Tuesday 19 August 2014

How To Reduce Retail Inventory Shrinkage

Inventory shrinkage includes theft by employees, visitors, administrative and paperwork errors, and other vendor issues. If considered, employee theft is the single biggest contributor which is difficult to track and the retail industry lose millions of dollars every year due to this.

In order to reduce shrinkage, the best way is to create a comprehensive strategy that includes people, processes, and technologies. This can be done through applications developed by IT consulting companies. These solutions help the retailers in gaining a clear visibility of the data to study the shrink causes. This accurate data can be used as a guideline or acts as an actionable information to help in making the right decisions.

RFID tags, and robust software combine to give you an effective method for more accurate tracking of the inventory. The RFID tags will allow you to precisely track the time and date of an item process, its removal from the case, the employee responsible for it, or if the item was purchased or returned by the customer.

Stock spoilage is another reason responsible for this shrinkage problem. As a solution to this, you can invest in a predictive software developed by a top-hand software development company that bases the orders on expected demand and replenishes stores closer to consumer purchase dates.

Also, lack of timely alert on low inventory levels or of the products that are about to expire is also responsible for inventory shrinkage. The inventory management system sends automatic alerts when inventory levels are low or the stock is near expiry or products are due to be shipped. This enables the inventory managers to make more timely and intelligent decisions to avoid future loss.

Moving from a manual, disjointed shrink-reduction program to an integrated strategy through inventory management system can increase the efficiency of the staff.

The above steps to reduce inventory shrinkage will offer the following operational benefits.

  • Achieve greater operational efficiency 
  • Get real-time insights on a mobile platform 
  • Streamline operations such as creating purchase orders, managing inventory and customer engagement
  • Improve customer service
  • Clear out the inventory of short-life date 
  • Enabling the customer to build a single item, customer and inventory view

Wednesday 13 August 2014

Software Solution For Health Insurance

Health insurance involves a lot of paperwork. Be it an individual, family, group or an organization’s policies, the health insurance is a completely different field when compared to other insurances with lots of complexities.

To enable an easy management of health insurances, the IT consulting companies offer software solution for handling large group health insurance policies. The softwares have many modules like for handling a group policy data, deciding on premium rates per individual or per group, to calculate unit rates based on individual tariff rates and all the other specific processes, of this complicated area of business. Bealow are the few of the many features of a health insurance software solution.

Policy Management - The solution allows the registration of all the insurance contracts and manages the administration work.

Agents & Commision – It calculates the commission, bonuses and overrides as per the commission rules. It controls the process of registration, individual commissions and its distribution to the staff.

Claim settlement Health – Claims are settled quickly if handled in a uniform way. The solution offers a uniform way to process all the claims in lines and supports the settlement process.

Billing and collection – It provides an automated solution to process the large volumes of insurance billing. Performs pre-accounting processes to calculate the premium for collection.

Personal data administration – Health insurance demands the management of all the entities, individual or group for proper functioning. A particular individual can play different roles, and can also be associated with other projects. The software keeps a record of all the personal data of every individual and his projects.

Reinsurance – Provides support in every aspect of the re-insurance processes.

Not just the above modules, a software development company, also add additional modules as per the individual insurance company demands, to provide the flexibility to manage the full spectrum of insurance.

Monday 11 August 2014

Types of Restaurant POS Modules

The restaurant functioning includes various operations and the POS has modules that assist in each and every operation. The POS is a touch screen computer that enables inventory management, customer relationship management, maintains payroll modules, integrated accounting and other operations.

The Restaurant POS developed by a web development company, has the following modules to enable smooth and quick functioning.

1. Hotel front desk – Customer is the king. Clients are an integral component of this business. This module allows to collect and provide information.

2. Inventory management – Most of the business suffers from loss due to lack of the knowledge of true inventory levels. The ROS inventory modules enable tracking of the inventories that need to be finished first and gives alerts when the levels are low. Informed decisions can be taken with the inventory data.

3. Purchase Order - This module automatically creates purchase orders after analyzing the inventory and demand graph.

4. Kitchen monitor – The modules provide the chef with the orders that are needed to be prepared. It provides with the quantity of each order so that the cook knows how many items have to be prepared. Direct communication nil’s the occurrence of the error events.

5. Ingredient and recipe management – Allows multiple units of measure for ingredient purchasing, calculates wastage loss percentage for bulk items, and allows par-inventory for re-ordering.

6. Accounting interface – Tracking sales is important. This module tracks cash sales, recurring invoices and interest charges. It maintains customer database, the sales reports can be seen on the screen and is capable of printing statements and mailing labels.

7. Gift card management – This module is an additional application offered by some of the top-hand software development companies. It is beneficial for marketing and brand building. It allows to have a gift card program, the system tracks the balance of the card until the value is used. Benefits the business with increased cash flow, generation of new customers, and increase of average sales.

8. Credit/Debit card authorization – It provides integrated processing of both debit cards and credit cards. It cuts the transaction time at the point of sale to half. Also, provides valuable information of all the transactions, is high in accuracy and thus, increases productivity and saves money and time.

Friday 8 August 2014

3 Factors to Consider Before Purchasing an Online Patient Portal

Online patient portals are becoming a necessity these days. The graph of health problems has risen and also, people are becoming more and more health conscious. It has become difficult for the hospital and healthcare organizations to manage such large influx of patients. As a solution to this problem, the IT consulting companies have developed the online patient portals that offer various beneficial features. Unfortunately, not all the patient portals are created with quality features. Investing in an unworthy portal can cost a lot in the long run. Therefore, before investing in an online patient portal, considering the following factors.

1. Useful features – Check for features that will help in improving the hospital efficiencies. The portal should integrate with the hospitals EHR system. Also, it should have the feature to extract and exchange data from other sources. It should have custom content on login like articles, news feed, optional interaction levels like click to chat with staff, for document exchange, online appointments, request for a prescription refill, e-consultations, online bill payments, lab data et al. Along with features, check for security, privacy and legal considerations. After all, improving and streamlining the communication channel is the main motive of an online portal.

2.  EHR strategy –  The working strategies of the electronic health record have to be flexible and effective. Like, some portals may demand manual interpretation and manual process of an online patient query. And with some portals, the staff can answer the query or process a request online. It is necessary to have a persevering strategy with an effective workflow.

3. Portal cost – Generally, the cost of a patient portal includes installation charges,the licensing fee and the maintenance charges. While, some portals may also charge for every transaction like every bill payment or online communication that have been made. This raises the cost of the portal. To avoid being surprised with the cost later on, try and learn the cost estimation of both up-front and other services.

There are many good development companies, but choosing the best web development company that offers great features and excellent services at the right price, is an important decision to make.

Wednesday 6 August 2014

4 Reason To Invest In Ambulance Management System With GPS Tacking

Ambulance Management System with GPS Tacking is an ultimate technology product of a software development company. The ambulance is an emergency medical vehicle (EMV). As We know, during emergencies, even seconds are important to save lives. That is why it’s important to manage the ambulances as efficiently as possible. Read below a few reasons to invest in a GPS tracking ambulance management system to manage the emergency medical vehicles.
  1. Efficient Resource Utilization – For efficient handling of critical situations, it is important that the ambulances reach the locations on time. The ambulance management system with GPS tracking assist in locating the nearest available EMV that can reach the emergency site in the shortest time. Also, through the GPS, one can direct the drivers to reach the emergency spot quickly by guiding him through the shortest possible paths available.
  2. Real-Time Tracking Data – During emergencies a minute means everything. While, the ambulance drives the patient to the hospital, the doctors at the hospital can watch the live GPS tracking data. This, helps them in judging the condition of the patient in a more precise way. Thus, they can be prepared in a much better way to start with the treatments immediately, as soon as the ambulance arrives.
  3. Monitoring The Vehicles -  The GPS tracking system allows to keep a track of the resources in different locations. It is also important to monitor the employees associated with the EMV, to make sure if they are doing their job well, and to keep a track of any misuse of the vehicle.  Also, constant monitoring also assists in finding the efficient routes to the nearest nursing homes or hospitals.
  4. Low fuel cost –  With the rising fuel cost, it is significant to bring the expenses down. The system with GPS tracking ensures that the vehicles take the shortest route (cutting down the distance that needs to be travelled) and also, guides the drivers to avoid the route where traffic is more, to avoid fuel wastage due to idling.
Also, quick medical services, improves the reputation of the healthcare organization. Thus, investing in an ambulance management system with GPS tracking developed by a good web development company makes the EMV’s even more efficient.

Monday 4 August 2014

Types of Mobile Applications

Mobile phones are now called as Smartphones. What makes it Smart? Well, along with powerful hardware, the smartphones possess a wide range of inbuilt apps and support other apps in the app market.  The apps are referred to as programs that perform predefined functions and can run on the mobile devices. Nowadays, there seems to be an app for everything, from checking recent updates on sports, learning tutorials, checking breaking news, social networking and for doing bookings and  more. Earlier, the apps were developed to take PC-based applications to the mobile devices and now, the approach is to create apps specifically designed for the mobile environment.

There are different types of apps, developed by IT consulting companies based on the mobile development technology used for the app creation.

1. Native Mobile Application – The applications run directly from the handheld device. It can be downloaded from the relevant mobile store and installed on the device. It is developed to be used on a particular platform or  device. Like, the app is coded with a specific programming language, for iOS objective C, Java for android operating system. Hence, duplicate versions of the app needs to be created to enable it to run on other platforms. The native apps can utilize the device functionalities like camera, contact et al.

2. Hybrid mobile applications – They are like native apps and are written with web technologies that is hosted inside the native app container. They allow cross platform development as the particular web code can be used on various operating systems. Often, a web development company creates hybrid apps as wrappers for an existing web page. This reduces the development cost. These apps can also use device functionalities.

3. Mobile web applications – It is just the loading of the traditional web applications on the mobile device browser. The applications can be customized to provide fast and efficient loading of the website content.