Info@hand is the "Business Portal" and central application in our CRBM Platform. Depending on your perspective or roles played in your business processes, you will find a benefit and perhaps many that apply to you. If you are a manager or book keeper there are several features that can help you track assets, inventory and help yougather solid business intelligence. If you are a production manager or talent resource there are many tools for managing project and improving efficiency or collaboration of your team. If you are a system administrator there are many tools for managing roles, teams and other system wide configuration and customizations.

There are really 5 clear value propositions that make the CRBM platform a perfect choice for virtually any small to mid-sized business:

1.     Consolidated business management with reporting, automations, HR, Project Management with project profit loss tracking, Timesheet, and more.

2.     Seamless integration with the Joomla CMS for virtually unlimited expandability for front end customer portal, partner portal or social networking community.

3.     eCommerce synchronization for a ful transaction life cycle management and ERP inventory management capabilities with Sipping and Receiving

4.     One time licensing fee on premise model and low cost of entry

5.     Close integration and two way synchronizations with QuickBooks and Microsoft Outlook

Contact CNP integrations for a free CRBM Platform consulting session and FREE white paper on "Making Business Intelligence your Competitive Advantage"

This article will explore many of the features and capabilities of info@hand CRM. However for a full product feature review please contact us for a FREE 30 Day trial version and a one on one product demo. You can also visit www.learningcrm.com where you can find online training, documentation, product module reviews and a Live Demo. You can sign up here for a FREE 30 Day trial for your business any time.

Some of the key CRM capabilities of info@hand include:

• Salesforce automation - including lead capture, and the promotion of leads to Opportunities;
• Opportunity tracking with sales stage and percentage likelihood;
• Sales pipeline tracking, with graphical charts that offer drill-down from the bar or segment of the chart to the data that underlies it;
• Definition of sales teams and territories, to manage information sharing and track sales performance by territory;
• Sales forecasting, and comparison of forecasts to quotas and actuals, by team or by individual;
• Lead source analysis of sales and opportunities;
• Flexible reporting, to extract precisely the information you want to see;
• Corporate calendar management, for arranging calls and meetings; and
• Integrated Inbound and outbound Email, which is automatically added to account and contact history.

Email & Letter Mail Marketing Campaigns:

• Marketing campaigns may be conducted with email templates for automatically customized emails, management of prospect lists, and tracking of campaign click-through rates.
• A target list for an email campaign may be assembled from a mixture of prospects plus pre-existing contacts and leads. You may create a target list as the output of a report, facilitating the targeting of prospects or existing clients with specific characteristics. A special Quick Campaign feature makes it quick and easy to perform spur of the moment email campaigns.
• You can also import lists of prospects (in either Comma Separated Values (CSV) or Tab Separated Values (TSV) formats).
• A mail merge feature enables the execution of letter mail campaigns, and target lists may also be exported to MS Word for a variety of purposes.

Project & Resource Management:
info@hand tracks the performance of current projects, and organizes a history of all project-related documents, status reports, tasks and contacts. Utilization, and time booked to project tasks, are also tracked for resources assigned to the project.

Within info@hand, a project is modeled as:

• A main panel containing summary information about the project
• A financial information panel containing a summary of expected and actual costs and revenue for each month of the project
• A number of sub-panels linking in related information

Document Management:
info@hand enables the sharing of business documents - from HR claim forms and Marketing collateral to Engineering designs.

• Multiple revisions may be stored ensuring only approved documents are used.
• Documents in any format can be filed, and may be searched by title, description, file type, status, department, keywords and owner.
• Documents may be associated with Projects, Accounts, Contacts, Leads, Opportunities, or Service Cases.
• A project can have all of the project's documentation attached to it. An account, lead or contact can have all related documents attached. And supporting documents for a service case can be attached to it.

Inventory Management:

info@hand includes a full inventory management capability. Two key modules perform the bulk of inventory management - Shipping and Receiving. In addition, the Sales Orders and Purchase Orders modules, as well as the Invoices module, evolved to support the tracking of partially received Purchase Orders, and partially shipped Sales Orders or Invoices (depending on how your business operates).

Receiving:
The Receiving module lets users in shipping/receiving document the receipt of a shipment, list the items and quantities received, and link to the related Purchase Order (and Sales Order if any). It documents the inbound shipping provider, number of packages and weight, the supplier's packing slip number, and the date received.

The easiest way to create a received goods record is to locate your related Purchase Order, and click on the Receive It! button, Then just adjust the quantities and items received if they differ from the PO, and save. Partial quantities received are recorded on the PO, and if a PO has been completely received, it is marked Closed.

For businesses with multiple warehouses, each goods received record will be linked to the warehouse where the goods were received, and inventory is adjusted appropriately for that location.

Shipping:
The Shipping module lets users in shipping/receiving record the shipments they send out. As well, it links to the FedEx and UPS shipping and tracking web services to automate those activities when using these shipping providers. It documents the outbound shipping provider, number of packages and weight, the packing slip number (it can also produce PDFs of packing slips), and the date shipped.

The simplest way to create a packing slip is to locate the related Invoice, and click on the Ship It! button, Then just adjust the quantities and items shipped if they differ from the Invoice, and save. Partial quantities shipped are recorded on the Invoice and on the Sales Order if there is one. If an Invoice has been completely shipped, it is marked Shipped, and if a Sales Order has been completely shipped it is marked Closed.

For businesses with multiple warehouses, each packing slip will be linked to the warehouse from which the goods were shipped, and inventory is adjusted appropriately for that location.

Note: Serial numbers are tracked from receiving, through the Sales Order and Invoice and on to the Packing Slip. Additionally, Supported Products are linked to client accounts, and also track product serial numbers.

 

Contact CNP integrations for a free CRBM Platform consulting session and FREE white paper on "Making Business Intelligence your Competitive Advantage"

Corporate Calendar:
info@hand offers full group calendaring features:

• Set meeting time and duration by simply clicking and dragging your mouse.
• Check for schedule conflicts when planning calls and meetings.
• Send invitations to colleagues and customers.
• View the calendar by Day, Week, Month, or Year.
• View Calls, Meetings, Tasks that are due, Project Task Assignments & Company Events - for yourself, for the whole company, by department, or for specific employees.
• Check Resource and Meeting room bookings.
• Create recurring meetings.

Email Management:

info@hand lets you compose and send email (text or HTML format), plus receive email from one or more accounts per user.

• Create custom email folders to hold your mail for filing.
• The system automatically links all mail to Contact and (optionally) Account history.
• info@hand can also organize and perform outbound email marketing campaigns
• Email addresses are auto-completed if you just type in a few letters of first or last name (see image of composing email).
• Full text email search finds information in email body, not just email subject.
• Each user specifies retention period for different types of email, reducing clutter of irrelevant emails.
• Email signatures are provided as a convenient time-saver.

Personalized News Pages:
An RSS News page delivers personalized daily news for each employee.
See the top 5 stories for each news feed you select - and click to open them in a separate window.
info@hand is supplied with hundreds of standard news feeds, and you can add your own quickly and easily.

Company Directory:
A photographic company directory displays telephone extension, department, email, mobile phone number, and SMS address for all employees.

A handy indicator LED shows which users are currently online.

Report Designer & Generator:
As businesses get larger and their data becomes more complex, a capable reporting system is a fundamental requirement.

Within info@hand the reports module shows a list of available reports. You may click on the name of a report to run that report, or to see the archived results of previous runs of that report. Each report listed shows its name, the principal module on which it reports, when it was last run, when it was last modified, and if it is set to run manually, interactively or automatically on a timed basis. Scheduled reports may be automatically emailed to a distribution list. Just imagine - your business tells you how it is doing without being asked!A number of predefined standard reports are included with the system, and new report designs may be easily developed and saved for repeated use in future. Try our online demo to see how easy it is to design your own reports.

Reports can include multiple sort keys, grouping, filters, and may relate data in multiple modules. Acrobat PDF documents may be created from any report, and report data may also be exported to several common file formats including CSV and HTML.

Reports may also generate charts of their data, and these charts may then be added to your Personal Dashboard.

Graphical Dashboard Charts:
The system provides graphical dashboards for Sales, Service, Financials, and Projects. As well, a Personal Dashboard allows you to assemble and re-order a list of your key charts, including charts created from your own custom reports. When the system is initially created, these dashboards include the following charts:

Sales Dashboard:

• Fiscal Year Booked Sales (Horizontal bar chart: Shows the 12 months of the current fiscal year, and the value of sales booked for each of those months.)
• Weighted & Gross Opportunities by Month (Horizontal bar chart: Shows, for the 12 month period starting last month, the gross and weighted (by probability) value of the opportunities for each month - the sales pipeline.)
• Pipeline by Sales Stage (Horizontal stacked bar chart: Shows the total value of potential sales at each stage of the sales pipeline.)
• All Opportunities by Lead Source by Outcome (Horizontal stacked bar chart: Shows a stacked bar of the total opportunities for each lead source. Each bar is made up of multi-colored segments which represent the outcome proportions for that lead source.)
• Pipeline by Month by Outcome (Vertical stacked bar chart: Each bar shows the total sales pipeline for each month. Each bar is made up of multi-colored segments which represent the outcome proportions for the pipeline in that month.)
• All Opportunities by Lead Source (Pie chart: Shows a simple pie visualization of the proportion of total sales opportunities for each lead source.)

 

Contact CNP integrations for a free CRBM Platform consulting session and FREE white paper on "Making Business Intelligence your Competitive Advantage"

Service Dashboard:

• Cases by Status by User (Horizontal stacked bar chart: Shows the breakdown of cases by status, for each user.)
• Cases by Priority by Month (Vertical stacked bar chart: Shows the breakdown of cases by priority, for each month.)
• Bugs by Status by User (Horizontal stacked bar chart: Shows the breakdown of software bugs by status, for each user.)
• Bugs by Priority by Month (Vertical stacked bar chart: Shows the breakdown of software bugs by priority, for each month.)

Financial Dashboard:

• Fiscal Year Invoiced Sales (Horizontal bar chart: Shows the 12 months of the current fiscal year, and the value of sales invoiced for each of those months.)
• Fiscal Year Booked Sales (Horizontal bar chart: Shows the 12 months of the current fiscal year, and the value of sales booked for each of those months.)
• Project Expected Revenue by Month (Vertical stacked bar chart: Shows the forecast income from Projects. The various colour bar segments are used to represent projects which have different status. The six months starting last month are represented.)

Projects Dashboard:

• Project Expected Revenue by Month (Vertical stacked bar chart: Shows the forecast income from Projects. The various color bar segments are used to represent projects which have different status. The six months starting last month are represented.)
• Each chart may be customized by clicking on the Edit button by the top right corner of the chart. This will bring up a small dialog area which permits you to specify parameters of the chart.
• A remarkably powerful feature of the Dashboard is that the charts allow for drilling down into the actual underlying data. This means that each distinctively colored area on every chart is actively linked to the set of opportunities it represents - simply click on an area to see those opportunities.

Info@Hand Outlook Sync

The info@hand plug-in for Microsoft Outlook is available free of charge for all info@hand users, and utilizes the info@hand web services SOAP interface to integrate CRM functionality into Outlook. No server components or modifications are needed to use the plug-in. The plug-in is simply installed and configured on each client PC or notebook that needs this capability, and enhances the Outlook client installed on that computer.

CNP Integrations is value added reseller (VAR) for the info@hand software solutions and supports a fully integrated CRBM Platform with Joomla CMS, Info@hand CRM and QuickBooks. We provide the value building consulting and technical expertise to help you deploy these systems and integrate the human and business dynamics with the technology for targeted results.

Contact CNP integrations for a free CRBM Platform consulting session and FREE white paper on "Making Business intelligence your Competitive Advantage"

Information here provided curtsey of the Long Reach Corporation and www.infoathand.com