and related models to calculate and offer those key information, which is more reliable that man made work. And sales can trace those numbers any time in the system. In another case, when an in-train ad is posted,  normally the operation team cannot give the sales the exact time when the train is out for operation (So that customer can check the ads or we can take the pictures for ads). An ideal ERP system would be linked to the metro operation system, so they would monitor every train’s activity: if the train is being repaired; how many times i would run today,  and how many passengers on that train.  It would help marketing team to precisely calculate target coverage of the ads in that train, to make a reliable after-ads report to the customer.

STDecaux is a sub company of JCDecuax, the worldwide No.1 outdoor adversing company. It owns 90% of media in 16 lines of Shanghai Metro in year 2013. One big change was: Sales department was divided into three groups: One group sales Line 1 and other minor lines, second group sales Line 2 and other minor lines, the third one sales digital media in all lines. If customer needs all resources, the customer has to sign triple media lease contracts, production contracts and on-board contracts, and may negotiate with three sales in our company. In another situation, if a customer is controlled by one sales, he intends to sale more of his own media resource gutless of other groups’ media, then he personally “Sale” the customer to his trusted sales in other groups, let them to sign the contract and exchange with “future promise” of media contracts from those sales. However dividing sales into three groups may also bring goods things: the silo – effect would force each group to sale more their own resources. Media coverage was unbalanced before group dividing since Line 1 and Line 2 occupies 80% of the total revenues.
In part 2, I will talk about what is the whole process of a sales in STDecaux and what can be improved.

We are purchase and inventory team this week! So what’s the procurement process in our company? Before we going to make an order, we should collect all the purchase requirements in a certain time, and in a ERP system, we collect the material (Master Data). We do this to make our purchase order effectively. Then if we do not have vendor, we should take times to do the vendor selection (Receive different quotations and pick up one to several vendors). Now we can make purchase order. Our system would remind us purchase team of goods shipping time and amount in case of some special situation. After this, purchase team job done. Inventory team goes on with Good receipt, which has Financial Impact (Assets increase) and Material Impact(Inventory increase). Next, we process our invoice verification. We need to check our purchase order, master data of materials. Last, we make the payment and trigger the financial impact (Cash decrease). Inventory team now can go home and play video game.