Windows
The most obvious advantage is that Maranello is a Windows product, allowing much more information about your business to be put on the screen and under your control.
Windows allows the selection of options by the click of the mouse and the ease to be able move between different tasks without having to go up and down fixed multiple choice menus. In fact you don’t even have to abandon one task to perform another. For example, if goods arrive and need scanning while you are updating your customer details then simply open another window, receive your goods and then go right back to where you were with the customer details.
Windows also provides the ability to report and display your information in new ways. The new integrated reporting tool takes full advantage of fonts and graphics printing to provide professional reports. An integrated Graphics tool allows you to produce charts and graphs to show trends and analysis across your business.
Like Retail Manager Plus, Maranello is not a static product. It is designed to allow for future extension and enhancements as new general or niche requirements arise.
Customer Relationship Manager
As retailers, customer relationships are vital to expanding your business. A simple mailing list is not enough. Maranello allows you to track all your contacts with customers so you can build on the relationship and target any promotions and events where they can be most effective.
Repairs Module
The Enterprise edition of Maranello comes complete with a Repairs Module. This comprehensive tool gives the retailer the opportunity to record detailed information about any type of repair, e.g. computers, cars, garden equipment. Labour time spent and parts used are built up to create a final bill.
Task Manager
Post-it notes on the till isn't a reliable method to communicate with your staff; particularly those working when you’re not. Maranello provides the ability to create tasks or jobs addressed to individual members of staff. They can then complete progress reports on these tasks to give you tracking of what’s been done and what hasn’t.
User Definable Fields
As with Retail Manager Plus, Maranello allows you to add fields to allow for those minor but important extensions to the underlying database, without the expense and delay of commissioning a special edition of Maranello from BitS. For example, an electronics retailer may wish to add a field to their products file showing if products are UK or US voltages. In addition, customer information can now be defined by the retailer, enabling the retailer to determine exactly what information to capture against the customer. This can be then used for marketing reports and sales analysis.
Integrated Report Designer
The all-new report designer can be used as simple point-and-click tool to select items to report on. It also has the power to perform complex calculations, selections, sorting and grouping of the data to criteria defined by you.
The layout of reports is made by dragging and dropping the items on screen with a full on screen preview of the finished report.
All reports can be saved for future use. Maranello is shipped with a set of standard reports. Additional reports can be designed and supplied by BitS at an additional cost.
Integrated Charts & Graphs
For
quick reviews of trends and presentations to colleagues, a simple picture is often more informative than pages of figures. Maranello includes a Chart and Graph tool similar to the report designer.
Full Operator Security and Auditing
Maranello provides you with the option of restricting access to selected operations to individuals or groups of individuals. It provides audit trails of all significant modifications to your data. This level of control can be further enhanced by the database engine itself.
SQL Server
As well as producing Maranello using the Windows interface, we have upgraded the choice of database to hold your data. In the future, Maranello can be linked to a variety of database engines but initially we are using Microsoft SQL Server.
As a dedicated database engine, SQL Server is much faster at returning data than Retail Manager Plus, particularly for complex queries covering many areas of the whole database.
SQL Server optionally provides levels of security and privacy for your data preventing direct access or copying of your data by unauthorised persons or software.
Data Mining
SQL Server provides the ability to ask detailed ad-hoc queries about your data, such as “How many Videos and Popcorn do we sell on a Friday night before 9pm?”. This process, known as data mining, can identify business opportunities which are not always obvious. Maranello provides the tools to formulate these questions by a leading you through a set of pages known as Wizards.
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