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Effective Employee Collaboration Platforms

July 27th, 2010 by Bharath Lanka

In today’s business climate, many companies have employees scattered across many states and time zones. Keeping employees informed and engaged even though they are geographically distant can bring increased employee performance and innovation to your company.

Businesses can implement effective employee collaboration platforms with the many online tools available. Some examples are internal blogs, software that encourages real-time status updates for specific departments, knowledge management documents, podcasts, RSS feeds, communication facilitation and professional networking opportunities.

Recruiting, training and retaining quality employees entails development of an effective employee “lifecycle” which spans the entirety of an employee’s time with your business.

Oftentimes, finding new employees can be accomplished through the networking ability and referral of contacts from current employees. Using these resources can cut the time and cost of finding new talent that may better match your current corporate culture.

“Onboarding” is a relatively new term that defines the process for incorporating new hires into the company quickly and effectively. A successful onboarding program can help to reduce employee turnover and increase new hire success. Onboarding includes automated information routing, new hire information, new employee development plans, effective communication of company goals and expectations, and onboarding process tracking.

Employee networking is an important benefit for the company and for the employees. Although companies spend a large part of their training budget on formal training programs, the greatest amount of information sharing is usually much more informal between employees. Companies will realize a greater return on their training dollars when they help to facilitate ways for employees to network internally and exchange ideas.

Developing employee profiles help to foster a sense of community among your employees, whether they share a physical location or are separated by wide geographical distances. This workplace community in turn fosters increased communication, a sense of shared corporate memory, and a way to form partnerships through internal social networks.

One of the most valuable assets a company possesses is its human capital: its employees. The success of a business depends on the success of its employees, and businesses are increasing realizing the value of “talent management”. Successful businesses implement platforms that tie their training programs to the goals of their organizations and design ways for their business units to meet their performance goals. Human resource departments realize that they should address the issues of their Generation Y employees as well as those employees who are nearing retirement. Employees value being offered effective career development plans; businesses benefit by identifying those employees who can be positioned for future leadership roles.

With today’s online hosted conferencing solutions and communications platforms, companies can provide all of the benefits of personalized training and seminars while simultaneously reducing travel time and expenses. Real-time training sessions and business unit collaboration meetings can be supplied to specified groups of users based on employee position, department location or communication needs. These same sessions can be recorded for access at any time with permission-based applications.

With effective and ongoing employee collaboration practices, business performance can be tracked and enhanced throughout all areas of a company in a time-efficient and cost-effective manner. Employee collaboration service providers design and implement unique approaches that are flexible and match your companies current workflow and business process and practices.

Posted in Applications, Business Processes, Hosting, Outsourcing, SaaS | No Comments »

Benefits of Customer Relationship Management

July 22nd, 2010 by Nitin Bidi

The most valuable assets of any business are its customers, without which there would be no business. Customer relationship management (CRM) business practices help companies retain their best customers and attract new customers effectively through sales, marketing and support interactions.

CRM applications are used by companies to focus on productive sales activities such as planning and forecasting, contacts, opportunities, product and service configurations, pricing, contracts, procurement, and orders.

Marketing activities are more effective when paired with intelligent business decisions. The data gathered through CRM applications enable companies to analyze, develop and implement the processes that will maximize customer interaction.

Customer retention depends on customer satisfaction and support in the areas of contract management, logistics, installation and maintenance, return and repair maintenance, call center operations, and multi-channel delivery options.

Effective CRM applications also help companies reach new customers and enhance relationships with current customers through sales, marketing and services activities provided through the Internet. ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications can be deployed directly integrated with CRM functionality to increase e-marketing, e-commerce, e-service and customer analytics.

Communication processes with current and prospective customers can be improved with effective business communications management and CRM integration and implementation. Today’s customers expect to be able to contact your company by phone, text, chat, email, and fax, and CRM applications can facilitate the routing of all types of communication to the right person in your company whether that person works locally or remotely.

Customer relationship management is an integral component of your company’s total business operations; increasing your return on investment for your sales, marketing, and service and support departments.

Posted in Applications, Hosting, Outsourcing, SaaS | No Comments »

Systems Integration Solutions

July 20th, 2010 by Bharath Lanka

Systems integration is a critical solution for the business management sector, bringing together the various components of other subsystems in a company’s information technology system to function as one unit. Each subsystem has its own interface that must be integrated and interlocked so that the capability of the entire system adds value to the combination of the parts. The task of bringing together the disparate subsystems falls to a system integration engineer who has a wide range of skills including hardware and software engineering, knowledge of interface protocols, and problem-solving . There are three main types of systems integration, each with its own function.

Vertical integration involves integrating subsystems by their function into specific entities. Vertical integration is usually a quick and relatively inexpensive method of initial integration. The overall cost of ownership for a vertical integration implementation could be higher because each scaling of the system involves a new integration.

Horizontal integration is also known by the name Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and involves dedicating a specialized subsystem that facilitates communication between other subsystems. When the ESB translates the interface connection from one subsystem, the costs of the integration decreases while the flexibility of the system increases. Horizontal integration can completely replace one subsystem with another similarly functional subsystem while transparently exporting different interfaces.

Star integration entails interconnecting subsystems. This method is also called spaghetti integration because of how the system integration appears in a diagram. Although more flexible than vertical integration, star integration is more expensive to design and implement, especially if the exported systems contain proprietary interfaces. The addition of each subsequent subsystem increases the cost, but also the flexibility of the overall system integration.

Systems integration is a complex undertaking and is comprised of several layers of expertise including initial conception, implementation, delivery, upgrades and ongoing project management. Experienced systems integrators will work with you and your company to complete your integration project based on clearly defined specifications for time period, cost projections, and performance benchmarks.

The work of system integration engineers begins before the actual development and implementation of an integration project. There are many consultations and discussions with the stakeholders of the company to ensure that any and all conflicting issues and requirements are addressed. The resulting project plan will results in a systems integration that works with all the present and subsequent components and development processes.

Development and implementation of a turnkey systems integration project involves risks, but throughout the process, the quality and quantity of the support services offered by the service provider can reduce the risks for your company. Ongoing and rigorous testing of each of the individual components of the new or upgraded system will assess how each part works with the other parts and with the system as a whole.

Systems integrators for IT work to successfully combine a company’s various systems used to input and process data. IT solutions also may include integrating inventory tracking systems, document management systems, unified messaging systems, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and data storage systems. The goal is to create an overall effective IT solution for the customer.

Posted in Outsourcing, SaaS, Systems Integration | No Comments »

Regulatory Compliance

July 7th, 2010 by Devender Aerrabolu

In the past several years, several new pieces of legislation have been enacted that impact the compliance regulation processes of the enterprise. It imperative that companies have compliance policies in place. Keeping compliant is often very expensive, but being found in non-compliance can be even more expensive. Not only are the monetary fines purposefully high, but CEOs can find themselves subject to actual prison time.

Two laws that may directly affect you and your company are the HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (1996) and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.

HIPAA. This Health Privacy Rule gives federal protection oversight to the personal health information of patients and ensures their rights with respect to that information. The Act balances “need to know” from the health providers’ viewpoint and “privacy” for the patient. The Act specifically outlines a series of safeguards for the administration and technical dissemination of information via electronic means.

Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX). The Sarbanes-Oxley Act was passed in response to the failed accounting policies that led to the collapse of the Enron Corporation and other companies in 2001. The SOX Act imposes a set of financial regulations intended to guarantee that the integrity of reported financial data has not been compromised. CEOs are ultimately held responsible for the relationship between their companies and the accounting firms who actually submit the financial reports.

Although laws such as these are intended to protect both the company and the public, it is incumbent upon the company to ensure that compliance is met and maintained annually.

Posted in Compliance Regulations, HIPPA, SOX | No Comments »

Business Process Outsourcing

July 5th, 2010 by Bharath Lanka

Outsourcing for enterprise organizations comes in many forms. Many people first think of outsourcing in terms of IT third-party service providers, but another type of outsourcing is becoming more and more common.

Business process outsourcing (BPO) entails hiring another company to handle specific types of business activities for your company. BPO can consist of payroll services, employee benefits management, call center services, customer services activities, human resources, accounting, and other “non-core” functions.

Depending on the strategic business plan and the size of the company, BPO contracts can run for multiple years and cost millions of dollars. But companies utilizing BPO also can realize savings in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars over the life of the contract through savings over implementing the outsourced activities in-house.

The typical traditional corporate structure in the last half of the twentieth century was to build companies as large as possible with all business functions kept within the company. The bigger, the better. Today, however, “lean and mean” is more of the norm, and taking advantage of service providers that specialize in certain business functions often makes better sense for many corporations; helping companies of all sizes stay more competitive in the present business environment. When deciding whether or not outsourcing is right for your company, however, means taking the time necessary to ask the right questions and putting the right internal processes in place first.

Michael Motonen, a vice-president at the Gartner Consulting Sourcing Team, and the BPO lead principal, offers several tips:

Develop an outsourcing life-cycle model and strategy first. Garter has four phases.

1. The sourcing strategy phase considers questions such as: “What are the risks for our company?” “Why are we considering outsourcing?” “What kind of relationship are we looking for with our service provider?” “Will the resulting partnership be enhancing our current processes, or will it be transformative–helping our company change by driving cost savings or increasing revenue?”

2. Selection phase: Evaluate several prospective companies and make the final selection.

3. Contract phase: Develop and finalize the contract.

4. Sourcing Management phase: Included here is the service level agreement (SLA) for milestone benchmarks and other mutual assessment tools.

Take into consideration all aspects of contract duration. BPO contracts are often long-term for a reason. Strategic changes in business functions and relationships with BPO providers take time. A balance is needed between the short-term assessment of results and long enough to meet the stated goals. Most BPO contracts last for three to five years or more. Montonen recommends shorter contracts that allow for periodic reviews and renewals rather than tying yourself into long-term contracts with ten year time frames. It is also recommended that you include in the contract policies and procedures for bringing the business activities back in-house if necessary.

Identify, assess and evaluate any potential risks.

1. Ensure that your vendor is actually able to provide the services within your contract and SLA, and

2. Retain a certain amount of control and internal oversight for the entire process and project.

Ensure that compliance procedures are stipulated in the contract. Your service provider should be able to prove that what compliance regulations apply to your company can be applied to the entire project.

Keep the lines of communication open. On-going and open communication is important for the success of the BPO relationship; not only with your vendor, but also internally with everyone concerned in your own company. Outside vendors often make employees nervous. Proper management of all types of external and internal changes is critical to the overall success of the project and overall company morale.

Posted in Business Processes, Outsourcing, SaaS | No Comments »

Application Hosting Options

June 30th, 2010 by Bharath Lanka

Application Hosting. According to several business dictionaries, the definition of application hosting is “…the rental or outsourcing of business applications from an applications service provider, rather than installing the software internally…”

Many enterprise businesses have traditionally hosted and maintained their own proprietary software applications on their own servers. Today however, many of those same businesses are looking into the benefits of outsourcing some or all of their enterprise-application software to third-party services providers. Companies are finding out that in addition to freeing up time and monetary resources, they realize additional benefits such as department-level or company-wide training, secure data backup, and application upgrade services. Known industry-wide as the SaaS (Software as a Service) model, these off-site hosted applications integrate easily with a company’s existing data and IT systems. Additionally, because customer demands and sales may fluctuate frequently during a specified accounting period, implementing SaaS applications provides the flexibility large corporations need to quickly respond to economic conditions and industry demands.

Some of the open source software applications offered by service providers include:

● CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

● PM (Project Management)

● VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) for Call Center Management

● DMS (Document Management Solutions)

● CMS (Content Management Solutions)

● E-commerce solutions and integrated shopping cart applications

● Mail Server Solutions

When deciding whether to transfer some or all of their applications to a third-party service, many enterprises have to deal with several questions first. The number one concern seems to be security, since SaaS applications are stored online “in the cloud” and therefore outside of exclusive company control. Other questions that should be asked of a service provider before deciding on deployment include:

Can my company have my choice of programming language and application platform?
Will my company have to change basic IT infrastructure such as the operating system and current deployment environments?
What are the contract requirements of the provider?
Is there an upfront investment? If so, how much?
How quick is the response time for spikes and lulls in customer demand and application loading?
What is the experience of the third-party provider with issues such as global deployment, redundancy and resiliency?
What provisions are in place to keep my data secure?

Another important consideration for enterprise concerns with IT environments is managing the various compliance and regulatory data management and reporting requirements. This is another area where hosting your applications with an experienced third-party service provider can assist companies and help to mitigate the risks involved with meeting government reporting deadlines and data recovery processes.

It is the responsibility of a company’s CIO (Chief Information Officer) to ensure a company’s regulatory compliance and infrastructure security, but this is another large area that can be successfully outsourced to the carefully screened and chosen service provider. A disaster recovery plan is also required for most businesses and must include redundant backup systems. Off-site application hosting solutions will help to ensure that your applications and your business can continue to operate even when your main IT environment fails due to man-made or natural disasters.

Posted in Applications, Hosting | No Comments »

Trends in Internet Retailing

June 21st, 2010 by Nitin Bidi

The period 2008/2009 has been characterized as “The Great Recession”, referring to the global economic crisis that began in December 2007 increased throughout 2008. Though there remain serious economic challenges in Europe (Greece, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Hungary) there are hopeful signs of improvement in the retail sector in the United States. Online merchants, in particular, seem to be well on their way to recovery here in mid-2010.

Tully & Holland is a United States investment bank that advises on mergers and acquisitions (M & A) and private placements. The firm specializes in consumer product manufacturers and distributors, multi-channel marketers, and retailers. The managing director of Tully & Holland, Stuart Rose, recently released a comprehensive report updating the Internet Retail industry overall and reporting on trends in the M&A internet retail market.

Despite the very difficult challenges of 2009, especially and including losses and restructuring for small and medium-sized businesses, the fourth quarter of 2009 showed strong signs of growth in the fastest growing sectors of the retail industry. Conversely, the M&A sector continued to struggle, although Tully & Holland predict slow but steady growth in this area over the next five years.

Tully and Holland studied the retail marketplace for the years of 2001 through 2008 before summarizing 2009 and making forecasts for 2010 and beyond. One benchmark used in the 2009 summary document was Compound Annual Growth Rate or CAGR. Although the CAGR of Internet sales grew 18.6% from $34.5B to $150B between 2001 and 2009, the actual annual growth rate declined to a near-negative rate in 2008. Other findings for total retail sales and e-commerce include

E-commerce grew as a percentage of total retail sales from 1.1% in 2001 to 3.7% in 2009.
Online retailers enjoyed a very strong Q4 in 2009 over Q408 with YOY (Year-Over-Year) sales increasing 14.6%. That increase represented 4.3% of total retail sales.
Publicly-traded internet retail companies experienced large increases in their stock prices, increasing 130% from February of 2009; contrasting with the S&P 500 Retailing Index which increased about 70% in the same time period.

Merger and acquisitions for Internet retail did not fare as well in 2009, reporting an overall decline of 37% in deals from a total of 57 deals in 2008 to only 36 deals in 2009. The decreased availability of credit brought on by the financial sector crisis, as well as a weak overall U.S. economy are thought to be the major causes for the drop in M&A activity. There were five major transactions which comprised the majority of deals: Retail Convergence, Zappos, NextRx, Circuit City, and Ticketmaster.

The message from Tully & Holland for SMB Internet retailers is that along with growth will come increased competition and reduced prices and margins. To avoid becoming a target for acquisition, SMBs should concentrate on increasing their brand recognition, strengthening their supply chains, and upgrading their financial performance.

Posted in Ecommerce, Internet Retail | No Comments »

Improving Dynamics NAV for the Middle Market

June 17th, 2010 by Bharath Lanka

Small- and medium-sized businesses (SMB) have unique requirements for their enterprise resource planning (ERP) needs. The industry-leading companies that most benefit SMBs are those that assist companies in aligning their ERP solution with their strategic goals.

Microsoft offers a complete suite of interconnected applications designed with SMBs in mind. While Microsoft Dynamics GP is clearly focused on the smaller enterprises, over the years, our work with Microsoft Dynamics NAV has shown it to be a more robust and cost effective enterprise solution for the middle market. Dynamics NAV is simple to use and very adaptable but it generally requires the assistance of an external service provider to ensure an optimally performing implementation. Maintain a relationship with an external service provider with NAV expertise is particularly important in light of the constant improvements that Microsoft makes to the platform.

Recently, Microsoft unveiled Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 R2, with significant upgrades in platform architecture, built-in integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM and online Payment Service. The release will be available in the fourth quarter of 2010, a timeframe that introduces the release more quickly than scheduled.

According to Microsoft, Dynamics NAV 2009 R2 will include the following enhancements:

Microsoft Dynamics CRM integration. In its continued effort to ease the sale of CRM to its ERP base, Microsoft is providing built-in integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Benefits of customer relationship management (CRM) integration include eliminating redundant data entries, keeping information up to date in both ERP and CRM solutions, and providing salespeople with the ability to quickly access detailed business information about contracts, pricing and product availability. Customers can choose between integration to on-premises Microsoft Dynamics CRM or Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online with the option to migrate to either option over time.
Online Payment Service for Microsoft Dynamics NAV. This enables customers to process payment transactions from the Microsoft Dynamics NAV interface across multiple channels, including e-commerce, point of sale and call center transactions. The Payment Service works with leading payment processing services and all major credit cards.
Role-Tailored interface access for remote or roaming users. Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 R2 supports direct access from the Microsoft Dynamics RoleTailored experience over the Internet. This allows for remote or roaming users to take advantage of the richness and Microsoft Office integration of the RoleTailored interface and the many integration features connected to local resources, such as the operating system and Microsoft Office. This reduces the complexity and overhead compared with using other applications such as Citrix Systems and Terminal Services, especially for hosting partners offering cloud-based Microsoft Dynamics NAV deployments.
Microsoft Application Virtualization support. The Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 R2 Role-Tailored interface can be deployed using Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) technology, which is relevant for both on-premise and hosted solutions. This provides a better experience for the end user as all integration with local applications is done on the desktop. It also cuts IT costs by centrally managing Microsoft Dynamics NAV client installations with automatic deployment to the desktop after an update.
Windows 7 user experience improvements. Through Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 R2, jumplists can be used to open recently accessed customers and vendors for increased business productivity and efficiency, and the icon overlay functionality provides information on system events and status streamlined with the Windows 7 user experience.

We believe that these important advancements in the NAV solution will broaden the platform’s market presence by making it more attractive to middle market enterprises in vertical industries that might not have considered it before.

Posted in Microsoft Dynamics NAV, SMB | No Comments »

Outsourcing and the Middle Market

June 14th, 2010 by Bill Martin

Historically, the outsourcing of functions such as help desks, human resources and communications has been concentrated in large enterprises and multi-national companies. Beyond the organizational turmoil associated with outsourcing entire functional areas and the perception of losing internal control over internal business processes, one of the main reasons why small and mid-sized businesses previously did not take advantage of outsourcing is because business outsourcing vendors generally ignored the smaller business marketplace.

In recent years, small and mid-market businesses have begun to embrace outsourcing as a way to increase operational efficiencies, reduce costs, and promote enterprise transformation. As a result, more vendors are now focusing on the small and mid-size business market; helping them to compete with larger companies.

According to Frank J. Casale, founder and CEO of The Outsourcing Institute, for many of these mid-sized organizations, the outsourcing of business processes is proving to be an effective way to cut operating costs and increase efficiencies. He also notes that, in a lot of industries, middle market companies are forced to compete with much larger enterprises. By outsourcing some of their more costly business processes, smaller companies are able to level the playing field. In that regard, outsourcing serves as an equalizer.

Outsourcing of the human resources function is at the top of the list of outsourcing processes, accounting for 73% of back-office services that are outsourced, according to a Gartner, Inc. study. That same study found that business outsourcing by SMBs (small and mid-sized businesses) was valued at over $15 billion in the United States.

With the lingering fear of a loss of control over internal operations, many smaller businesses dip a toe in the water by outsourcing only a very small portion of their functions to service providers; retaining the perceived strategic areas such as finance and accounting in-house. Activities that are increasingly outsourced include facilities management, logistics management, and HR. Small and mid-sized businesses are discovering that outsourcing a portion of their business operations frees up both time and capital resources. Senior executives and managers can then concentrate on more strategic activities that impact the revenue-producing areas of the company. For businesses that have yet to implement an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, outsourcing, in the form of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provides them the opportunity to access the newest and best technology.

SMBs face some unique challenges when attempting to implement outsourcing strategies. Due to the relative immaturity of broad-based outsourcing services to this demographic, many SMBs simply do not have the teams in place to acquire and manage service providers who may themselves be just beginning to reach out to SMBs. It is important that middle market companies find outsourcing partners that will work with them during the initial acquisition phase as well as providing continuing support as the SMB business requirements change over time.

Often, SMBs consider outsourcing as a series of tasks or separate functions instead of components of an overall sourcing strategy for the company. Service providers must work closely with small and medium-sized businesses to ensure that key business requirements are incorporated, business metrics are utilized and tracked, and specific and measurable short- and long-term outsourcing goals are in place. When researching an outsourcing partner, SMBs should look for companies which possess the knowledge, tools, expertise and experienced staff to help manage outsourced functions.

Posted in Outsourcing, SMB | No Comments »

Quality Assurance Realities for the New Economy

June 11th, 2010 by Devender Aerrabolu

As U.S. businesses slowly but surely enter into the welcome recovery period from the most recent recession, those companies poised to take advantage of the new economy realize that quality assurance programs must be an important part of their strategic planning for the future. In the past few years, many businesses cut costs to the proverbial bone while trying to stay in business. Now it is time to re-focus on the customer in order to grow the business.

Although consumer spending is posting monthly gains in 2010, customers are still very cost-conscious. Even as the customers start to purchase goods and services again, it is estimated by experts such as Alix Partners that Americans will spend only up to about 86% of pre-recession levels. It is incumbent upon businesses to adjust to the new economic realities and realize tangible ROI (return on investment) in every area of the company.

Because they have so many more options, customers will gravitate to, and stay with companies who they perceive will give them the best value for their money.

Because customer acquisition is estimated at ten times the cost of customer retention, businesses need to invest in the latter. That is where effective and cost-efficient quality assurance (QA) programs come in.

Not only do customers have more physical choices in products and services, they also have many more avenues to research purchases and “spread the word” about their experiences with a particular company. With the explosion of the Internet and social media, consumers can quickly and easily find the product or service that matches their needs, and also can “leave feedback” instantly about their experience.

The goal of quality assurance is to help understand what drives customer satisfaction and how each key indicator can deliver the customer experience that will help the company improve its positive customer satisfaction scores. Companies today want and need to know what to do and what not to do to retain their customers, build their company brand, and increase company loyalty. It’s been said that “perception is everything”, and a well-designed and effectively managed quality assurance program will help your business to manage the perceptions of your customers so they return to you and refer or recommend your products and services to others.

When you and your company partners with a leading business solutions team of experts (please excuse my gratuitous plug for American Unit), you are on the right track to carefully manage your costs while at the same time growing your business according to the “new rules” of this post-recession economy.

Posted in Quality Assurance | No Comments »