Tag Archives: Integrated
Your Data, Your Brand: Creating Trust in Integrated Workflows and Reporting
Every company is a data company. Insights Everywhere explores the ways companies are evolving to include analytics in their products as a market differentiator and revenue driver.
The key to success for apps of all kinds is stickiness, or getting users to, well, use your app regularly. The stickiest business applications are those that can be seamlessly embedded into the toolkit of your target audience’s daily work environment. Analytic apps are applications that can be bidirectionally embedded, rebranded, and integrated into everyday workflows, connecting employees and customers with data and insights to help them make smarter decisions.
When you’re evaluating a tool to enrich your core product or service, certain features are de rigueur: security, governance, compliance, etc. However, beyond these nuts-and-bolts elements, you also need to consider features that impact how your brand presents itself to users.
The power of branding
Brand-related features may even be the most important criteria when choosing a platform like Sisense to enhance your analytic app. Making sure your analytic app matches your brand’s look and feel is vital to ensuring that the application enjoys the full trust of the user. This includes the app’s user interface, colors, and fonts, but more importantly, you need to drive home the idea that data is integral to your organization. Your data (and any analytics presented to internal or external users) is one of your most important assets, and how these insights are displayed impacts your integrity.
Making data-based decisions is becoming increasingly important to organizations of all kinds. Savvy companies are finding ways to infuse insights into their workers’ daily tasks, allowing them to seamlessly make decisions within a business application. Additionally, these same companies are integrating insights and analytics into their customer-facing products to increase stickiness and even drive new revenue.
Wherever you’re putting data and insights, it’s imperative that any analytics presented to decision-makers be displayed within your brand’s guidelines. In short, your data and analytics must look and feel like they are coming from you.
For this reason, the Sisense product team requires every component built with APIs to keep this integration of data and analytics into other applications in mind. These APIs empower developers to tap into any Sisense interface or functionality and enhance, rebrand, or integrate it into the brand’s own analytic apps and off-the-shelf business systems.
Custom analytics with the Linux Pivot API
The newly released Linux Pivot encompasses a new set of APIs, allowing brands to customize the look and feel of, transform the data in, or change the structure of pivot tables to fit their unique needs.
Developers are motivated to extend and enhance their software using the functionality that standard and supported APIs (like the JavaScript APIs) offered over the pivot table. Using these APIs, developers can ensure that their custom solutions are backward compatible with every version upgrade and count on the vendor to announce breaking changes well in advance for them to mitigate issues. Their software becomes a fully functioning extension of the Sisense Pivot Table, never a hack.
To jump-start the adoption of the new Pivot Table APIs and offer cloud-native customers a list of reusable extensions, Sisense partnered with Paldi Solutions. The joint project took only a few weeks and some well-planned lines of code. Paldi’s team posted several extensions in the Sisense Plugins forum, including adding visual indicators to cells, checkboxes as interactive filters, and presenting sparklines to accompany the data (plus several other features).
Ravid Paldi, CEO of Paldi Solutions, puts it this way: “Two especially interesting features are the new ‘transformPivot()’ function with a very convenient cell selector for cells you wish to manipulate, and the ability to inject React components as your cell’s content. Cool stuff!”
For example, many of our customers in the retail industry present images of their products that align with each product’s key performance indicators inside an analytic app. These are presented in pivot tables; each image is clickable and allows the marketing manager to easily jump into their e-commerce campaign management tool or the product page on their Content Management System.
Taking our example a few steps further, let’s assume that inside the pivot table you have the forecast sales for each product, along with the allocated marketing budget. Using Sisense’s AI capabilities such as Forecast and AI Trends, the marketing manager can adjust the campaign budget within the analytic app to achieve the greatest return. It’s a fully integrated workflow that makes the marketing manager’s job easier and more productive.
Empowering with plugins
These add-ons extending the power of pivot tables are only a few of the numerous solutions customers, partners, and Sisensers post to the Plugins forum. As an open platform, Sisense offers an abundance of APIs, both REST and JavaScript, to embed, rebrand, extend, and customize analytic apps.
Whatever your company’s core product or service is, infusing data and analytics throughout will make it stickier, deliver more value to internal and external users, and can even help drive revenue from your data. Using a platform like Sisense, with an emphasis on flexible, powerful APIs (versus building your analytics from scratch internally), can be a game-changer when it comes to simplifying your analytics deployment. Analytics are the future of every industry, so choose a partner that’s as committed to your success as you are.
Tomer Lapid is a Product Manager for Sisense analytics and reporting. He brings 20 years of experience in a variety of R&D, customer-facing, leadership, and product management roles that he combines into one superpower: problem-solving!
5 Ways Integrated ERP Supports Healthcare Management Organizations
5 Ways Integrated ERP Supports Healthcare Management Organizations
Posted by John Goode, Senior Director, Channel Marketing
Physician offices, clinics and provider staffing companies often fall under the umbrella of “healthcare management” organizations, which serve as holding companies for a myriad of medical service providers. These organizations have very specific technology needs.
Accounting management, payroll administration, invoicing and other financial tasks are especially challenging. Healthcare management accounting processes are generally very different from those used in other industries. For example, healthcare providers must manage patient co-pays and the many different rates they’ve negotiated with various payers. Additionally, these organizations often operate in highly acquisitive environments.
Nolan Business Solutions and Oracle NetSuite offer solutions tailored to help healthcare management companies. Here are five ways a unified cloud ERP system can help them streamline operations while also saving time and increasing revenue:
- Supports scale. As a healthcare management company grows, its technology infrastructure becomes more geographically spread out and detached. For example, a medical service provider may have a long-range plan to partner with small doctors’ offices, at which point those doctors become partial owners of the healthcare management company. While this creates economies of scale on the procurement and insurance side of the business, and supports population health models (i.e., a general medical practice that also includes a pediatrician can refer younger patients to the pediatrician within their system) it introduces complexity often in the form of multiple on-premises systems. Using a cloud ERP solution, these growing entities can easily onboard new acquisitions without the need for new technology investments, implementations or internal IT resources.
- Easy integration of new entities. While there are many positives associated with merging multiple healthcare providers into a single entity, healthcare management companies face unique challenges in integrating independent clinics to their corporate portfolios. Most acquired companies are small to midsized practices and use platforms like QuickBooks for basic accounting functions. Others rely heavily on Excel spreadsheets. “We’ve seen some healthcare management organizations using 20+ different instances of QuickBooks,” said Diana Dunphy, a NetSuite Consultant with Nolan Business Solutions. “That’s because when a healthcare management organization buys a new entity, that entity still needs a legal ID in order to run its individual financial statements.” By consolidating those activities and files onto a single, cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) system like NetSuite, healthcare management organizations can bring all of their reporting, purchasing/procurement, financials and accounting onto one platform.
- Consolidates financials and leverages contracted rates. For many of these organizations, “trying to do consolidated financials is a nightmare,” said Dunphy. “That’s where NetSuite steps in.” With it, these companies can grow their practices in the way that they intended. For example, when a patient gets a flu shot, his or her insurance company is billed for a portion of the charge (e.g., a $ 100 flu shot may be paid in part by the patient [$ 20 co-pay] and the rest by the insurance company). This process is managed through a database that records patient revenues, deductibles and allowances. “The more patients the clinic can put into the system,” said Dunphy, “the better its contract rates will be.”
- Simple data extraction and sharing. Nolan Business Systems sets up NetSuite in a way that enables data extraction from the clinic’s billing system—via an application programming interface (API)—and into a NetSuite-ready journal entry. “The administrator pushes a button and a file is generated,” said Dunphy, whose team has years of experience working in the healthcare field, helping it consolidate and digitize its operations.
- Plug, play, and go. With its plug-and-play chart of accounts and a financial reporting structure that caters to healthcare management companies, Nolan Business Solutions’ implementations typically take 90-120 days to complete and include easy customizations and financial reporting structure. Six years in the making, its chart of accounts is continually honed and updated to ensure that it meets the needs of today’s healthcare management organizations. “We know our customers’ financial structures, and how to slice and dice their accounts,” said Dunphy. “Working closely with our clients, our chart of accounts just keeps getting better and better.”
Over the past decade, healthcare management organizations have significantly increased both their services and geographic coverage. With this growth comes new challenges, many of them related to accounting and financial management. By implementing a unified cloud ERP system and working with a provider like Nolan Business Solutions, healthcare management organizations get a solution that’s tailored to their industry and to their individual businesses. Access this info graphic and data sheet to learn more about how Nolan Business Solutions’ has developed a proven process for supporting healthcare management implementations.
by NetSuite filed under
How to Accelerate Your Sales Cycle: CPQ Integrated with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales
How important is it to you to respond quickly to customers’ requests for price quotes, and to produce accurate proposals that reflect their unique specifications?
Sales leaders we’ve spoken with agree that delivering accurate quotes in a timely manner helps their teams close deals faster. If you agree, then integrating leading-edge technology that ensures your sales team has the tools they need to accelerate their sales cycles should be high on your list of priorities for the upcoming year.
CPQ Partner Apps for Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales
In April 2019, that Dynamics 365 for Sales had partnered with the “best CPQ solution providers to deliver deep product integration with Dynamics 365 for Sales.”
These partnerships allow sales organizations to harness the power of configure-price-quote (CPQ) solutions to quickly, consistently and accurately configure their pricing and produce quotes from within their Dynamics 365 for Sales environment.
So What is CPQ?
(also known as Configure-Price-Quote) is a tool that integrates natively with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales to accelerate deals by quickly producing price quotes and sales proposals. Product configuration options and pricing rules help sales reps create quotes in minutes without the need for Excel spreadsheets and manual calculations.
A sales playbook guides reps through the quote creation process to ensure customers are getting the right products at an optimized price. By reducing error-prone manual tasks, a CPQ helps businesses streamline their sales process and helps move deals along the pipeline.
Below are the ways CPQ and Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales work together to increase efficiency. Consider making the integration before your 2020 sales kickoff so your sales team can achieve better results in the new year.
The Benefits of CPQ-Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM Integration
reported on the benefits of CPQ in their study on best-in-class organizations. Let’s take a look at 4 of these benefits and how they will help your sales organization raise the bar on performance against goals and elevate the customer experience.
CPQ Improves Organizational Capabilities for Faster, More Profitable Sales Deals
Source: Aberdeen Group, March 2015
Improved Sales Team Response to Request for Quotes
Sales reps who don’t use CPQ waste time searching for updated pricing sheets, supplier lists, sales assets, and proposal materials because they’re not integrated into the workflow.
Aberdeen’s research revealed that CPQ users ship an average of 21.9 proposals per rep per month, versus 9.9 proposals per month per rep for companies that don’t use CPQ.
Lack of efficiency affects not only response time, but quote accuracy as well. When sales reps use Excel spreadsheets or stand-alone tools that aren’t integrated with their CRM, it’s difficult to respond to requests for quotes quickly and the chances for error increase significantly.
Generate Complex Quotes with Ease
In a separate , 86% of organizations that use CPQ report that their sales reps are kept well-informed of pricing, promotions, and suppliers (compared to 73% of non-CPQ companies).
A CPQ is updated in real-time and gives sales teams a single source of truth about current pricing, promotions, supply levels, and discounts and allows sales reps to generate complex quotes easily. CPQ integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM ensures an automated, streamlined workflow from which sales teams can rapidly produce error-free proposals, quotes, and other sales documents.
Pricing and discounting rules built into the CPQ ensure a degree of flexibility in pricing that gives sales reps the agility to manage pricing by exception without the need to check with managers. Customers appreciate not having to wait for approvals and it gives them greater confidence in your organization.
Use of Personalized Quote, Proposal and Contract Templates
Templates are an essential part of automating the sales process and the CPQ solution will be a central repository for quote, proposal and contract templates. This ensures all quotes that go out are on-brand, follow pricing and discounting rules, and adhere to legal and regulatory guidelines.
Templates are a great way to streamline proposal and quote production, but customization and personalization are crucial to ensuring customers feel like they are not just a number. Personalization helps build trust with customers and CPQ software pulls customer information and data from the CRM into the proposal to reflect customer needs and previous conversations.
Avoiding “No Decision” Sales Losses
The Aberdeen study brings up an interesting point about “no decision” sales losses and how CPQ helps eradicate these disappointments. The study reveals that 39% of sales organizations that use CPQ are able to avoid “no decision” sales losses, compared with 19% of companies that don’t use CPQ.
CPQ-enabled sales teams use , and workflow of questions, to gather deal specifics and plug them into the software. Information such as buyer data, product requests, and time constraints are entered into the CPQ early in the opportunity management process. Armed with this data, sales teams can evaluate the deals to learn, based on predictive analytics, which are destined to win or fail.
A Stronger, More Efficient Sales Team
CPQ enables your sales team to be more efficient, respond faster, and use data to learn where to focus their efforts.
Are you ready accelerate your quote to cash cycle? Integrate CPQ with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales and you’ll soon see that your sales team is celebrating more closed deals and happier customers.
DealHub.io is a . Learn the advantages of DealHub CPQ integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales in this video:
Integrated Business Planning For High Tech: How Platforms Improve Execution And Drive Differentiation
In the vocabulary of today’s digital economy, “high tech” and “innovation” are virtually synonymous. This emphasis on innovation has driven a dramatic expansion in the definition of what high tech as an industry delivers to customers.
Today, it’s not just the computer on your lap and the phone in your pocket. It’s also the car you drive and the gadgets that control your home. It’s appliances with touch screens, shoes with sensors, watches with GPS. Across an ever-increasing range of possibilities, the high-tech industry prides itself on delivering products that change the way we live and work.
Innovation is so deeply ingrained in the high-tech industry that customers expect it. Innovation has become the norm – a commodity in itself. This, in turn, is making customer experience and service into an increasingly important differentiator.
Yes, coming up with the next big product is essential to staying relevant. But at the same time, the pressure is relentless to drive down costs, increase efficiency, and maximize ROI across all areas of operations – even in the face of ever-growing infrastructure, development, and research efforts.
Differentiation, in other words, is not exclusive to product innovation in the high-tech industry. It is also increasingly dependent on excellence in areas such as manufacturing, logistics, and supply chain management – and one of the keys to success across all of these areas is to develop an integrated business planning platform that helps tie all relevant activities together.
Platform considerations
For brand owners in the high-tech industry, you have to start somewhere – and this somewhere is typically a demand forecast, which becomes the drumbeat of your extended supply chain network. With expensive critical components and long lead times, even the smallest change in the demand picture can wreak havoc in the high-tech industry – particularly when there’s significant lag time between the actual change and the detection of it. And in an industry where demand is volatile and fluctuations are the norm, the ability to respond to short-term changes is critical.
Leading brand owners and manufacturers, therefore, put a premium on platforms that facilitate the ability to detect demand changes in real time and then respond effectively. Such platforms help you standardize and integrate supply chain processes, not only for demand and supply planning but also for collaboration with partners such as contract manufacturers, critical component and commodity suppliers, distribution partners, and customers. With the integration of disparate systems and the ability to handle the big data volumes associated with a global supply chain, you can realize the operational and planning efficiencies that help to drive down costs and improve performance.
A platform up to the task for high-tech brand owners and manufacturers should support the following:
- Collaborative sales and operations planning (S&OP): Today, S&OP needs to move from an insular process executed within planning silos to one that reaches out to include all planning constituencies on a more continuous basis. A robust platform helps to pull all relevant partners – inside and outside of the organization – into the planning process where quick collaboration can happen based on a single source of trusted data.
- Response and supply planning: To respond more effectively to demand fluctuations and supply disruptions, platforms should allow you to mix multi-level demand and supply matching and rough-cut capacity planning with embedded analytics and exception management – including the identification of gating factors. This can help you better prioritize demand, generate effective allocations based on promises to deliver, and improve response management.
- Inventory optimization: A platform that supports multi-echelon inventory optimization can drive down working capital investments and drive up service levels by helping you plan more effectively regarding inbound raw materials and finished goods in distribution centers. For outsourced manufacturing, this can also drive down off-balance-sheet liabilities. Support for demand-driven material requirements planning (DDMRP) with advanced analytics also makes it possible for you to develop better profiles of decoupling points and related buffer stock positions while generating a continuous flow of goods – thus reducing the MRP nervousness that is prevalent in the extended supply chains of the high-tech industry. This can help reduce the risk of stock-outs, optimize inventory carrying costs, and reduce the dependency on forecasts that are never perfect.
- Demand planning and sensing: By mixing data on historical trends and seasonal patterns with, say, live data from sell-in and sell-through data (even down to point-of-sales systems), you can sense shifts in demand in real time. Statistical models can help you develop accurate mid-term forecasts, while demand-sensing capabilities enable you to react to near-term demand changes as they occur. You can also use machine learning technology to identify correlation patterns and automate the detection of demand changes.
- Multi-tier supply chain collaboration: Most high-tech supply chains rely on multiple tiers of trading partners that need to be aligned effectively. As opposed to regular physics, information in supply chain networks typically flows easier upstream than downstream. So, next to communicating forecast and demand information upstream to multiple tiers of manufacturers and suppliers, it is important to also obtain more real-time information of manufacturing status, inventory on-hand, and on-order positions of trading partners to make better and more informed decisions. Highly effective companies leverage the power of business networks to achieve scalability and lower the hurdle of onboarding or switching suppliers – thereby increasing resiliency and automation.
- Real-time monitoring: To help tie all activities together and monitor events in real time, you also need some sort of visibility layer – a dashboard, cockpit, or control tower. Such a layer should enable you to not only track critical KPIs but also drill down into the details without having to jump over to separate systems. From such a monitoring environment, you should also be able to manage alerts, run simulations, and even collaborate with partners as needed.
As high-tech brand owners and manufacturers continue to seek out ways to compete more effectively in crowded markets, the ability to execute on business plans and respond with agility to changing market dynamics is becoming an increasingly valuable point of differentiation. A proper, integrated business planning platform that helps you consolidate your view of all relevant data and act on that data with confidence can help you improve decision-making, speed your execution, and – ultimately – enhance the customer experience with quality products that meet demand.
To learn more about best practices for integrated business planning in the high-tech industry, download the IDC report on digital business planning.
Integrated Business Planning For High Tech: How Platforms Improve Execution And Drive Differentiation
In the vocabulary of today’s digital economy, “high tech” and “innovation” are virtually synonymous. This emphasis on innovation has driven a dramatic expansion in the definition of what high tech as an industry delivers to customers.
Today, it’s not just the computer on your lap and the phone in your pocket. It’s also the car you drive and the gadgets that control your home. It’s appliances with touch screens, shoes with sensors, watches with GPS. Across an ever-increasing range of possibilities, the high-tech industry prides itself on delivering products that change the way we live and work.
Innovation is so deeply ingrained in the high-tech industry that customers expect it. Innovation has become the norm – a commodity in itself. This, in turn, is making customer experience and service into an increasingly important differentiator.
Yes, coming up with the next big product is essential to staying relevant. But at the same time, the pressure is relentless to drive down costs, increase efficiency, and maximize ROI across all areas of operations – even in the face of ever-growing infrastructure, development, and research efforts.
Differentiation, in other words, is not exclusive to product innovation in the high-tech industry. It is also increasingly dependent on excellence in areas such as manufacturing, logistics, and supply chain management – and one of the keys to success across all of these areas is to develop an integrated business planning platform that helps tie all relevant activities together.
Platform considerations
For brand owners in the high-tech industry, you have to start somewhere – and this somewhere is typically a demand forecast, which becomes the drumbeat of your extended supply chain network. With expensive critical components and long lead times, even the smallest change in the demand picture can wreak havoc in the high-tech industry – particularly when there’s significant lag time between the actual change and the detection of it. And in an industry where demand is volatile and fluctuations are the norm, the ability to respond to short-term changes is critical.
Leading brand owners and manufacturers, therefore, put a premium on platforms that facilitate the ability to detect demand changes in real time and then respond effectively. Such platforms help you standardize and integrate supply chain processes, not only for demand and supply planning but also for collaboration with partners such as contract manufacturers, critical component and commodity suppliers, distribution partners, and customers. With the integration of disparate systems and the ability to handle the big data volumes associated with a global supply chain, you can realize the operational and planning efficiencies that help to drive down costs and improve performance.
A platform up to the task for high-tech brand owners and manufacturers should support the following:
- Collaborative sales and operations planning (S&OP): Today, S&OP needs to move from an insular process executed within planning silos to one that reaches out to include all planning constituencies on a more continuous basis. A robust platform helps to pull all relevant partners – inside and outside of the organization – into the planning process where quick collaboration can happen based on a single source of trusted data.
- Response and supply planning: To respond more effectively to demand fluctuations and supply disruptions, platforms should allow you to mix multi-level demand and supply matching and rough-cut capacity planning with embedded analytics and exception management – including the identification of gating factors. This can help you better prioritize demand, generate effective allocations based on promises to deliver, and improve response management.
- Inventory optimization: A platform that supports multi-echelon inventory optimization can drive down working capital investments and drive up service levels by helping you plan more effectively regarding inbound raw materials and finished goods in distribution centers. For outsourced manufacturing, this can also drive down off-balance-sheet liabilities. Support for demand-driven material requirements planning (DDMRP) with advanced analytics also makes it possible for you to develop better profiles of decoupling points and related buffer stock positions while generating a continuous flow of goods – thus reducing the MRP nervousness that is prevalent in the extended supply chains of the high-tech industry. This can help reduce the risk of stock-outs, optimize inventory carrying costs, and reduce the dependency on forecasts that are never perfect.
- Demand planning and sensing: By mixing data on historical trends and seasonal patterns with, say, live data from sell-in and sell-through data (even down to point-of-sales systems), you can sense shifts in demand in real time. Statistical models can help you develop accurate mid-term forecasts, while demand-sensing capabilities enable you to react to near-term demand changes as they occur. You can also use machine learning technology to identify correlation patterns and automate the detection of demand changes.
- Multi-tier supply chain collaboration: Most high-tech supply chains rely on multiple tiers of trading partners that need to be aligned effectively. As opposed to regular physics, information in supply chain networks typically flows easier upstream than downstream. So, next to communicating forecast and demand information upstream to multiple tiers of manufacturers and suppliers, it is important to also obtain more real-time information of manufacturing status, inventory on-hand, and on-order positions of trading partners to make better and more informed decisions. Highly effective companies leverage the power of business networks to achieve scalability and lower the hurdle of onboarding or switching suppliers – thereby increasing resiliency and automation.
- Real-time monitoring: To help tie all activities together and monitor events in real time, you also need some sort of visibility layer – a dashboard, cockpit, or control tower. Such a layer should enable you to not only track critical KPIs but also drill down into the details without having to jump over to separate systems. From such a monitoring environment, you should also be able to manage alerts, run simulations, and even collaborate with partners as needed.
As high-tech brand owners and manufacturers continue to seek out ways to compete more effectively in crowded markets, the ability to execute on business plans and respond with agility to changing market dynamics is becoming an increasingly valuable point of differentiation. A proper, integrated business planning platform that helps you consolidate your view of all relevant data and act on that data with confidence can help you improve decision-making, speed your execution, and – ultimately – enhance the customer experience with quality products that meet demand.
To learn more about best practices for integrated business planning in the high-tech industry, download the IDC report on digital business planning.
5 Ways to Close Deals Faster Using Contract Management Software Integrated with Microsoft Dynamics CRM
According to research by Forrester and Aberdeen, it takes an average of 3.4 weeks to get a contract approved, but using Contract Management software can reduce contract approval time an average of 82%.
Deals don’t always close as fast as we’d like. The contract review, approval, and negotiation phase is all too often a sticking point on the journey from quote to cash.
We have shared a lot of information about Configure-Price-Quote and the benefits of integrating a quote generation tool with Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Sales. But, another part of the sales process that creates delays, and can kill deals, is the contract phase.
Manual contract generation and approval is a time-consuming and error-prone process. Contracts can languish for days or weeks while Finance, Operations, and Legal review and approve contracts. What’s needed is a level of control over managing contracts, while ensuring contracts move forward quickly.
5 Ways Contract Management Software Helps Close Deals Faster
Contract management software, , helps close deals faster in these ways:
- Organization: Automated workflows prompt internal parties such as sales, finance, and legal to perform their review, redlining, and approval then move the contract forward to keep the approval process on track.
- Simplicity: Using pre-built templates and workflows, sales representatives can quickly create and send contracts without difficulty.
- Productivity: Approvals move quickly since all parties in the process have a structured process to follow, step-by-step.
- Efficiency: Conversations, redlines, and documents are all located in one digital collaborative environment, eliminating the back and forth of emails and hastening the negotiation process.
- Storage: Contracts, and all versions of each document, are stored and synced in one place. Version control is a non-issue, and contracts can be retrieved from a central repository with ease.
A standard automated workflow for each buyer, includes review by business teams, redlining, e-Signature, storage of agreements, and submission to buyers. The same stages and steps are followed for each customer interaction, ensuring efficiency and accuracy.
Why Choose Contract Management Software?
Adding new sales software is an investment, but one that can increase your sales teams’ success is certainly worth considering. shows that about twice as many Best-in-Class organizations report automating their contract management processes than do other organizations. Automating the contract management process enables Sales, Operations, Finance, and Legal to spend less effort on the contract process and generate greater revenue.
When selecting contract management software, you should select a solution that is packed with features to hasten the sales process, including:
- Tracking and monitoring
- Customizable templates
- Contract change notifications
- Contract redlining capability
- Ability to digitally collaborate, edit, and share documents internally and externally
- Easy set up of legal requirements and internal business rules
DealHub’s Best-in-Class Contract Management Software
DealHub Contract Management Software for Microsoft Dynamics CRM has several features that stand out, including predictive sales playbooks, automated workflows, and deal tracking. This unique solution provides buyer insights that allow sales reps to track contract progress and pinpoint bottlenecks.
Other benefits of DealHub Contract Management Software include:
- Real-time data and analytics
- Contract redlining
- e-Signature
- Unified platform – from quote to close
- User-friendly
- Approval workflows
- Seamless Microsoft Dynamics CRM integration
Learn more about .
DealHub is Easy to Use
DealHub Sales Proposal Software, which includes contract management, was designed to be easy to set up and modify for business leaders and sales representatives. Your company can be set up quickly, and since it’s easy to use, your sales team will be up and running in no time.
Check out DealHub’s reviews on G2 to learn why we are rated the .
If you’re looking for a centralized, simplified contract management process that helps your sales team close deals faster, it’s time to consider implementing contract management software in your business.
DealHub Contract Management Solution includes Contract Redlining which enhances the buyer’s experience by replacing a cumbersome negotiation process with an efficient digital environment. .
One Product, One Partner for Integrated ERP and CRM – Microsoft Dynamics 365 from Crowe
“Organizations with integrated ERP and CRM are 2.5 times as likely to have the ability to share and integrate data with the extended enterprise,” according to Aberdeen research (August 2016).
Is your company using an integrated ERP and CRM system? Do you work with just one software package and one software partner?
Not all technology firms specialize in both areas. And not all software packages include both ERP and CRM functionality.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 (formerly Microsoft Dynamics AX and Microsoft Dynamics CRM) combines Finance and Operations, Sales, Customer Service, Marketing, Field Service, Talent (HR), Retail, Project Service Automation and AI.
The team at Crowe specializes in the entire Microsoft Dynamics 365 package – and .
Who is Crowe?
Crowe is one of the largest public accounting, consulting, and technology firms in the United States. Crowe’s Microsoft practice is focused on delivering best-in-class customer engagement through industry specialized accelerators and productivity enhancing apps delivered across Business Apps (Dynamics 365), Modern Workplace (Security / Compliance), and, Data and AI (Big Data, Data Warehouse, Analytics, AI).
Performance Consulting Areas:
Plus, Crowe offers a range of industry solutions and business apps developed for Microsoft Dynamics 365 across a variety of industries and specializations:
Crowe Industry Solutions for Microsoft Dynamics 365/CRM:
Designed for employee benefits brokers, this add-on provides enhanced visibility into your operations and efficiency to your CRM system.
Crowe Business Apps for Microsoft Dynamics 365/CRM:
Bring your customer data into better view for faster and easier organizing and updating of individual records.
Keep your projects on schedule and within budget with automated workflow and resource tracking.
Forecast measurable revenue against individual and organizational goals.
Streamline your recordkeeping with predefined folder templates.
Simplify the administrative tasks of tracking your time with an easy user interface.
Crowe Industry Solutions for Microsoft Dynamics 365/ERP:
Delivers an ERP platform capable of meeting the unique needs of the metals supply chain while also enabling an organization to leverage powerful analytics to enable improved employee decision-making.
Targets issues such as electronic data interchange and release accounting optimization, and more to deliver a complete solution for suppliers modernizing their enterprise application approach.
Brings government entities an industry solution for Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP that helps them overcome financial and operational obstacles to enterprise resource planning.
Crowe Business Apps for Microsoft Dynamics 365/ERP:
Streamline management of your leased assets while complying with new accounting standards.
Increase sales efficiency and service with a complete view of customer order status.
Quickly view purchase orders to help improve supply chain visibility and changes.
Streamline with central access to open, pending, and paid invoices across Dynamics AX companies.
Reduce confusion and sequence and schedule production jobs on a single, easy-to-use form.
Avoid period-end surprises by reconciling open items accurately across one or multiple entities all from a single screen.
Manage and gain visibility to journal entries across multiple AX entities – all in one app.
Segment your financial reporting and reduce time spent on allocations in Microsoft Dynamics AX.
Automate the opening and closing process and eliminate data entry errors with user-level control in Dynamics AX.
Quickly review and update multi-company batch process jobs from a single form in Microsoft Dynamics AX.
T-Account Visualizer
View and efficiently manage financial data across accounts in a standard format.
Standardize and copy notes containing critical data throughout the Microsoft Dynamics AX platform.
Bring efficiency and transparency into operational functions.
What do Crowe Customers Say?
To invest so much with one firm, you need to feel confident they can deliver. Clients tell us when our technical expertise, industry knowledge, and applied technology come together, exceptional service and value result.
What is the value of One Crowe?
With a team this size, your entire business is covered. ERP, CRM and more. That is “One Crowe”. According to Jim Powers, CEO, Crowe, this means, “We are able to bring the entire intellectual capital of the firm to bear in supporting any client, in any location, through any service team.”
Next Steps
to discuss your complete Microsoft Dynamics 365 project.
By Ryan Plourde, Crowe,
Embracing Cloud For Integrated Data Management, Not Just Database Deployment: Part 2
Part 2 of a 2-part series. Read Part 1.
In Part 1 of this series, I spoke with Ken Tsai, global VP and head of Product Marketing, Database and Data Management at SAP, about how companies can manage data in the cloud and different approaches to consider. Here, we address hybrid workloads and how the flexibility of the cloud can help spur innovation.
Let’s start with your point of view on hybrid workloads.
As I explained in Part 1, having a database platform as a service deployed in the cloud, you have the benefit of integrating with any native cloud functionality that’s provided from any third party. But if you think about this logically, what does that mean?
It benefits a lot of customers that may have data spread across on-premises environments and in the cloud. If for whatever reason they can’t move all the data directly into the cloud, they can still create a private instance of that dataset directly in the cloud and enjoy the benefits of the different data computing capabilities in the cloud.
My favorite example, which you may have heard me share before, has always been Google Photos. Think about the possibility of the data set that any on-premises customer has, even stored on a laptop. Having that automatically processed and enhanced, providing a value-added service back to the user, is incredible.
Consider a marketing or sales team sharing data in the cloud. This data can automatically go through a “do not call” list, or go through a comparison to existing contacts who are already in the sales pipeline to avoid interrupting the current sales process. This data-use authorization traditionally took two, three, or even four weeks to process. But with the CRM in the cloud, do-not-call list sitting somewhere else, and contact lists from events in your mobile device, you can actually demand these business-level cloud computing services to give you the answer you want immediately.
You’ve touched on it already, but to summarize, why is a multi-cloud deployment strategy important?
From the customer’s perspective, having the freedom of cloud choice is very, very important. As technology advances and government regulation continues to be solidified (even on a regional basis, such as GDPR), it becomes a necessity to have the means to actually alter that or change the platform very easily down the road, since nobody knows what the future holds.
This is not about just putting your data in the cloud, but having the freedom to move the data, the data processing system, and the applications from one cloud to the other and even potentially back to on-premises. That’s really the core of what the customer needs in our completely connected cloud world.
How can the cloud accelerate innovation?
I think cloud is one of those catalysts that makes everything faster, just because it’s already available. I remember the early days, when I was doing programming, and maintaining the software was always an issue, updating it, making it available, and accessing it. But that is all gone. Now you’re really focusing on the value-added application and the ability that we want to build on top of it.
I fundamentally believe that everything will go the route of cloud in the future, but that doesn’t mean that everything goes into one single public cloud. The data centers themselves will translate into a private cloud environment as we mature these technologies stacks.
The principles of simplicity and eliminating latency and redundancy that you can see in data-driven applications will ultimately drive the requirement of these technology solutions going forward for business use.
What’s the simplest way for someone to start a cloud journey?
I love this question. I think, just like any cloud options, the simplest way to actually engage and start their journey is by trying it. With SAP HANA as a service, for example, the software’s there, the capability’s there, the trial system’s there. And accessing it is not a long cycle of waiting for the software to arrive, then waiting for the next version to arrive. With the cloud-oriented paradigm, this is all delivered directly to the customer up front, and this is why I’m excited about building software solutions directly in the cloud.
Evaluating different capabilities and finding the right fit up front, rather than doing it as a post-sales process, benefits customers. And from solution provider perspective, it is only through this continuous learning in user and system behavior that we will figure out future improvement and automation opportunities.
Learn more
Learn more about how to start your cloud journey with SAP HANA as a service on SAP Cloud Platform and SAP HANA Data Management Suite.
This article originally appeared on Medium and is republished with permission.
It also appeared on the SAP HANA blog.
Propelling Your Business Forward With Integrated Financial Plans
Part 3 in the “Intelligent FP&A” series
Today’s business world is significantly different from that of just a few years ago, and the velocity and magnitude of change and uncertainty will only accelerate. We are operating in an environment of high “VUCA” – volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.
Today’s decidedly intricate enterprises may comprise multiple businesses, product lines, departments, and geographic locations. Aggregating all of the associated data required for financial reporting, forecasting, budgeting, analytics, and long-term strategic planning presents an enormous obstacle. One way organizations have overcome this challenge is to embrace a collaborative business planning philosophy.
When organizations are not planning in sync
Traditional approaches to financial planning are no longer sufficiently flexible or sophisticated to enable rapid response to dynamic changes in the business environment. As a result, financial plans can end up disconnected from the day-to-day reality of the organization and ultimately, the financial planning process becomes an exercise in playing catch-up rather than a path to desired results. Experience has confirmed that financial planning often suffers from inadequate direction and integration. Failure to adapt financial planning processes to reflect the changing environment can lead to a number of issues:
- Financial plans are not linked to downstream decision-making.
- There is no continuity across planning cycles, which inhibits plan quality.
- The tools that link the processes are inadequate.
- Financial planning is an exercise of aggregating bottom-up submissions.
- Inputs and assumptions are inconsistent.
- There is too much reliance on “gut feel.”
The root cause of these challenges (not just the symptoms) is what we are attempting to cure with collaborative business planning. Instead of failing to address why are we planning in the first place, we should be able to produce a great strategic plan that is connected to planning, budgeting, and forecasting.
We want our capital budgeting, long-range planning, annual planning, strategic and operational planning, and management reporting to be integrated. We want to be able to execute real-time scenario-planning. We want to help multiple business areas translate the financial strategy into their individual plans and targets. And we want everyone to be speaking the same language.
When organizations are planning collaboratively
By incorporating this philosophy with a robust planning and analysis system, organizations can connect the financial planning function (led by the FP&A group) across all of the business units and functions. This is the way to improve operational alignment and financial performance. A collaborative approach can link strategic and operational planning with financial planning.
The benefits of this approach are multifold. It can:
- Provide an integrated planning platform
- Generate a holistic understanding of performance drivers and identify top financial drivers
- Quantify the financial impact and interdependencies across planning alternatives
- Optimize strategic planning and resource allocation
- Quantify financial risk
- Increase business flexibility
- Help answer what-if scenarios
Think of your company as a shell in a competitive rowing event. Each department is paddling in various directions, with various amounts of power. Once collaborative business planning is incorporated with the FP&A team as the coxswain, and with performance drivers in place and in sync across the departments, everyone rows in the same direction at the same cadence. The shell shoots right across the water.
Learn more
We will be hosting a number of events all over the world, where we will be discussing and diving deeper into these critical issues and topics. In addition to our Global FP&A Roundtable series, we hope to see you at Financials2018 EMEA in Prague, October 16– 18, and the Financial Excellence Forum in New York City.
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