Please note that in the absence of a business impact, any issues logged with Technical Support will be assigned a severity level based solely on the information available. This may result in an inaccurate severity level being assigned to the incident. In this case, a business impact should be provided as per the guide below.

This guide is written for the benefit of Sage 200 Professional customers who get their support from a business partner but can equally be used by customers with Sage 200 Standard or Sage 200 for Education and wish to work out the impact an issue is having before contacting their support provider.

 TIP: Please also see Analysing the 'Business Impact' when troubleshooting Sage 200 issues

Steps To Establish the Business Impact

The following questions will help to determine the impact an issue is having on your business (this is not an exhaustive list; other questions will depend upon the nature of the problem). 

• How many times a day is the effected routine run?
• Can the routine in question still be run? – if the problem is a degradation in performance, it is important to quantify how much extra time the process now takes.
• Is the problem intermittent? – How often does the problem occur?
• Are there short-term alternatives to the problem? – How much more time does this take? – What if any is the difference in the results?
• Is the problem pc-specific? – How many PCs do you have/How many PCs are affected? – Are there any geographical implications? (i.e. all PCs on a site are affected which could inhibit potential workarounds).
• Is the problem user-specific? – How many users do you have/How many users are affected? – Are there any geographical implications? (i.e. all users in a particular office are affected which could inhibit potential workarounds).
• Are there any legislative implications?
• Are there any financial implications (fines, loss of sales or contracts etc.)?

What is Business Impact Analysis?

Analysing the Business Impact should identify the operational and financial effects resulting from the disruption of business functions and processes. These could include:

• Lost sales and income
• Delayed sales (Customer dissatisfaction or defection, cashflow)
• Staff utilisation resulting in delayed or additional processing (increased expense from overtime or additional staffing levels)
• Regulatory fines
• Contractual penalties or loss of contractual bonuses
• Delay to projects (Implementations, upgrades, training etc.)

Why is the Business Impact Important?

The Business Impact is used to help in the planning and scheduling of workloads to resolve problems in a timely manner.

To enable your Business Partner to prioritise effectively, it is essential that you can provide a quantifiable Business Impact when logging an incident with your Business Partner. 

As a customer it can be beneficial to you and your Business Partner to discuss the Business Impact, as in doing so you can give better insight into your site which in turn will help establish workarounds or alternative processing options.

Understanding the End-to-End Process

Quite often the intention behind the use of a function within the software is self-explanatory however with some more complicated functions it is important to establish your end-to-end process.

Pragmatically speaking we need to ask:

• What are you doing?
• Why are you doing it?
• How is the problem affecting you?

Understanding the end-to-end process is essential in not only gaining a better understanding or tangibility of how a problem is affecting you, but it is also invaluable in determining a workaround or an alternative processing route.

The importance of Workarounds or alternative processes

All but the most critical issues will have a valid workaround or an alternative processing route, there are occasions were these prove to be a better fit than the original process.

It is imperative that all potential workarounds are explored, and their impact assessed (i.e. to work out how much longer the process takes).

The Meaning of Quantification in Business Impact

Quantification is an important word in our dictionary. We really do need to know this from the lowest part of the problem to a summary of hours involved. Please provide a calculation where possible.

Example 1

An issue means that each sales order takes an extra 2 minutes to enter. There are 4 operators entering sales orders for a full 7-hour working day. Each operator inputs approximately 30 sales orders per day.

30 sales orders × 2 minutes = 60 extra minutes per person per day. Four operators × 60 minutes = 240 minutes per day, or 4 hours. In a working week, 5 days x 4 hours = 20 hours per week.

In this example, 4 staff members are affected and the problem is costing the company 20 hours per week.

Example 2

You encounter a problem which prevents access to one of your customer records and prevents raising printable invoices against that customer account. This is having an impact on your cashflow because you are prevented from sending invoices to the customer.

Three separate invoices valued at £70,320.00 in total cannot be created and emailed to the customer having an knock on effect of delaying the due date for payment by a week.

Your staff manually replicate the first invoice document in Microsoft Word which takes 2 hours work for 1 member of staff.

Each subsequent invoice raised takes 20 minutes to prepare.

In total the problem has cost you 2 hours and 40 minutes and there has been a delay in the cashflow of £70,320.00 by a week which resulted in a bank overdraft charge.