Management Blogs

How Collaboration Makes Business Analytics Better

2015-12-02T10:32:24Z

Adding Collaboration to Business Analytics helps us go beyond data and discovery to deliver a solutions oriented experience for management and staff.

Many of you likely have some interaction with Business Reporting. This happens when you are looking at financial statements, a list of open orders, sales rep performance, or product sales within a customer segment. Reporting helps us understand what is happening in our business. Business Analytics allows us to investigate issues by using the data in a more sophisticated fashion to figure out why things happen. You can even take Analytics a step further with dashboards that use visualization to quickly gain insight into company and individual performance.

While Reporting and Analytics help us understand what is happening and why, Collaboration helps us figure out how to fix our problems and scale our successes. Collaboration, thus, provides a foundation for building solutions, as team members can view data, share ideas, and solicit feedback to validate potential solutions and solidify decision making.

The final piece of the puzzle is to be able to remember and learn from our experiences. The key here is to make sure the Collaboration system has the ability to capture knowledge created during team innovation and problem solving efforts. Storing content and collaboration in an accessible environment, such as a Portal, allows questions, answers, problems, and solutions to be shared later. This knowledge can be used to recall why decisions were made and enable future teams to benefit from lessons learned.

As you can see, Collaboration takes us beyond simply looking at data and gives us a platform to do something about it by helping us build solutions as a team and share our successes with others.

eCorpSys provides solutions for Business Analytics, Collaboration, and Content Management in a single Web Portal environment. For more information on bringing Collaboration together with Analytics, please contact an eCorpSys Consultant, or go to our website to request a whitepaper or watch a demo.

Why Portals Are So Important for Businesses

2015-12-02T10:32:47Z

There has been a lot of hype about portals recently, and well founded, as modern portals can bring game-changing capabilities to businesses. So, lets talk about what a portal is and why the technology is so important.

Wikipedia describes a portal as a doorway, and further explains that a web portal is a web site with diverse sources of information, presented in a unified way. Ok, so we've got lots of information coming from different places, accessible all in one place. Is that right? Well, the answer is yes, but it's really much more than that...

Today, portals are being used in a variety on contexts: Internet sites, Intranet sites, and Extranet sites. Each of these kinds of sites have different purposes. An Internet site is designed to provide information to a public audience, e.g. potential customers, other businesses, personal contacts, etc., commonly referred to as a web site. An Extranet site is designed to provide more specific information to customers, vendors, or other external business partners. Extranets can be used to deliver customized product news, company announcements, documents and reports, product manuals and procedures, FAQs, problem solving discussions, and even solicit information to help design your next product or service. The last type is an Intranet, which helps employees collaborate and innovate. Intranets facilitate the learning, sharing, and problem solving process by managing news, documents, knowledge, and team discussions inside the organization. The Intranet can also help automate your business processes to achieve a substantial boost in productivity.

So what makes today's portals special? Modern portals, sometimes called enterprise portals, offer a one stop shop for information and interaction between employees, staff, customers, and other partners. The ability to provide one location and one consistent user experience to access information from a variety of sources, places, or systems can prove to be very powerful for users. Imagine customers grabbing and updating data (invoices, orders, etc.) from the ERP system without being in the ERP system. Imagine employees accessing time cards from the ERP system, payroll forms from the HR system, sales information from the CRM system, all from inside the portal. Modern portals also foster a collaborative environment by providing tools to manage discussions, capture feedback, and keep everyone up to speed. And when there's something you need that just doesn't exist yet, portals provide a great platform for application development.

Here are some examples of how companies are using portals to do more with a positive ROI.

Shell conducted a study that found employees in an average corporate environment can spend 30% to 60% of their productive time searching for information to do their job. Shell built a Knowledge Intranet to serve its 10,000+ employees and now saves $300M annually with a project ROI of 5000% in the first year. -Ideas Magazine

Audi launched an Extranet site for its dealer customers in Australia that boosted users by 450% and page visits by 300% in the second month of its operation. -Intranet Journal

It is easy to see how a portal can become the information center of a business. Contact an eCorpSys consultant for more information on how a portal can help your organization.

Intranet Solutions That Boost Revenue and Lower Costs

2014-10-14T13:52:38Z

The Intranet is becoming an essential technology piece for companies looking to raise their top and bottom lines.

Modern Intranets can provide a collection of business solutions that boost company productivity by driving employee innovation. Solutions can range from customer driven product or service improvements, to employee training systems, to HR process automation, to internal process improvements. Intranet technology contributes to these solutions by helping employees interact, generate and share ideas, validate concepts, and document results.

The best part of the technology is that companies can start with a minimal investment by implementing 2 or 3 business solutions, initially. As the technology produces real world results, the Intranet can be grown over time. This process allows companies to reduce their technology risks and control their costs like never before.

Here are a few examples of Intranet solutions that you might find appealing:

Build the products and services that customers want using a customer driven request system.
Improve the accuracy and effectiveness of company training programs with less resources.
Expand process improvement efforts to reach more staff, get more ideas and better solutions.
Automate HR processes to improve accuracy, reduce costs, and free staff to work on high level activities.
Build a sharing culture that rewards those who contribute to company innovation.

Let's face it, technology that can provide these kinds of benefits can likely help your company boost sales and cut costs. Contact an eCorpSys consultant for a demo and evaluation to learn more about how an Intranet can help your organization.

Empowering Remote Workers Without Compromising Productivity

2012-01-30T19:37:00Z

While the concept of remote workers is not new, advances in technology are enabling the remote workforce in ways that were not possible before. Companies are beginning to explore this new paradigm as a way to reduce their overhead, especially in today’s tough economic climate. Managers are rightly concerned about maintaining productivity of staff not co-located with their colleagues and critical systems. In recent years, though, Intranets and IP telephony have evolved to empower remote staff to easily access office systems, collaborate with coworkers and use their corporate telephone systems.

The most basic requirement is usually telephony and workers have long been able to forward their extensions to ring at home. While functional, it was not ideal since they wouldn’t get corporate phone features and outgoing calls wouldn’t be on the company’s rates. The advent of IP telephony now lets remote workers have a phone at home that is identical in features to their office phone with all the bells and whistles like voicemail, call forwarding, music-on-hold, etc. They can even make and receive work calls on their PC or smartphone using your corporate rates.

Intranet technology has also evolved to allow a remote workforce to access critical information and interact with colleagues. Teams can work together, share documents and set up discussions that not only permit the free exchange of ideas and comments, but also capture the conversations for future reference. All of this can now be done using corporate Intranets, securely accessible over the web. Intranets are now so flexible that we are building and accessing business applications, like Business Intelligence, CRM, Document Management and ERP from within the Intranet’s simple, single-login interface.

Modern technologies are blurring the line between remote and office workers, allowing all workers to have all the same resources and conveniences.

Contact eCorpSys today to learn how you can enable your remote workforce.

Reducing System Costs with IP Telephony

2013-02-08T18:43:47Z

Everyone knows cutting costs can directly improve your bottom line. But what you may not know is that there are several IT applications that can help reduce your technology costs. Today, I am going to talk about how IP Based Telephony can help reduce costs for voice communications.

IP Based Telephony is different from traditional analog telephony systems being that it operates over an IP (internet protocol) network similar to your computers. The IP network enables more connection options and allows you to build your own telephony network to connect other offices in a way that enables free inter-office calling. Eliminating costs for calls between offices can result in a significant cost reduction for companies that have multiple offices. The best part is that you can connect offices anywhere in the world on your own telephony network to enjoy these cost savings.

One of the typical problems IT faces with traditional analog telephony services (from a company like AT&T®) is planning for peak capacity. Because you can only receive calls for the number of lines and phone numbers that you have purchased with your analog service provider, companies end up purchasing excess lines to plan for rare situations when the company may receive an extraordinary amount calls (e.g. for sales conference calls, or peak customer service hours, etc.) to avoid rejecting calls due to capacity limits. These problems are eliminated with IP based telephony services because the technology has the ability to route an unlimited number of calls on a single telephony trunk over a single phone number. This means you don't have to buy excess lines and you don't have to buy phone numbers for back-end lines to handle capacity. This results in simplified capacity planning as well as a cost savings for services.

Another area of savings for IP based telephony services lies in usage rates. IP based telephony services often carry a lower minute rate, which can add up to a significant savings, depending on your usage patterns.

If you are considering a new phone system, you should take a look at phone systems powered by open technology, like the eCorpSys telephony system, as these systems can offer loads of features, expansion for future needs, and lower costs on hardware and equipment. Some systems, like the eCorpSys Telephony Server, also offer "zero phone setup" features that reduce labor costs by having the server automatically program the phones. This can result in a much faster project with lower setup costs.

If you would like to learn more about our IP Telephony systems, you can review features with this link, or equipment options with this link .

Reduce Software Costs and Subscription Fees with Open Technology

2012-01-30T19:40:47Z

Today, I am going to talk about reducing software product and subscription costs using free alternatives to proprietary software solutions.

Did you know that there are open technology alternatives that rival industry leading software solutions? You can get no cost business applications to replace expensive proprietary solutions, or use free software stack components such as feature rich database servers, best in class web servers, high performance application servers, and superior reliability operating systems.

Open technology solutions are used by a many companies these days, in the form of software components, business applications, in the cloud, or with hosted services. This technology is developed by a large community of "interested" parties, often by companies with large revenues, who want to have software tools available to them without restrictions and high costs associated with the proprietary solutions. For example, Oracle® has been one of the leading contributers to Red Hat® Linux® over the years, and Google® is one of the leading consumers of several Linux® and Apache Foundation® free software products. So, these tools are not just for small companies looking to try something new; they are widespread throughout the IT industry and utilized by companies of all sizes.

You may want to consider migrating an existing application to open technology, or using an open business application for your next new project. Even if you have a requirement for a proprietary application, you may be able to use free software components such as a web or database server running on an open source operating system to cut costs in the software stack.

Sometimes working with open technology requires specialized skills, or learning a new system. To avoid training your own staff, you could consider working with a consulting company that has this expertise, like eCorpSys, to augment your technology skill set. There are a number of options to implement open technology at your company, contact us to learn more about eCorpSys Open Technology Solutions.

Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle, Red Hat is a registered trademark of Red Hat, Inc., Google is a registered trademark of registered Google, Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds, Apache and the the Apache Foundation are registered trademarks of the Apache Foundation.