Sage Alerts and Workflow: The Smart Part of Business Intelligence and the Action Behind Actionable Intelligence

Terms like Business Intelligence and Actionable Insight get a whole lot of attention these days — and for good reason. Companies need data intelligence to better understand their businesses, and more actionable insights to help with decision making. However, we would argue that what companies need more, especially during these challenging times, are tools that act on that intelligence and insight, not simply dole it out. If you think so too, you’re going to love Sage Alerts and Workflow. Sage Alerts and Workflow is the practical application of intelligence and insights. Think of it this way: if Business Intelligence is the architect, Sage Alerts and Workflow is the carpenter.

We cover the capabilities of Sage Alerts and Workflow in some detail in this article, so here we’re taking a higher-level look at how this tool builds value.

What it is and what it does

Sage Alerts and Workflow is a business activity monitoring tool that you train to continually monitor your Sage ERP databases — as well as other data sets — looking for things that matter to you. Once it finds those things, Sage Alerts and Workflow can alert you and it can take action. An easy example of this would be to ask Sage Alerts and Workflow to monitor your inventory stock levels, notify you by email when stock of a particular item gets low, and then create a purchase order to bring stock levels higher.

The list of conditions Sage Alerts and Workflow can monitor is nearly endless, and the list of actions it can take in response is impressive. It can create and deliver documents (invoices, purchase orders, etc.), generate and deliver reports, provide charts illustrating monitored results, and interact with other business software through REST API triggers and actions.

For all its power and capabilities, Sage Alerts and Workflow is easy to configure. The publisher tells us that 90% of customers need no support. The product comes with dozens of preconfigured alerts, meaning that for many companies, it’s almost as simple as plug and play. You can customize the existing alerts, and build new alerts using the friendly workflow wizard.

Now that’s smart

By automating routine tasks, Sage Alerts and Workflow can save a company significant amounts of time. A typical company, for example, can expect to save 20 minutes per user per day. For a company with just six ERP users, that adds up to an astounding 66 days saved per year.

We’ve had some fun with the language surrounding business intelligence and actionable insight here, and to be fair, it’s largely semantics. While Sage Alerts and Workflow bills itself as a “business activity monitoring” tool — that monitoring requires a great deal of intelligence and provides great insight. Regardless of what one calls it, we call it pretty smart.

We invite you to join us for our upcoming webinar on Sage Alerts and Workflow where we will cover the top 10 uses of the solution and present a live demo – Register Here.