Software Answers

Postcode Lookups

For years you have had the ability to use postcodes to accurately retrieve addresses in the UK.  For most companies the  high cost to licence and pain to install and update was such that it was not viable however given that licence costs per annum per user where anything up to £300+. Unless a large proportion of your time was spent entering addresses the return on the cost was simply not there. 

Now however a company called World Address have changed that. First point is that you pay per query as as the pricing table shows below even for small usage its not so expensive.  At between 8p each for less than a thousand per to 7p for ten thousand plus its justifiable to make sure you get accurate addresses entered rapidly.

Secondly there are no installation or maintenance costs, its a service over the web that your systems can just call when they need it. This means that you don’t have to install it on each computer and get and distribute update files from the provider, much better.

Finally the interface we have to link it seamlessly to your existing systems is very good, From CRM, NAV, AX or Pegasus you can just enter a postcode in the normal box and a new window comes up to display the alternatives i.e the house numbers and names in that postcode, you select the one you want and it updates the relevant fields, simple and easy.

Technology Management have been using it both internally and with clients for a while now, it gets our clear recommendation. If you think it could help your business let us know. 

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

Dynamics CRM Update ‘R8’

So in the last twenty four hours the web has been alive with tweets welcoming the announcement of what will be in the Dynamics CRM Q2 2012  update codenamed R8. Titled CRM Anywhere it includes two major highlights allowing CRM systems to be accessed from as many devices as possible in as many different places as possible plus four other “enhancements”. What does it all mean for you?

• There will be a mobile app for iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone devices
• It will support other web browsers than Internet Explorer, such as Firefox, Chrome and Safari
• More social network integration (improving the activity feeds introduced in R6)
• Industry templates to get new customers started quicker
• Support for SQL 2012 including its new Power View BI tool and links to Azure
• More security certifications for CRM Online such as SAS70 Type II, Safe Harbour & DPA 

Well we were at the announcement in person at ExtremeCRM conference in Berlin so got the detail that is maybe not highlighted in the official announcement document.. 

There is no doubt the most exciting bit is that Microsoft is launching their own Mobile app. This is in fact a version of the CWR mobile application that's been available for some time and now we have the full detail we know that despite communicating through Microsoft’s data centres it will connect to both our hosted and clients on premise applications that have been setup with an Internet Facing Deployment. It costs $30 per month per user but you can access it from as many devices as you like so those with a phone and a tablet will not have to pay twice.

A few will like the ability to use other browsers and the same for the ability to filter, like and unlike activity feeds but for me the best news is the early support for PowerView which is a really strong Excel add in for analysing data. Reporting in CRM is already strong in 2011, made stronger in R6 with more graph possibilities including 3D out of the box but will be unbeatable by any application in my judgement once PowerView is in the mix.

The good news in that this announcement is making all the mobile partners like  Resco look at their pricing and most are likely to match Microsoft’s price point if not better it, bringing down the slightly prohibitive entry level costs to date. Even better  ones Resco  can support all the standard entities such as service cases which appear missing on the MS option as well as allowing customisation to a far higher level. That means the tailoring you’ve had done to make your CRM fit your business will be possible on the whatever device your using too.  

And finally you don’t have to wait, either the CWR or Resco options are available now rather than waiting till Microsoft release in the the October/November timeframe (their Q2 is our Q4) so if you’d like to try it out give us a call.

DynamicsFood Events

With the latest release of our DynamicsFood software (combining Dynamics NAV and Microsoft Certified for Dynamics add on, SI Foodware) due at the end of February, we have been busy updating our website and arranging some events to coincide with this.

We will be demonstrating the total food journey right through from the initial entry of the sales order using various different methods,via purchasing,production and quality control and ending with the final delivery of the goods to the end customer showing you where your business can save time as well as improve accuracy and traceability.

 

Events will be held at our offices in Wolverhampton, Microsoft’s offices in Reading and the home of Yorkshire County Cricket, Headingley during February and we look forward to welcoming everyone to these. To book a place, please register at www.tecman.co.uk/events or spend some time browsing our new website at www.dynamicsfood.co.uk and register from there!

If you can’t make these dates but would like to know more, please contact Claire Evans at claire.evans@tecman.co.uk

New Schedule of Free NAV workshops at TecMan announced

The popular free monthly workshops that have run for several years, are now scheduled for the 1st quarter of 2012.

We are covering VAT settlement returns and reconciliation, Jet Reports and Fixed Assets.  These run at our offices in Wolverhampton and hosted by our support team which means its a guaranteed sales person free event! 

If you have a support contract or are interested in moving your support across to Technology Management, book on, meet the team and maximise your investment in Dynamics NAV by finding out what's possible with the software.

Book on at www.tecman.co.uk/events

Liam

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

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.

Improve business efficiency with electronic invoicing

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 allows invoices to be delivered via email and/or fax, providing the following benefits:

· Reduced costs - no postage, reduced stationery

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

· Increased efficiency – streamlined processes, increased productivity

· 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 Electronic Invoicing for Microsoft Dynamics NAV focuses on how Zetadocs can help you improve business efficiency and save you money:

Electronic Invoicing for Microsoft Dynamics NAV

Date: Thursday 15^th December 2011

Time: 3pm
Duration: 30 minutes

Cost: FREE

Register for the event here:

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