AXIS & Florida International University Team Up to offer Professional Online Certificate Program in CRM

We are very excited and proud to announce the roll out of our professional online certificate program. This one of a kind program was designed with the collaboration of the College of Business Administration at Florida International University (FIU) and Dr. Nancy Rauseo. This program combines real world expertise from CRM professionals and academic excellence from an accredited (AACSB) public research university.

“We service many clients in areas outside of our geographical locations, including the Caribbean that historically could not participate in our training programs. This program was designed with them in mind” stated Manny Buigas, CEO.

“You will have ongoing online interactions with well-known CRM and marketing faculty and experts from Florida International University (FIU). They will serve as your facilitators and CRM consultants. You will also have the opportunity to interact online with other program participants through online message boards and real-time chat rooms, enabling you to share best practices and challenges. For the duration of the program, we will create a REAL learning community!” added Dr. Nancy Rauseo.

Why On-line training

Convenience. Flexibility. Results. This is the first CRM online program tailored for the working professional. Why spend money on travel and accommodations when you can learn on your own time? Put the resources of an accredited research university, with a strong global presence, at your fingertips. Technology-enabled collaborative learning gives you a flexible way to gain the knowledge you need to implement CRM and communicate with fellow professionals and CRM experts the way you like to learn: actively.

Objective of Program

The objective of this professional online certificate program is to enable our clients, prospects and consultants to successfully design an effective CRM strategy and implementation plan for any organization.

According to several research studies, CRM implementation projects fail at a rate of about 50 to 60%. The good news is that the adoption of CRM best practices has resulted in outstanding ROI rates of 100% to 500%, with payback periods of a year. There is a need for learning how to implement CRM.

Next Step

We have prepared a DEMO of our program. Please visit us at CRM On-Line Demo to access it, please click on the View the Demo button on the right-hand side of this page. Classes are limited to 25 participants, so be sure to sign up right away for the Fall 2006 session starting September 4th. The registration deadline is August 18th.

If you have any questions about the program, please contact us at info@axisintegratedsolutions.com.

Is Your Company Ready?

Business disruptions happen frequently: planned outages, system maintenance upgrades, or hardware and systems failures. Periodically, larger-scale disruptions, such as power outages, fires, hurricanes or other major catastrophes, can occur.

Hurricane Season started June 1 and forecasters predict another active season. IS YOUR COMPANY READY?

Facts About Data Loss

Most businesses today have considered the risk of data loss, but few have adequately protected their data.

• 34% of companies fail to test their tape backups, and of those that do, 77% have found tape backup failures. (A)
• 93% of companies that lost their data for 10 days or more due to disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster. (B)
• 50% of businesses without their data for the same time period filed for bankruptcy immediately. (B)

*Statistics: (A) The Gartner Group (B) National Archives & Records Administration

Your business isn't safe if your data is unprotected

CoreVault Secure™ is a fully automated backup and recovery service designed specifically for small and medium-sized businesses. CoreVault Secure™ online service completely eliminates the hassle and unreliability of tape backups. With our online service you can backup your critical data to our secure, offsite location and secondary vault over 120 miles away and never have to worry about the security of your data again.

Please click this link CoreVault to view an online demo of this backup solution. This cost effective solution is priced for small and medium businesses like yours. Sleep better at night knowing you have a strong contingency plan that will protect your data and enable your business to continue operations.

For more information, please contact us at info@axisintegratedsolutions.com.

Customer Experience Management and its Role in CRM
By Dr. Nancy Rauseo

Most of you probably know that the philosophy behind CRM is to create long-term, loyal customers. The longer a company can retain its customers, the more loyal those customers can become towards the company. Customer retention can be achieved through pricing, product quality and service quality strategies, the latter being the one that impacts customer loyalty the most. According to several studies, about 70% of customers will defect due to poor service quality. Another 20% defect because of pricing or product quality issues.

Customer experience management (CEM) has been tagged by Colin Shaw and John Ivens as the next business tsunami. Why? Because service quality, as it has been traditionally known, will no longer be enough to create customer loyalty. In their book Building Great Customer Experiences, Shaw and Ivens explain that the customer experience is the next competitive battleground. It is easy to compete today on pricing and product quality. Sustainable competitive advantage will come from a company’s ability to create repeated unforgettable experiences for its customers.

So what’s the connection between CEM and CRM? There are many definitions of CRM out there, but all agree that CRM is a philosophy and a business strategy designed to create valuable human interactions and supported by customer intelligence, processes, people and technology. CEM is not a separate philosophy ~ it is an essential component of any successful CRM strategy. A customer experience is made up of interactions between a company and a customer.

Some of the key elements of an unforgettable customer experience are customer-focused processes, customer knowledge, and customer-caring people. In this article, our focus will be on the design and implementation of customer-focused processes as a part of your CRM plan. The business community has realized that successful CRM requires modifications to a company’s sales, marketing, and service processes. Let’s look at how this is normally being done today and how this can be done using CEM principles.

CRM Process Design Today

Process mapping is a technique that most of you have probably heard of and/or use in your quest towards CRM solution implementation. Business process maps are diagrams that describe the series of steps required to achieve a particular outcome. If applied correctly, the process maps are then used to guide the design and development of business and technical requirements when installing CRM software solutions.

In my experience, most companies take a myopic and internal approach towards creating their CRM processes. The focus is primarily on efficiency and productivity improvements. Customers usually find ways of getting around these processes in an effort to get what they need, and never even tell the company. With the pressure to implement the technology solution, company representatives may say “the process has been working fine for years. Why change it ~ let’s just make the necessary changes so it integrates with the CRM software solution.” Working fine but according to whom?

A process can be viewed as follows:

The most important INPUT into the design of a process is the customer. Most processes have probably been around for quite sometime and have never been ‘customerized’ or redesigned from an external perspective. When was the last time you asked the customer to get involved in your process redesign?

Ask yourself these questions:

• How do my customers feel when they interact with us?
• What value do we create for them at every touch point?
• How does every output of each process tie back to our customers’ expectations?
• What was it like for customers to do business with us? How can this be changed to increase the value to them?

CRM Process Design Using CEM Principles

A customer experience map is one that represents the stages and steps a customer goes through when interacting with a company throughout the customer lifecycle. These stages can have many interaction or customer touch points ~ a phone conversation, a visit to the website, a personal encounter, the receipt of a mail piece, etc. For example, the bullets below represent encounter or touch points for an airplane flight.

• Order tickets via phone
• Receive tickets in the mail
• Park at the airport
• Check in/check bags at ticket counter
• Board the plane
• Receive food/drink in flight
• Deplane
• Receive bags from carousel
• Leave airport area.

Customer experience blueprinting involves expanding each of the touch points and describing what the customer experience was like. These blueprints help us analyze current experiences and design future ones that link back to an overall CRM strategy by addressing these questions:

• What is the experience like now for customers?
• What do customers want the experience to be like?
• How can customer experiences be improved?
• What specific changes need to be made?

Cognitive mapping techniques can also be used to help align the CRM business strategy to the process strategy. Cognitive maps enable people to make the invisible visible. An organizational chart, which creates a picture of the alignment of power and authority, is one form of a cognitive map. Another form is a customer interaction map, or high-level map that depicts the interactions between the stages of the customer lifecycle and the core business processes of the company. It shows the exchanges or inputs/outputs between the customer and the company. It also distinguishes internal processes from those that touch the customer.

I was first introduced to customer interaction maps by a colleague, Dr. Kevin McCormack. We worked with a construction company a few years ago and involved top level executives to built the maps from the top down or outside-in. That gave the company a holistic view of its business and made it possible for everyone to visualize all the interrelationships between customers and functions/departments. Rather than having the company and its departments look at ways to reduce expenses or otherwise improve the bottom line from an internal perspective, we had them use the maps to create a view of how customers interact with them. By understanding these interactions, companies can make their business processes match customer expectations more effectively.

Since companies have to define customer needs and evaluate how those needs are being met—or not—these customer experience techniques place emphasis on obtaining external input from customers as well as input from the departments, about interactions. By involving the customers more, companies can improve their processes and secure the loyalty of their customer base.

Effective CRM initiatives complete the design of experienced-based processes or workflows first, based on customer input ~ needs and expectations. These processes must improve human interactions and create value at all customer touch points. By using cognitive process mapping, customer experience blueprinting, touch point mapping and other techniques, companies can ensure that processes provide unmatched features and create a WOW experience for the customer at every interaction.

Dr. Nancy Rauseo is on the faculty of Florida International University’s College of Business Administration where she teaches marketing. Nancy holds a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University and an M.B.A and Ph.D. from Nova Southeastern University. Prior to her teaching career, she held various senior management positions for over 20 years in the areas of sales, marketing and technology implementation. Dr. Rauseo is also Instructor for FIU’s Professional Certification Program in CRM. For more information, visit: http://business.fiu.edu/epe/crm.cfm

Empowering your HR Department by focusing on high value activities

HR departments are often overwhelmed with low value activities such as filing performance reviews, filing supervisor notes, processing benefit enrollments, answering employee inquiries about vacation and accrued benefits. While necessary, these activities do not create the same value if these efforts were more focused on recruitment of candidates or improving the workplace for existing employees. One way to gain efficiencies in the Human Resource Department is to delegate the responsibility of maintaining routine employee information to employees themselves and their supervisors.

By using the existing features in Accpac HR Series, security roles can be set up so that supervisors can maintain information on their own direct reports without seeing any other information in the HR Series Software. They can enter performance reviews on their direct reports, document conversations, produce correspondence and maintain any industry specific information such as required training themselves. This allows the supervisor to use the existing software to assist in managing their employees and eliminating the redundancies in the HR department.

By implementing the Accpac HR Self-Service module, employees can keep their routine information updated such as current address, dependents, emergency contacts and can see what benefits they are enrolled in, what benefits are available and how much vacation time they have earned and used. Employees can even self enroll in benefits they are eligible for and request time off through HR Self-Service. Imagine the time savings and the reduction of telephone calls the HR Department will have to handle on routine information. The best part of the Accpac HR Self-Service functionality is that all the information collected can be either automatically updated or reviewed by the HR Department before any updating takes place.

Another great feature of HR Self-Service is that any document or web page can be linked to the Self-Service web page. That means employee handbooks, health insurance plan documents, internal job openings, current company sponsored events, and other pertinent information can be accessed through HR Self-Service. Between the Correspondence Wizard and Accpac HR Self-Service, you can communicate information very easily to employees and keep a history of it, with out a huge employee file.

All companies benefit from an efficient, effective HR Department. Let Accpac HR Series Software assist you in that goal. Contact us at info@axisintegratedsolutions.com.

Unattended Data Integrity Checker

Checking the integrity of your Sage Accpac ERP data on a regular basis has never been easier! Unattended Data Integrity Checker enables you to schedule when your Sage Accpac ERP data is to be checked and maximizes system resource usage by allowing you to automatically perform the checking overnight, while the system is not being used.

Unattended Data Integrity Checker enables you to:

• Schedule Sage Accpac ERP to check your data integrity unattended
• Automatically dump your data to a user defined subdirectory for backup purposes
• Specify which companies and which modules need to be checked
• Make use of Windows Scheduler to set up a recurring job so that you don't forget
• Installs as a standard Sage Accpac ERP module

Your accounting data is of critical importance and needs to be checked on a regular basis. Unattended Data Integrity Checker will give you peace of mind knowing that your data is being checked on a regular, recurring basis.

Document Management - Improve your shipping and delivery document processes

Distribution centers must include numerous shipping documents before products can be released. The speed and accuracy of obtaining the right documentation has a direct impact on a company’s bottom line. Such documents may include information that may not be currently maintained in your current systems (such as routes, stop and customer information). They may be generated from multiple systems including the billing system, accounting system, warehouse management system, customer relationship systems, labeling, and freight systems. Multiple documents are released by users at staggered times of the day.

Ninety percent (90%) of these documents require manual handling and preparation of customer delivery documents.

The delivery documents that are part of the current processes have a measurable impact on business. Preprinted documents are very costly. Document management, if not properly streamlined with your warehousing solution, can increase staffing requirements.

Employee moral will decrease with high volume levels of shipments or as shipment expedition increases. Customer service is impaired if documents are not properly organized. Manual preparation and processing of documents allows the opportunity for mistakes by overwhelmed staff members during busy or peak periods.

Streamlining customer delivery documents can reduce costs in two areas: 1) labor costs and 2) paper costs.

Labor costs can be reduced by:

• elimination of direct “manual” labor required to produce delivery documents;
• elimination of operator intervention of releasing the shipping documents;
• reduction of operator time to manage forms-based printers; and
• eliminating manual collation of these documents.

Paper costs can be reduced up to 75% by:

• converting to plain paper from pre-printed forms;
• using plain versus preprinted forms; and
• reducing supplies, maintenance and storage costs with fewer documents.

Streamlining of documents has other “intangible” benefits that have a direct impact on customer service.

These benefits include:

• elimination of human error in assembling customer delivery documents;
• automation of processes and reduction of turnaround time for delivery drivers;
• enhanced controls for manifests, labels, packing lists, invoices, credit notes and return material authorizations; and
• automation of supporting forms such as UPS or FedEx shipping labels.

These benefits also reduce handling costs and improve shipping accuracy. Most importantly, streamlining documentation increases on time performance and increases customer satisfaction.

If your business will benefit from streamlined document generation process for warehousing or distribution, please contact us to discuss your needs. As your trusted business advisors, we have several different options that can be implemented immediately to provide fast return on investment. Additionally, we can review your current processes and make recommendations to operational procedural changes that can increase efficiencies of your company. Please contact us at info@axisintegratedsoltions.com.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q – Can I create a new Customer while entering an order or quote in the Order Entry module?

A – Yes. While in the O/E Order Entry window, click the New symbol next to the Customer No. field and the Accounts Receivable Customer form will open. You may then enter a new customer and upon completion the Order Entry Customer No. field is automatically populated for you to continue entering the order.

In addition to the ability to add new customers, you can use the same button to modify existing customer records as well. For example, you can change the terms or the customer’s address from the Order Entry window.

Q – What happens to Order Entry Quotes after the expiration date?

A – Once the session date is the same as the quote’s expiration date the quotation entry is deleted from the database completely. There is no way to retrieve the quotation once is has been removed from Accpac; your only option is to re-enter it into the Order Entry module.

If you wish to retain quotations for a longer period of time, the setting that defaults the expiration date is the Default Quote Expiration Days field located in the Order Entry Setup Options form shown below. You may set this option to a maximum of 999 days. If you wish to retain quotations longer than 999 days, you can manually override the default expiration date for each quotation.

Q – Is it possible to include an extended description on Accounts Receivable Summary Invoices?

A – One way to include extended descriptions on Accounts Receivable Summary Invoices is to setup distribution codes. You can then pull the distribution code description onto the Accounts Receivable Invoice by modifying the Invoice Crystal Report. You can either setup numerous distribution codes with standardized descriptions or you can manually change the description on each detail line in the Accounts Receivable Invoice Entry window.

Q - Can I archive User Activity Records?

A - Yes, you can in CRM v5.8. To avoid storing a large number of user activity records, you can archive records of a specific age. Archived files are removed from the All User Activity page and filed to a CSV document, which is stored with the system log files. To archive user activity files:

1. Select Administration | Users | User Activity. Click on the Archive To File button.
2. Select the age at which records are to be archived from the Records Older Than drop-down list. You can select One Month, Three Months, Six Months or 12 Months.
   1. A message is displayed to tell you how many records will be archived.
   2. Select the Archive To File button.
   3. You are returned to the All User Activity page. A message is displayed indicating how many records have been archived and the name of the file to which they have been archived.
      Note: If there are no records older than the selected criteria, you cannot archive the records to file.

Q - How do I add a Report to My Reports Category?

A - You can group reports that you work with regularly in your own personal reports category.

1. Select the Reports menu button. The page of existing report categories is displayed. Select the category of report you want to run, for example, Sales.
2. Click on the Favorite checkbox next to, for example, the My Open Opportunities report. This report is now available in the My Reports category.

Q - Why, when printing a form, the Export radio button is grayed out?

A - The Export option is only available when generating reports; not forms. Depending on the form data desired, it may be possible to generate the same information in a standard report and export it to an external application. It is also possible to generate and export data from customized reports.

When printing forms, such as purchase orders, this information cannot be exported and this option is disabled in the Print Destination screen.

Q - How do I determine the Number of User Licenses in Sage Pro ERP?

A - Follow the steps below to determine the number of Sage Pro user licenses available in an installation:

Sage Pro 7.3 and later
Open the Help menu and click About Sage Pro ERP. Click Technical Information button. The User Licenses field contains the number of available user licenses.

Sage Pro 7.2 and earlier
Open the Help menu and click Technical Information. The User Licenses field the number of available user licenses.

Versions prior to Sage Pro 5.0 do not have this information available in the program. To determine the number of user licenses, check the sticker on the back of the Sage Pro CD case. It may list the number of user licenses available. The original invoice for the product may also have this information. Sage Customer Care may also have this information on file.

Q - Why the Currency Field does not appear in Order Entry screen?

A - This situation occurs if OE has not been linked to AR. This can be verified from the Change Order
Entry System Information screen:

• Open OE.
• Under the File menu, click Change Setup Information; the Change Order Entry System Information screen appears.
• Select Link to Accounts Receivable.
• Click Save.

The Currency ID field now appears in OE as well as in AR.

TOOL OF THE MONTH

PrintKey 2000

PrintKey is a screen capture program that can capture the screen or any part of it with the press of the Print Screen key (or any other key you configure).

You can adjust the captured picture's brightness, contrast, color balance, size, color invert, or convert to grayscale or black and white.

Pictures can be edited, using the built-in image editors and printed or saved in multiple formats such as JPG, JPEG, BMP, PNG, GIF, TIF and PCX. You can also insert text and free hand draw on the picture.

You can capture the full screen or just the active window, the client area, or any rectangular or circular area with or without the cursor.

You can preview the picture, add the date, user info, and any text you choose before printing.

You can download a freeware unsupported version from here: http://home.pb.net/~kclarke/pub/printkey510ef.zip

In addition to the freeware version, there is a supported version that can be purchased at http://www.warecentral.com/

Here is a chart comparing the features between PrintKey 2000 and PrintKey Pro: