Software Answers

Are you invoicing electronically?

Technology Management, in partnership with Equisys, has introduced an electronic document management solution, Zetadocs, which integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Dynamics NAV. We can provide advice on how adopting a secure, sustainable approach to invoicing can benefit your company.

With seamless integration to NAV, Zetadocs allows invoices to be delivered via email and/or fax, providing the following benefits:

· Reduced costs - no postage, reduced stationery and less time spent by staff preparing invoices

· Improved cash flow – delivering documents in real-time encourages faster payment

· Increased efficiency – time spent preparing and sending invoices can be spent on other tasks

· Improved customer service – automatic archiving of documents allows quick retrieval for quicker query resolution.

· Reduced carbon footprint – eliminating paper from your invoicing process can help your organisation meet sustainability targets.

Electronic Invoicing for Microsoft Dynamics NAV Web Event

Our software partners Equisys are running a series of free webinars. The upcoming event on “Electronic Invoicing” focuses on how Zetadocs can help you improve business efficiency and save you money:

Date: Wednesday 22^nd February 2012

Time: 3.30pm

Cost: FREE

To register for the event follow the link: http://www.equisys.com/products/zetadocs_for_nav/einvoicingwebinar.html

For more information on how Technology Management can help your business, contact Jason Tromans at Jason.Tromans@tecman.co.uk or call 01902 578300

Microsoft Certification Gold in CRM and ERP for 2012

Pleased to confirm that we continue to hold Gold Certification with Microsoft for Dynamics ERP and CRM for the next 12 months.

This certification is the highest available from Microsoft, and requires a minimum of 6 certified employees in each competency. A number of case studies plus the completion of a customer satisfaction survey was also required to be successful.

The CRM team now stands at 10 dedicated people while our Dynamics ERP teams number 16. The investment in quality people all trained and certified to the highest level in implementation, consultancy, development. training and dedicated support is recognised by this certification.

CRM 2011 Role Tailored Forms

I have come across many CRM implementations where the fields on various forms can start to get cluttered and confusing. The fields always tend to be required by someone within the business but without proper management the sheer number of fields can start to take up un-necessary real estate on the form. Take for example a sales manager, when they open an account record they probably want to see key information such as year to date revenue, sales forecasts and turnover. This is fine, we can add that information to the form and the sales manager will be happy, but what about the poor support technician? When they open the account form they want to be able to see support contract details and case history, without having to scroll past a boat load of sales information first. Thankfully CRM 2011 has a great feature that means you can tailor forms based on the role of the user, so the form for a sales manager can now have completely different content and layout to what a support technician may see. All we need to do is create a relevant form, with the desired layout, and then assign a security role to that form.

So here’s what a sales manager will see when they open up an account record:

And here is what a support technician will see when they open up an account record:

As you can see, they are two totally different sets of fields, but very relevant to the user accessing it. The forms are clean and un-cluttered, which makes the user experience a whole lot better as they don’t need to search through a maze of fields to get to the information they need.

This feature doesn’t stop there though, not only can you customise the form layout on a role by role basis; you can also specify the code driven business logic too! This means you can add different sets of validation and actions to a form, depending on the role of the user accessing it. The combination of these features makes quickly implementing a UI, which fits all users’ requirements, a lot more achievable then previous versions of the product. Feel free to contact Technology Management should you require more information about Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, email crm@tecman.co.uk or visit our website http://www.tecman.co.uk/Products/Microsoft-Dynamics-CRM

Nathan.hawkins@tecman.co.uk

Do things differently – automatically file supplier invoices

Streamlining your document management system can help you improve business efficiency, reduce costs and build better relationships with your customers.

Technology Management, in partnership with Equisys, has introduced an electronic document management solution, Zetadocs, which integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Dynamics NAV. We can provide advice on how adopting a secure, sustainable approach to invoicing can benefit your company.

Zetadocs uses pre-printed or sticky label barcodes to automatically scan, split and file batches of documents via an office scanner:

· Reducing the time and cost of filing documents

· Speeding dispute resolution with instant, on-screen retrieval

· Minimising the risk of documents being lost or misfiled

· Easing audit processes, and strengthens compliance with legal regulations and process management standards

Supplier Invoice Processing for Microsoft Dynamics NAV Web Event

Our software partners Equisys are running a series of free webinars. The upcoming event on “Supplier Invoice Processing” focuses on how Zetadocs can help you improve business efficiency and save you money:

Supplier Invoice Processing for Microsoft Dynamics NAV

Date: Thursday 26^th January 2012

Time: 3.30pm
Duration: 30 minutes

Cost: FREE

Register for the event here:

http://www.equisys.com/products/zetadocs_for_nav/supplierinvoicewebinar.html

For more information on how Technology Management can help your business, contact Jason Tromans at Jason.Tromans@tecman.co.uk or call 01902 578300

Pension Auto-Enrolment………What's it all about? & How does it effect you?

Although new duties come in from 1 October 2012, individual employers' own duties will be introduced gradually over the following years and will be based on the size of the employer, typically by PAYE size.

The following is a table showing the staging dates for employers with 3,000 or more employees.  The Government is revising the staging dates for employers with less than 3,000 employees and further information will appear here early in 2012.

Employer (by PAYE  scheme size)	Staging Date
120,000 or more	1 October 2012
50,000 to 119,999	1 November 2012
30,000 to 49,999	1 January 2013
20,000 to 29,999	1 February 2013
10,000 to 19,999	1 March 2013
6,000 to 9,999	1 April 2013
4,100 to 5,999	1 May 2013
4,000 to 4,099	1 June 2013
3,000 to 3,999	1 July 2013

 

There will be a three month waiting period before employers are required to enrol workers into their designated scheme. During this period, workers can choose to opt in to start saving straight away.

The largest employers who are due to auto-enrol between 1 October 2012 and 1 November 2012 will be allowed to start auto-enrolment from as early as July 2012 to avoid the Christmas period.

Employers will be given the flexibility to re-enrol workers three months either side of their automatic re-enrolment date.

Process Documentation Tool

Technology Management provides software that controls and drives business processes. Whether its from the basics of enquiry through sales order to delivery and then payment or a much more industry or even customer specific getting all the steps right and clearly understood can be the key to rapidly and reliably implementing changes.

Documenting how it will work before you do the development in a way that’s clear and easy to understand but no the less comprehensive has always proved a challenge. When you write a specification in word its too open to interpretation but trying to diagram anything but the most basic flowchart in Visio can take an immense and lead to frustration the first time an amendment is needed and all those lines have to be reconnected.

So we are delighted to have recently found and trained up in a new tool called Engage Modeller. Engage is a cloud based tool that easy and rapid enough to be be able to ‘build while you talk’ negating the need to take copious notes and then try to understand them later. As you identify the actions and questions you can drop them into the schematic there and then complete with as many notes about each stage as you need. The connections are created automatically or by drag and drop and you can drill through to sub-processes.

Putting responsibilities and probabilities against each stage and you can calculate your capacity and reliability for each process as well. 

So next time your talking to one of our consultants about a process change don’t be surprised if they fire up Engage. We believe its going to serious improve our quality by not just enabling us to create solutions ‘right first time’ but by shorter solution delivery times via easier communication and making handover to support and understanding of how it works in years to come much easier.

How Technology Management can combat your Supplier Invoice Processing problems

 

If you are losing information, finding invoice submission slow or if you’re unable to easily answer questions like ‘how much do we spend on stationery?’ it may be time for you to look at a document management solution.

Technology Management has introduced a document management solution which works seamlessly with Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

To learn more about how this new solution can help you to improve business efficiency and save you money, our software partners Equisys are running a series of free webinars to highlight the functionality and benefits of Zetadocs, an exciting document management solution for users of Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

The first of these web events will be held on Tuesday 15^th November at 3pm. This FREE 30 minute webinar is focused around how our document management solution, Zetadocs, can help with Supplier Invoice Processing.

More about Zetadocs

Processing supplier invoices can be time consuming and costly. However, with our new Supplier Invoice Processing solution for Microsoft Dynamics NAV, paper invoices can be scanned and filed automatically – enabling finance teams to spend more time on productive, value-added tasks.
Technology Management’s chosen solution, Zetadocs, uses pre-printed or sticky label barcodes to automatically scan, split and file batches of documents:

• Reducing the time and cost of filing documents
• Speeding dispute resolution with instant, on-screen retrieval
• Minimising the risk of documents being lost or misfiled
• Easing audit processes, and strengthens compliance with legal regulations and process management standards “

WEB EVENT:

Supplier Invoice Processing

Tuesday 15 November 2011, 3pm

To register for the event follow the link: http://www.equisys.com/products/zetadocs_for_nav/supplierinvoicewebinar.html

If you would like to find out more about our document management solution and are unable to attend the webinar please feel free to contact Jason Tromans at Technology Management who would be more than happy to answer any questions you may have.

You can email Jason via Jason.Tromans@tecman.co.uk or alternatively call 01902 578300.

Microsoft vision of the future part 2

About 2 years ago Microsoft launched a concept video on how technology would impact our lives, the new forms of user interface like touch and gesture, new devices like slates and worktops being computers.  How data would interact with the real world with augmented reality, and how that data should flow seamlessly and between individuals and organisations. We used the video alot in presentations and have seen some of those technologies come to life in some shape or form.  Every time I showed it i got great feedback from the audience and many said it inspired them to see what IT may be capable of. Pleased to say that Microsoft have released another such video updated with new research and although builds on the original video rather than taking a different time scale. If you thinks its a little far fetched, just considered what you do with your smartphone today and how you would have felt if someone had predicted that 10 years ago…..

Enjoy the video

Productivity Future Vision

Virtualisation and Hyper V

For those of you who are considering virtualisation and understand the potential benefits of this type of technology i.e. less downtime, high availability, lower maintenance costs, etc. I thought it would be worth sharing some of the information I have increasingly seen appearing on the web.

The general consideration when looking at virtualisation always seemed to revolve around 'Microsoft Hyper V or VMware?' In all of the situations we have come up against we have always felt confident that the Microsoft solution is more than adequate for requirements especially as it is essentially 'free' with the purchase of Windows Server 2008. We of course have 'practised what we preach' and used this as the basis for the infrastructure at our hosting centre so we are fully aware of the capbilities of the software.

In the past though a lot of the posts I have seen on the web have tended to favour VMware in some shape or form. However times seem to be changing and the realisation that Hyper V not only fulfills requirements but also comes in at a lower price is even being noticed by the independent/impartial virtualisation websites as shown by the following blog post:

http://virtualizationreview.com/blogs/the-hoard-facts/2011/10/inevitable-rise-of-hyper-v.aspx

This is only going to become more obvious with the latest release of Hyper V and to indicate why some of the more useful technical benefits are listed in a post below:

http://virtualizationreview.com/blogs/virtual-insider/2011/10/5-fast-reasons-to-upgrade-to-hyper-v-3.aspx

Realistically virtualisation is going to become a standard platform moving forward, the real question is whether you want to use an effective and free piece of software or pay for something that has additional functionality but in reality you are never likely to need?

Pegasus shortlisted in the Payroll World Awards

Payroll World, the UK’s leading payroll magazine, is introducing a brand new awards scheme, the Payroll World Awards 2011 for the payroll and HR industry and its associated stakeholders in 2011. The award ceremony will attract around 300 professionals from the payroll sector, and will reward firms, teams and individuals for their professionalism, pioneering efforts and commitment to improving the reputation of the payroll department.

We are delighted to announce Pegasus has been shortlisted for the Payroll Provider Award. Winners will be announced on 16 November. So watch this space……………..

Take a look at Opera 3 Payroll & HR, it simplifies your key tasks and is fully accredited by HMRC so you will always have peace of mind. It is available as a stand alone application or integrates with the other applications available for Opera 3; linking seamlessly to Personnel and P11D Organiser.