CylTech II

CylTech II is our flagship product, which has been designed to fit the specific needs of the Welding Supply Distributor. CylTech II provides you with a broad range of capabilities that will help you address the unique requirements of the industrial gas distributor. These capabilities include:

Accounts Receivable
Order Entry/Invoicing/Quotations
Cylinder Control
Inventory Control
Accounts Payable
Purchasing
General Ledger

From the special requirements associated with tracking cylinders, to the time and effort it takes to generate cylinder rental invoices to all the special pricing requirements dictated by your customers and the marketplace, CylTech II helps you operate more efficiently and effectively. In the next few paragraphs, we will explain in more detail some of the capabilities offered by CylTech II.

Accounts Receivable

CylTech II begins by handling all the special needs you have with your customers, whether it is related to taxing or pricing. You simply identify which taxes the customer pays, even to the point of identifying specific inventory items they don't pay tax on, and forget about it. When you bill them, all taxes are handled without another thought.

Pricing is a problem for many Welding Supply Distributors because you often have to quote odd prices to get the business. This is an area where CylTech II really shines. With CylTech II, you have the capability to quote any price you want to a customer, enter it into the system and then forget about it. From that point on, your customer is always charged the correct price. No more credit memos or phone calls from customers complaining about being charged the wrong price. Just to give you an idea of how flexible the pricing system is, here are some examples of how you can set up prices for a customer:

You can quote a price as a percentage discount from the retail price
You can quote a price as a dollar discount from the retail price
You can quote a price as a percentage above your cost
You can quote a price as a dollar amount above your cost
You can set up the pricing so that your customer automatically gets a discount on any item in a certain class of inventory, for example you could quote a 10% discount on all welding rods
You can set up the pricing so that your customer automatically gets a discount on any item you buy from a particular vendor
Finally, you can simply enter any price you want to give to your customer

CylTech II's accounts receivable module also gives you all the capabilities you need to effectively manage your collections. Selling is important and profits are important, but you still have to manage your customers and collections and this is where CylTech II really shines for you.

The first part of collections is making sure your customers pay you on time. CylTech II shows you exactly who owes you money and how long they have owed you. Special options allow you to see who owes you the most for the longest period of time. So if you only have a limited amount of time to make collection calls today, why not focus on those people that owe you the most money so you make the most of your time?

When you are talking to the customer about past due invoices, they want to know if a payment has been posted or if they can get a copy of an invoice. Easily accessible inquiries show you all the checks you have received from a customer and how you posted them to their account. If the customer wants a copy of an invoice, you simply reprint the original invoice without having to leave your PC or going to a filing cabinet. You save time with each customer, can make more collection calls in the same amount of time, and speed up your cash flow by getting copies of invoices to the customers in minutes instead of days.

One more tool you can use to help with collections is the use of Collection Letters. You compose the letter and then tell CylTech II to send it to everyone that matches the criteria you have selected. For example, you might compose one letter to send to every customer with invoices more than 45 days old. But you would want a little stronger letter sent to those customers who have invoices more than 120 days old. Collection letters help you improve cash flow and eliminate a lot of phone calls.

Order Entry/Invoicing/Quotations

When it comes to processing orders, you won't find a software package more flexible than CylTech II. You can, of course, use the Order Entry programs to take orders. But you can also do much more. The primary functions of the Order Entry system allow you to:

Take orders over the phone and enter them directly into the system for later processing.
Enter sales into the invoicing system for products that have already been sold and delivered.
Generate quotations for customers or prospects that want to know how much an item or group of items cost.
Handle the sale of a gas and the shipment of the cylinder in one transaction.

If you take orders over the phone and you want a computer generated delivery document, you would enter the order into CylTech II when the order is taken. The generated delivery document meets all of the legal requirements associated with the shipment of gases and hazardous products. Once the products are delivered you bring the original order back up on your PC, note any changes and generate the final invoice.

If you prefer to hand write your tickets at the counter or in the field, the invoicing feature allows you to enter the sale after the product has been delivered. These features are not exclusive of each other, so you could and might do some of both.

Finally, if you have customers and prospects who call in and want you to send them a quotation on a group of items, you will really appreciate the quotation option. With this option, you tell CylTech II you are entering a quotation as opposed to an order. Other than that, the items are entered as if you were selling them to the customer, except that all of the information regarding the quotation is stored outside of the regular invoicing system so it will not be confused with items that have been sold.

When your customer calls you back with the approval to go ahead, you simple type in the quotation number and the order is automatically generated without any additional data entry. You save the headache of entering the same information two times and your customer receives a professional looking, computer generated quotation with correct pricing.

The Order Entry program has too many capabilities to list on one or two pages, but a few of the major ones are listed below:

Automatic handling of special pricing for each customer as discussed above.
Automatic handling of all taxing functions including special taxing.
Total integration with cylinder tracking. When you ship a cylinder to a customer in the Order Entry program, the cylinder records for the customer are automatically updated.
Gas sales are handled automatically. When you ship an Oxygen cylinder, the contents are automatically billed without having to enter a separate transaction.
Serial numbered items such as welding machines can be tracked.
Groups of items such as Kits and Assemblies can be handled.
Automatic handling of Backorders.
Customers can have blanket purchase orders for gases and hard goods. If the customer has given you a limit on a purchase order number, CylTech II will keep track of how much has been applied to the purchase order and let you know when the customer has exceeded the amount of purchases allowed for a given blanket purchase order.
Unlimited comment lines for clear explanations of what has been sold.
Delayed Billing allows you to send out all invoices one time at the end of the month with complete detail.
Option to apply Delivery Charges.
Option to apply Hazardous Materials Surcharges.
Ability to track sales by the salesman assigned to the account or the salesman who took the order or both.
Ability to find inventory based on stock number, description, any part of the description, vendor part number or the customer's part number.
One keystroke access to customer purchasing history so you can answer questions such as "How much did I pay for that helmet last time?"
All invoices are stored electronically so you can reprint or review an invoice months or years after it has been processed.

CylTech II does much more than just process the order. When the order is updated, every item sold on the order is updated to the history file giving you the capability to analyze your sales in a variety of different ways, using CylTech II's latest addition, The Investigator.

The Investigator

The Investigator is one of the newest, most powerful and most beneficial enhancements to CylTech II in the past several years. The Investigator allows you to quickly retrieve information from your database without having to know computer programming or be able to use a report generator. Many distributors find themselves data rich and information poor. This means that they have a tremendous amount of data in their system that would help them better run their business but they have little useful information since the data is too hard to get to or takes too long to retrieve. Sometimes they can't get the answers to the questions they have without getting special programs written or having to learn report generators.

But the Investigator changes all of that. By simply selecting the options you want from a list, you can answer an almost unlimited number of questions without leaving your desk, without having to have special programs written, without help from someone else, and without having to print anything out.

With the Investigator, you have the ability to analyze sales by: customer, salesman, vendor, type of sale (hard goods versus gases), class or category of sale ( oxygen, acetylene, etc), store, inventory location and even stock number.

For example, here are just a few of the types of questions you could ask and have answered in a matter of seconds in most cases:

How profitable is customer ABC?
How much oxygen did customer ABC buy from me last month? Last year?
How much profit am I making on the items I buy from Vendor A?
How much profit did I make last year and the year before on Vendor A?
What is my overall margin on hard goods? Gases?
Have my gas sales increased or decreased over the last three years?
What were my gas sales in June?
What were my gas sales in June of last year? The year before last?
I have excess stock on one item. Who has been buying this item so I can go try and sell them the excess?
How many items did I sell that I made less than 5 % gross profit on?
How profitable is Salesman A?

The list of questions could go on almost indefinitely because of the options. The questions are almost limited only by your imagination. The Investigator – making you information rich!

Cylinder Control

The Cylinder Control System is designed to help you keep track of one of your most valuable assets in a simple, easy manner. To begin with CylTech II gives you the capability to describe a cylinder in the manner you are accustomed to. You might refer to cylinders by a number. Or a large oxygen might be referred to as an LOX or an OX251.

As you read earlier, the Order Entry system will automatically bill the customer for the contents of the cylinder when you ship it to them. The gases that are sold in the cylinder can be priced in the following ways:

Per cubic foot
Per hundred cubic feet
Per thousand cubic feet
Per ten thousand cubic feet
Per pound
Per liter
or, per cylinder

Once you identify during the set up process how you want your customer to pay for the gas in the cylinder, the pricing will be automatically calculated correctly each time you ship the cylinder to the customer. As another by product of shipping the cylinder, the cylinders shipped and returned on each invoice are sent to the Cylinder Rental programs for end of month rental calculations. And charging for the actual use of the cylinder is as easy and flexible as the pricing for the gases.

Unlimited rental and demurrage rates are available to fit almost any situation. You have the option to charge month end cylinder rent or daily rent. Many distributors begin moving to daily rent when they hear that daily rent generates more dollars for the same number of cylinders. You can also offer your customers pre-paid rentals or leases for any time period longer than one month. So you could offer your customer quarterly or semi-annual rental billing. CylTech II will remember when to re-bill the customer at the end of the lease or pre-paid rental so you won't lose any rental income by forgetting to bill a customer.

The Cylinder Control programs do more than just track your cylinders to and from your customers. You can also track your cylinders to and from vendors such as when you send them to be filled or to be refurbished.

Your cylinders are an important asset and an important revenue generator. CylTech II helps you get the most out of this important resource.

Inventory Control

The CylTech II Inventory Management programs provide you with the necessary tools to better manage and control your inventory while maximizing profits. Multiple costs and prices, historical sales, date of last sale, average usage and gross profit contribution are just a few of the types of information maintained to assist you in this function.

Beyond just tracking how many you have on hand, the Inventory Management programs help you easily identify items that don't sell very well. These items are often hard to identify but with CylTech II it is a simple task. Items that are not selling as well as they used to or are not selling at all are pointed out to you on a regular basis. Inventory averages show that 20% to 30% of your inventory does not contribute to your sales volume because they are no longer selling. Getting rid of these "dead" items can free up much needed capital and shelf space.

Sometimes you buy too much of an item and you are overstocked, even though the item is selling fairly well. This type of situation can also tie up capital. CylTech II calculates on a regular basis how many items you should be stocking and automatically adjusts the order points if sales pick up or slow down. You don't have to worry about maintaining re-order points and order quantities, CylTech II does it for you. You save time by eliminating the need to calculate these items and you save money because you stock the right amount of inventory to meet your sales requirements.

When you are ready to place an order with your vendor, ask CylTech II or a list of the items that need to be ordered. The rest is easy.

The Executive Inquiry

Another special tool offered by CylTech II for the owners of the company is the Executive Inquiry. You always want to know the health of the company, but printing out reports and searching through inquiries takes time that may not always be available to a busy Executive. The Executive Inquiry is designed for the busy executive or owner who wants a quick, simple way to determine the overall health of his company.

In the Sales and Profitability section, you can see sales for the month and year to date along with your gross margin percentages. In this example you can see that the current month is an improvement over the year to date figures. The service level is at 90% which tells you that out of 100 orders, 90 of them were shipped complete with no backorders.

The Inventory section shows you how much you have in inventory along with how effectively you are using what you have. Significant numbers such as Excess Stock, Slow Moving Stock and Dead Stock can be identified at a glance. The Under Utilization Cost shows you the annual cost of keeping too much inventory and not managing slow moving inventory.

The Purchasing section shows you how many purchase orders you have issued to vendors. The items out of stock gives you a measurement of how well purchasing is keeping you stocked in inventory for your customers. The always ever present counter balance is not having too much stock (Excess) which is shown above.

Accounts Receivable shows you how much your customers owe you and how good a job you are doing collecting what is owed you.

Accounts Payable shows you how much you owe your vendors and the dollar amount of potential discounts that have been lost.

Cash Flow is a snapshot of your cash flow. You see orders that have been taken but not yet billed and total accounts receivable. This is compared to what you owe your vendors and expressed as the ratio at the bottom.

Cylinders The section of cylinders shows you how many cylinders you have in customers hands and the value of those cylinders.

Everything you need to know about the health of your business on one screen. Owners can even view the Executive Inquiry when they are away from the office. All they need is Internet access to your host computer system.

DataWeld Online

Once you install CylTech II you will want to make sure you get the maximum benefit out of every feature and the way you accomplish this goal is through DataWeld Online. DataWeld Online is the newest effort by DataWeld to provide the most value for your software support dollar. DataWeld Online is an Internet based software support tool that is accessible directly from your menu system.

When you call into the software support department for assistance, you and your support person may decide that the support person needs to see what is on your screen in order to help you. To do this all you need to do is click on the DataWeld Online icon from your menu and you will be taken directly to our software support web site. From there the support person can see what your problem is. If it is a training issue, you can watch the support person as they run the same program on our machine here at DataWeld. If a new program needs to be loaded onto your machine, the support person simply uses Windows and "drags" the program from our machine to yours. In seconds the new program is on your machine. Complete software installations and upgrades can be performed with DataWeld Online.

An even more impressive feature is the pre-recorded training sessions you will find on DataWeld Online. Do you have a new person who has never worked the counter before and you want them trained? With DataWeld Online it is as simple as directing them to the web site and having them watch a pre-recorded training session on entering an order at the sales counter. With the pre-recorded training sessions there is no cost and you can access the training sessions 24 hours a day. So your employees can even watch the training programs from their home.

Fill out our CylTech II Welding Supply Software Survey to help us assist you.

For more information On CylTech II, contact us.