Nonprofit, Founded by Former NBA All-Star and Sacramento Mayor, Turns to NetSuite to Support Growth Beyond the Classroom
SAN MATEO, Calif.—June 20, 2018—St. HOPE, a nonprofit community development corporation, has leveraged Oracle NetSuite to support its mission to create one of the finest urban pre-kindergarten through 12th grade public school systems in the United States. With NetSuite SuiteSuccess for Nonprofits, St. HOPE has been able to streamline critical business functions in order to focus its time and resources on providing high quality public education and creating living-wage sustainable jobs.
Founded by former NBA All-Star and Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson in 1989, St. HOPE began as a single, portable classroom that served as an afterschool program for Sacramento High School students. Today, it serves 1,800 students through five charter schools and manages residential properties as well as an Art and Cultural Center that includes a cafe, bookstore, barbershop, art gallery and 200-seat theater. The charter school network focuses on students from urban communities and aims to graduate self-motivated, industrious and critical-thinking leaders who are committed to serving others, passionate about lifelong learning and prepared to earn a degree from a four-year college.
“As we found success with the schools, the organization realized that we had an opportunity to do more in the community,” said Julian Love, chief financial officer, St. HOPE Community Development. “That meant we needed a system that could better track and manage finances. SuiteSuccess fit exactly what we needed.”
With the preconfigured roles, dashboards and nonprofit industry best practices within SuiteSuccess, St. HOPE has been able to shorten payroll processes by 87 percent, digitize & gain greater control over purchasing processes, and achieve real-time visibility into its financial performance. As a result, St. HOPE has been able to manage the increasing business complexity presented by its growth and expanding scope. St. HOPE selected NetSuite SuiteSuccess for Nonprofits in March 2017 and went live with a full-fledged Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system in less than three months.
“NetSuite has a proud history of helping organizations in the nonprofit sector,” said David Geilhufe, Head of Nonprofit, Oracle NetSuite. “With SuiteSuccess, we’re able to help thriving organizations like St. HOPE to quickly and easily manage critical business functions so they can focus on their mission and on helping the community.”
About St. HOPE St. HOPE began in 1989 in a portable classroom at Sacramento High School as an after-school program named St. HOPE Academy. Founded by NBA All-Star and Oak Park native Kevin Johnson, St. HOPE is a nonprofit community development corporation whose mission is to revitalize the Oak Park community through public education, and economic development. Learn more at www.sthope.org.
About Oracle NetSuite For more than 20 years, Oracle NetSuite has helped organizations grow, scale and adapt to change. NetSuite provides a suite of cloud-based applications, which includes financials / Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), HR, professional services automation and omnichannel commerce, used by more than 40,000 organizations and subsidiaries in 199 countries and territories.
About Oracle The Oracle Cloud offers complete SaaS application suites for ERP, HCM and CX, plus best-in-class database Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) from data centers throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia. For more information about Oracle (NYSE:ORCL), please visit us at oracle.com.
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Moneris has 600 users on Microsoft Dynamics 365, managing the customer experience from onboarding and post-sale, to call center and field service interactions. Beyond the customer-facing roles, which make up about half of their end users, Moneris also uses Dynamics 365 for some of their back-office and risk management teams. This ensures that all customer information is tracked and managed in one system. We sat down with Allan Measor, Vice President, Business Transformation and Customer Enablement at Moneris to hear about their experience.
Moneris overview:
Why did you choose to start using Dynamics 365 for all new support inquiries immediately following the implementation?
“For a short time, we ran our old ticket system as a reference tool alongside Dynamics 365. We analyzed our old ticket data, and over 80% of our inquiries were one and done, with 90% solved in a week or less. Because of this, we chose not to import our old tickets. In terms of data migration into Dynamics 365, we imported standard items like customer company data, name, address, account numbers, email address, phone numbers, all key payment device data, and work order information. We also authored over 1,900 knowledge articles into Dynamics 365 for reference.”
Why did you choose to be on the Cloud?
“Our legacy systems tended to take longer in terms of features and updates, so the idea that Cloud solutions get features firsts, thereby empowering our organization to be more current, was appealing to us. We also could avoid costly infrastructure investments and gain reliability and redundancy when on the cloud.”
Why did you choose Dynamics 365 for your CRM platform?
“Since we were already using Office 365, our team members were able to easily adjust to the Dynamics 365 and our customers now receive a seamless experience because of our investment in the Microsoft stack. The value of Microsoft’s Canadian data center, the feature richness of Dynamics 365, and the ease of integration into our existing technology footprint were key deciding factors for us.”
Why did you choose PowerObjects as your partner?
“PowerObjects came highly recommended from multiple individuals at Microsoft. We also had several vendor meetings with them, and ultimately liked their collaborative approach. We looked at other big consulting firms but liked the agile and flexible approach that PowerObjects offers, along with their deep Dynamics experience, so we went ahead with PowerObjects and haven’t regretted it once. We also liked that PowerObjects has an office and local staff right here in Toronto.”
What are some of the KPIs that you’ve seen since implementing Dynamics 365?
“We’ve seen a 4% reduction in average handle times (AHT) and a 5% increase in first call resolution (FCR) on top of our already high FCR which was around 80%. We’ve also seen improvements in our onboarding processes for new team members since there are more standardized processes in place, resulting in a decrease in onboarding time and an increase in employee performance. Additionally, we’re experiencing better Interactive Voice Response to Dynamics integration, improving screen pop accuracy for Customer Service Representatives.”
To learn more and read the full case study, click here.
The recent release of AtheneTM Cloud and AtheneTM 11 provide exciting new features and capabilities to our clients and open those capabilities to organizations everywhere.
Athene Cloud takes the world-class Athene capacity management software and puts all of the processing and storage in the cloud. This means that organizations can let Syncsort manage their server, the Capacity Management Information System (CMIS, also known as the Athene database), as well as provide key services to organizations that may not have a dedicated Capacity Management function.
Those services might include something as weekly monitoring, upgrade assistance, or training staff in creating key reports. However, organizations can choose to allow Syncsort’s experienced consultants to manage the entire Capacity Management process – from creating assessment reports, to weekly health reports, daily performance monitoring, change impact assessments, and completing a full capacity/business alignment plan.
All organizations, big and small, can benefit from a formal Capacity Management process and the use of Athene – now organizations without dedicated teams and available resources can team with Syncsort to provide that service.
The Athene 11 release adds additional functionality, including full support for IBM i, using direct DB2 database connections to capture capacity and performance data. IBM i is a key platform used in over 100,000 organizations worldwide and managing the performance and capacity of services that rely on IBM i is key for those organizations.
Athene ServiceView, a reporting and analysis tool that provides key time-to-live information to capacity managers, has been enhanced to include more targets and the ability to span multiple CMIS.
The new Concentrator Control Center is a PCI-compliant store-and-forward node for data that improves security and underpins Athene Cloud.
Other enhancements include enhanced portal dashboard reporting and significant performance improvements in Data Management, VMware data processing, and ServiceView calculation and report generation.
AtheneTM Cloud and AtheneTM 11 are now generally available. Additional details can be seen here: Press Release
Make sure to check out our on demand webcast for even more on the latest release of the Athene products.
I’ve been struggling with this for a few days, and so I thought I might ask this here. Part of the problem lies in the fact that I do not even know the mathematical solution, which runs the risk of this question falling out of the scope of this site. Nevertheless, I’ll proceed:
Consider this unexpanded polynomial of Symbols constructed out of heads Plus and Times only:
poly = ((a + b) (c + d (e + f)) + (g + h) i) j + k
What I’d like to do: Without expanding the polynomial, mark the leaves of the polynomial by integers based on its position in the tree. This labeling of leaves must have the property such that
When Expanded, each factor in each term is given a unique label
No more labels are used than necessary for the whole polynomial (number of distinct labels equals overall order of polynomial in all its variables).
It is not necessary that terms with fewer factors use specific labels in any order: for example a labeling of the polynomial in which the 2nd last term of the expanded form is h[1] i[3] j[0] (missing label 2) or in which the last term is k[2] is acceptable.
Moreover I’d like a solution that is faster than just expanding the polynomial and labeling each term.
My original attempt was based on traversing the tree,
and raising/lowering the value of the label based on whether it passes through Plus or Times. Unfortunately, none of my solutions based on this give the correct answer.
The possibilities of artificial intelligence are endless. AI helps businesses create tremendous efficiencies through automation, while enhancing an organizations ability to make more effective business decisions. However, it’s no surprise that companies are beginning to be held accountable for the outcomes of their AI-based decisions. From the proliferation of fake news to most recently, the deliberate creation of the AI psychopath Norman, we’re beginning to understand and experience the potential negative outcomes of AI.
While AI, machine learning, and deep learning have been deemed to be ‘black box’ technologies, unable to provide any information or explanation of its actions, this inability to explain AI will no longer be acceptable to consumers, regulators, and other stakeholders. For example, with the General Data Protection Regulation in effect, companies will now be required to provide consumers with an explanation for AI-based decisions.
FICO has been pioneering explainable AI (xAI) for more than 25 years and is at the cutting edge of helping people really understand and open up the AI black box. As you move forward with your AI journey, we’ve curated a list of blogs that uncover the importance of and trends leading to xAI.
According to GDPR, customers need to have clear-cut reasons for how they were adversely impacted by a decision. But what happens when your model was built with AI? This blog post uncovers the requirement of making AI explainable.
AI comes with many challenges, including trying to decipher what these models have learned, and thus their decision criteria. This blog lists ways to explain AI when used in a risk or regulatory context based on FICO’s experience.
Ready to make AI explainable? This post illustrates how you can achieve better performance and explainability by combining machine learning and scorecard approaches.
In 1996 we filed a patent for Reason Reporter—indicative of how long, in fact, FICO has been working with Explainable AI. Simply enough, Reason Reporter provide reasons associated with the neural network scores Falcon produces. The not so simple part? This post demonstrates how we utilize the reason reporter algorithm during model training.
Blockchain: Everywhere you turn in life sciences digitization, this ledger system is involved. Fully 83% of executives in life sciences expect blockchain integration in healthcare within five years. Last year’s proof of concept study clearly showed strong results using blockchain in identity trust. PC Magazine mentioned the use of blockchain for legal proof of ownership of unique cannabis strains.
How to drive blockchain technology value In life sciences
Life sciences companies are just starting to invest in digital ledgers technology (DLT) like blockchain. A 2017 survey from IDC showed that a quarter of IT professionals in the industry were already using DLTs or implementing it. Another third was evaluating or planning on evaluating the technology. But why have DLT systems started to become so popular for life science?
DLTs can provide instantly verifiable accountability to the research and development process. Beyond that, it also helps record accurate shipment data. This is important in an industry where environmental control is vital to success. It’s expected that the use of DLTs will rise as investment in digitization increases. But how do we know that this process is happening in life sciences?
Digitization increases the use of Big Data, analytics, cooperative work, and transparency. DLTs such as blockchain improve these aspects without compromising data integrity or security. It’s expected that supply chain, regulatory compliance, and product safety are probably the first blockchain projects for many life sciences companies. Sterilization processes or cold storage and transport of biologics are expected to lead the way for DLT options. Providing irrefutable documentation of this information builds trust between shareholders.
Using blockchain in clinical trials
Let’s look at an example of blockchain use in clinical trials. A pipeline drug can have a number of supply chain issues. Shipping and receiving of the experimental drug and test samples need to be tracked. Proper security, global payment management, and data sharing must also be managed. Smart contracts help improve payments to suppliers and research organizations. Internet of Things sensors can be implemented with shipping processes to update blockchain records. This helps catch potential environmental variances in medications during shipping.
Tracking document exchanges, data sharing, loT genealogy, and internal manufacturing processes can be monitored through DLTs. Now imagine adding this to current track and trace regulations for medications. Electronic product code information service requirements are much easier to manage using systems like blockchain. It provides an unforgeable ledger record that minimizes reaction time to public health crises resulting from medication problems. At the same time, it protects patient privacy by providing limited access to blockchain records.
Measuring overall DLT performance
What kind of metrics can be used to measure performance changes using DLT systems? One option is to look at reported errors compared to the overall process volume. Comparing the existing numbers against a blockchain system can often help your company locate and identify specific discrepancies and issues in the system. Because DLT systems have a unique signature with each transaction, it cannot be modified. This builds trust between supply chain parties, making the reconciliation process faster, easier, and more secure.
To implement blockchains into an organization, stakeholders must first decide which information should fall in a public versus a private blockchain. Sensitive, proprietary, or private information should be kept on a private blockchain so that it is protected. At the same time, data access and sharing must be considered. Who is allowed access and who has the responsibility to read and write to the system needs to be determined prior to starting the conversion process. Before the process goes live, your audit trails will also need to be tested.
By connecting clinical trial management programs to distributed ledgers, your organization’s supply requests, test results, and sensor data can be automated. This process can help speed up and improve the efficacy of the clinical trials. The level of transparency for the data can also help with your patient recruitment. The blockchain ledgers make it easier to improve contract payments and fair compensation while limiting overpayment risk.
How do you successfully add blockchain to your operation? Make sure you benchmark your current business processes. Map that process both before and after adding a DLT system to your operation. Take care in management of ownership and access to both internal and outside information. Ensure that patient and critical data is protected securely. Above all, before starting, figure out whether you have the expertise and resources to set up the system in the first place.
The advantages of using blockchain in life science ensure that this part of digitization is here to stay. DLT systems will help speed up and improve the quality of clinical trials. Companies that take advantage of these benefits will reap great rewards.
Each entity in the system will have an Object type code. For simplicity of understanding, think of it as a numbering system for all the entities, regardless if they are out of the box or custom. As a CRM Expert, you might encounter a situation where you will need to identify the Object Type code for an entity.
To identify the Entity name using the Object Type Code, follow these steps:
1. Enter your CRM instance.
2. Open any entity under any model, such as Accounts, Contacts, Cases, etc.
3. Open a New Record within the Entity
4. Once a new record is opened, pop out the record by selecting the icon on the top right side of the page.
5. Once enlarged, the Object Type Code is placed after the “etc.” equal sign within the URL.
Identifying the Entity of an Object Type Code
Sometimes you may receive an error message that states the Object Type Code but not the entity name or a Custom Entity Object Type Code that is not available online.
To identify the Entity name of an Object Type Code, follow these steps:
1. Follow the same steps in “how to Identify the Object Type code of an Entity” as shown above.
2. Once the record is enlarged, you can find the Object Type Code is placed after the etc. equals sign within the URL.
3. After the etc. equals sign, delete ONLY the number shown, replace it with desired number, and select Enter.
4. Now it will open a new record with the Entity Object Type Code you entered.
There you have it! For more Dynamics 365 tips and tricks, be sure to subscribe to our blog!
The federal government took a major step toward regulating ecommerce on Thursday when the Supreme Court upheld a South Dakota law that allows the state to gather sales tax from online businesses with at least $ 100,000 in sales from state residents or 200 transactions in the state annually. This overturned a ruling from 1992, Quill Corp. v. North Dakota, that prevented states from collecting taxes from companies without a physical presence in their state.
The 5-4 decision is meant to level the playing field between online sellers and traditional brick-and-mortar retailers. In the coming months and years, states will change their laws on ecommerce taxes based on this decision. Ecommerce sales added up to $ 450 billion in 2017, 13 percent of all retail sales.
Forty-five states have some kind of sales tax and online sales represent billions of dollars-worth of taxes every year, per NPR. Some states already have workaround laws in place to collect sales tax online, but experts predict they will scrap those in favor of legislation modeled after South Dakota.
Additionally, certain large online retailers already collect sales tax. Amazon charges taxes on all direct sales but not those from third-party businesses who sell through its site. Wayfair, one of three companies who challenged the initial South Dakota law, collects tax on about 80 percent of orders, according to The Hill.
However, this opens Pandora’s box for many smaller ecommerce companies that sell nationally but do not impose taxes. This provided certain online retailers with a competitive advantage – not only might it attract more customers to shop on the site, but the company did not need to worry about calculating or paying taxes on out-of-state orders.
Chief Justice John Roberts was not in favor of the ruling and expressed concern that the decision will slow the growth of ecommerce.
“Ecommerce has grown into a significant and vibrant part of our national economy against the backdrop of established rules, including the physical-presence rule,” Roberts wrote in the dissenting opinion. “Any alteration to those rules with the potential to disrupt the development of such a critical segment of the economy should be undertaken by Congress.”
Even before this decision, small businesses face a complex web of tax laws.
“Texas taxes sales of plain deodorant at 6.25 percent but imposes no tax on deodorant with antiperspirant,” Roberts wrote. “Illinois categorizes Twix and Snickers bars — chocolate-and-caramel confections usually displayed side-by-side in the candy aisle — as food and candy, respectively (Twix have flour; Snickers don’t), and taxes them differently.”
The President of the National Retail Federation, Matthew Shay, called for lawmakers to draw up universal rules that can be applied to all states and will minimize complications. While this would be ideal for retailers, it may not be realistic.
“Congress must now follow the Court’s lead and pass legislation implementing uniform national rules that provide consistency and clarity for retailers across the country,” Shay told The Hill.
This ruling will make robust commerce technology and tax compliance software a necessity for even small online sellers. They need a scalable way to automate taxes that may vary based on where a customer resides and a way to repay that money to the state. Technology providers will need to move quickly as ecommerce tax laws spring up.
Companies using a cloud system for financials and ecommerce are well-positioned for this change because as the vendor modifies the platform to address these challenges, updates are automatically pushed out to all customers.
A business platform that unifies commerce and financials is especially advantageous because it can calculate, capture and report on taxes across channels. The system automates tax-related tasks on all sales, whether an in-store purchase or online orders from customers spread across states, so staff doesn’t waste time dealing with such headaches.
Time will tell how this Supreme Court ruling impacts online retailers and how quickly, but change is brewing. What is clear is businesses with a unified platform that can painlessly manage sales tax will be better prepared for the change and continue to power the remarkable rise of ecommerce.
To learn more about the latest trends and news in ecommerce, check out this recap from the 2018 Internet Retail Conference and Exhibition.
Posted on Fri, June 22, 2018
by NetSuite filed under
