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Tag Archives: Making

Are you making the most out of Dynamics 365 CRM / Power Apps? Here are 12+ productivity apps to check if you are!

February 18, 2021   CRM News and Info

When great solutions like Dynamics 365 CRM / Power Apps hit the market, it revolutionized the way industries organized and managed their customer data as well as engaged and maintained relationships with them. Foundational software like a CRM is by nature huge in its capacity to deal with information and simultaneously hosts a massive library of features to do all kinds of information processing to allow smart business solutions.

Such a software base is the ideal opportunity for innovators and technology enthusiasts and so we took this opportunity to create out-of-the-box solutions that powered businesses to achieve their organizational goals by becoming more productive, efficient and tech savvy. With our current 12+ productivity apps we have an arsenal of solutions that can tackle any business challenge that a business can throw at us.

Let’s unpack these apps to see the many ways your business can make the most of the Dynamics 365 CRM / Power Apps.

Integration Apps:

Maplytics™ – Maplytics™ is a leading mapping solution that is certified and preferred solution by Microsoft on AppSource. It is a geo-analytical mapping app with features like Territory Management, Radius Search, Appointment Planning, Optimized Routing, PCF Controls, Census Data, Heat Maps, Truck Routing, etc. that helps users to visualize and analyze Dynamics 365 CRM data on map.

InoLink – InoLink provides bi-directional integration between Dynamics 365 CRM and Intuit QuickBooks thereby giving users a 360-degree view of customer accounting information within Dynamics 365 CRM.

1 Click Productivity Apps:

Click2Clone – Be it cloning parent-child records, records with more than 100-line items or creating multiple copies of a single record – name it and Click2Clone will get it done with just a single click.

Click2Export – An expert app to schedule, export and email Dynamics 365 CRM Reports/CRM Views/Document Templates (Word, Excel, Email) in 5 different formats – Excel, Word, PDF, CSV or TIFF – with just a single click.

Click2Undo – Undo recent or past changes in record(s) or restore deleted record(s) in Dynamics 365 CRM in 1 Click with Click2Undo. A worthy combination of ‘ctrl+z’ and ‘recycle bin’ features rolled into one handy app.

Attachment Management Apps:

Attach2Dynamics – SharePoint, Dropbox, or Azure Blob Storage – Attach2Dynamics will help you to store & manage your documents/attachments in a cloud storage of your choice from within Dynamics 365 CRM.

SharePoint Security Sync – A sure shot way to ensure secure and reliable access to confidential documents stored in SharePoint along with seamless attachment management from within Dynamics 365 CRM.

Visualization Apps:

Kanban Board – Visualize Dynamics 365 CRM data in Kanban view by categorizing the entity records in lanes and rows as per their status, priority or Business Process Flow stages.

Map My Relationships – A smart way to visualize the relationships between Dynamics 365 CRM entities or related records and connections in a mind map view.

Stand-Alone Apps:

Alerts4Dynamics – Send alerts and notifications to your team members through pop-ups, email or form notification which can be viewed from anywhere in CRM.

User Adoption Monitor – Keep track of user actions and performances in Dynamics 365 CRM on daily, weekly or monthly basis.

Lead Assignment and Distribution Automation – Assign all pending workload, incoming Leads automatically in a fair and even manner through Lead Assignment and Distribution Automation. No mismanagement, no cherry picking.

Billing Apps:

Recurring Billing Manager – Automate and streamline the billing processes – generating invoices, sending payment reminders, calculating charges on delayed payments – in Dynamics 365 CRM through Recurring Billing Manager.

Subscription Management – Ultimate time-saving app specifically designed for Software Publishers and Value Added Resellers (VARs) with flexible billing schedules, payment reminders and penalty calculations.

Auto Tax Calculator – Eliminate manual calculations, increase accuracy, save time for the entire team and improve productivity by automating and managing tax calculations in Dynamics 365 CRM with Auto Tax Calculator.

Let’s us give you an example of document management in Dynamics 365 CRM.

Storage space is limited in Dynamics 365 CRM. Even with native SharePoint integration, managing attachment in Dynamics 365 CRM seemed to be a tedious work. Many of our clients faced this issue. Keeping this in mind, we introduced two document management apps – Attach2Dynamics and SharePoint Security Sync.

Attach2Dynamics provides native integration between Dynamics 365 CRM and three different cloud storages – SharePoint, Dropbox, and Azure Blob Storage. Users can store and manage attachments in cloud storage of their choice from within Dynamics 365 CRM. Its features include Bulk Migration of history attachments, drag & drop, upload, download, copy link, email, create folder and much more. In one shot, users can free their disk space in CRM by moving the attachments to the cloud storage of their choice.

SharePoint Security Sync, on the other hand is an advanced version of Attach2Dynamics. It enhances the basic integration of Dynamics 365 CRM and SharePoint by syncing the security privileges of D365 with that of SharePoint. In other words, it restricts the access to confidential documents stored in SharePoint based on the security privilege assigned to the user in CRM. In addition to this, just like Attach2Dynamics, it enables document management in SharePoint from with Dynamics 365 CRM.

With these two apps, users can get maximum utility of storage space in Dynamics 365 CRM. No more worry about running out of space.

All of our apps are Preferred Apps on Microsoft AppSource, you can directly try our apps from the AppSource or you can head on to our website to get started with your free trial. If you need a walkthrough of any of the features you can send us a mail at crm@inogic.com to understand how these solutions fit into your organization and solve your personal business challenge.

So until next time – stay safe and stay productive with our Productivity Apps!

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Making the Most of the Apache Pulsar Messaging Platform Has Never Been Easier

February 7, 2021   TIBCO Spotfire
TIBCO ApachePulsar scaled e1611853232760 696x365 Making the Most of the Apache Pulsar Messaging Platform Has Never Been Easier

Reading Time: 2 minutes

A responsive digital landscape has increasingly become a must-have for businesses in order to create the resiliency to weather challenging market conditions and to differentiate themselves through re-imagined customer experiences, streamlined operations, and real-time insights. An important piece necessary for you to achieve these goals is the distribution of real-time data across the business enabling you to capitalize on it. 

Messaging is a key technology needed to meet the growing demand for real-time data distribution. As a result, messaging needs have grown more complex as businesses need solutions for data streaming and processing in addition to message queuing. 

Apache Pulsar has emerged as an exciting solution due to its highly flexible and scalable nature, as well as its ability to natively support both streaming and message queueing in one solution. 

What is Apache Pulsar?

Apache Pulsar is an open-source, cloud-native distributed messaging and streaming platform. Pulsar was originally developed at Yahoo! but was contributed to the Apache Software Foundation in 2016 and is now a top-level Apache project. 

The key features of Pulsar include: 

  • Support for both streaming and queuing messaging systems
  • Geo-replication
  • Multi-tenancy
  • Persistent data storage
  • Low latency, high throughput communication
  • Pulsar Functions, a serverless computing framework that offers stream-native data processing.

Announcing the TIBCO Flogo® Connector for Apache Pulsar

Our new Apache Pulsar connector allows you to quickly and easily connect to your Pulsar broker and provides out-of-the-box activities and triggers to send and receive messages. With this connector you can:

  • Securely connect to your Pulsar broker using TLS or a JSON Web Token (JWT)
  • Configure triggers that subscribe to messages published to a topic, with support for Exclusive, Shared, Failover, or KeyShared subscription types. 
  • Send messages to a topic by mapping string or JSON content, with optional compression.  

The Apache Pulsar connector is great for many use-cases, such as subscribing to messages produced by edge computing devices and performing transformation and/or analysis of them. 

You can also use Pulsar to create an architecture for publishing messages on any broker and topic in your network, based on the state of your Flow, sending these results to another topic for distributed communication. 

The Apache Pulsar connector is included in every TIBCO Cloud Integration subscription, as well as the TIBCO Flogo Enterprise license. You can also contribute to the open-source project on GitHub at this Project Flogo repository!

Messaging needs have grown more complex as businesses need solutions for data streaming and processing in addition to message queuing. Click To Tweet

Learn More About What TIBCO and Apache Pulsar Can Do For You

More information on the TIBCO Cloud Integration Apache Pulsar connector, including connector documentation, can be found here. In addition to Apache Pulsar, TIBCO has a broad portfolio of over 200 connectors that can be used to connect virtually any endpoint in your IT landscape, including business applications, databases, legacy technologies, and more. Our full portfolio of connectors can be found here. 

For more information on Apache Pulsar and how to choose the right messaging platform for your business, check out our detailed whitepaper, Choosing between Kafka, Pulsar, and Other Messaging Technologies.

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Making and plotting a Fourier transform

December 2, 2020   BI News and Info

 Making and plotting a Fourier transform

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Making a faster alternative for {PatternSequence[1, PatternSequence[2, 3 ..] ..] ..}

September 23, 2020   BI News and Info

 Making a faster alternative for {PatternSequence[1, PatternSequence[2, 3 ..] ..] ..}

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Announcing RapidMiner 9.7 — Making data science a team sport

June 10, 2020   BI News and Info
photo of people doing fist bump 3184430 Announcing RapidMiner 9.7 — Making data science a team sport

Today, we’re excited to announce the next step in RapidMiner’s growth—RapidMiner 9.7. With the launch of 9.7, we’re continuing our work to put people at the center of the AI journey by fostering better collaboration, all while improving the oversight and management that’s critical to creating successful machine learning projects.

Here’s a look at the biggest changes in 9.7.

RapidMiner Server is now RapidMiner AI Hub 

As part of the 9.7 launch, we’ve rebranded RapidMiner Server as RapidMiner AI Hub. This new name communicates the AI Hub’s function of connecting machine learning to the people, processes, and systems that make it all work. Integrating all of this through the AI Hub will help tear down the silos that can stymie machine learning projects and help them succeed. You can read more about the name change here.

AI Hub includes a new projects framework

The change in name to AI Hub comes with the addition of a projects framework that allows for unprecedented central collaboration and governance of AI projects.

Projects help teams convert ideas into models easily and iteratively, so they can deliver value for the business. People with different tooling preferences and skillsets can collaborate in a single platform that supports automated, visual, and code-based authoring styles. Everyone involved in machine learning projects can work together in the same place, easing collaboration friction.

Projects offers precise version control

In addition to allowing everyone to work in the same place, projects also delivers a rare combination of agility and traceability by integrating fine-grained version control based on Git standards. This allows the tracking of all changes—including who executed them—which creates clear and distinct model lineages in case you need to backtrack or merge project code. What’s more, “Snapshots” functionality lets you easily roll back to earlier versions of projects, supporting iterative and agile AI development.

Supports large-scale collaboration

To support collaboration at large scale, we’ve introduced enterprise-grade identity & access management to RapidMiner’s products. This includes an enterprise-grade single sign-on experience, creating a seamless experience across the RapidMiner platform. It also includes precision access control that facilitates fine-grained user, group, and role management.

All of these new features make collaboration between coders, RapidMiner Studio users, and RapidMiner Go users even easier. If you’re interested in the nitty gritty of the release, you can check out the What’s New page for all the details.

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B2B Buyer Behavior Is Changing: Making Experience The Top Objective

March 5, 2020   BI News and Info
 B2B Buyer Behavior Is Changing: Making Experience The Top Objective

In this new decade, businesses continue to navigate digital transformation in hopes of finding new ways to grow their brand while remaining cost-efficient. To support these initiatives, more companies are turning to digital channels when purchasing software. This allows for a much quicker process from the discovery and trial phase to purchase and use. With the pace of business continuously speeding up, digital buying is attracting more attention and starting to take a serious lead.

A shift in buyer behavior like this brings a lot of change to how things are bought and sold in the B2B space. To understand key transformations in buying patterns and digital purchases, we partnered last year with Futurum Research to source and publish the 2019 B2B Digital Buyers’ Journey Report. The findings are key to helping better inform B2B sellers’ strategies for the years ahead. Some interesting trends show businesses are no longer sticking to old timetables for buying software and are de-prioritizing legacy relationships when deciding who to buy from.

Understanding key shifts in today’s B2B buying process

According to the research, nearly 80% of businesses no longer rely on calendarized buy cycles to purchase software. In fact, more than half say they are ready to make a purchase anytime a solution is needed to keep the business moving forward, rather than waiting for budget approvals or biding time until upgrade and purchase periods come around. Similarly, the data also uncovered another major shift: fewer than one in five organizations still consider legacy relationships a factor when choosing enterprise software solutions to purchase digitally.

As a result of these changing habits, we are seeing the digital experience firmly take its place at center stage. The most simple, efficient, and highly personalized experiences are the ones that keep existing customers coming back and attracting new ones. Personalization combined with one-to-one digital engagement between a brand and each of its customers aren’t new concepts. But as this paradigm shift in buyer behavior takes a deeper hold on the B2B world, it’s important that B2B brands get it right by embracing these techniques.

Keeping up with the speed and complexity of modern business

The conversation for some time has centered around access to customer data and the ability to glean real-time insights from that data in order to make it actionable. However, the process of personalization and engagement is becoming increasingly more complex. The speed at which business is done now has a lot to do with this and puts even more pressure on brands to provide unique customer experiences at each new interaction and purchase stage.

On top of this, B2B buyers have specific demands when deciding what to purchase. Product trials are still very important along the digital buying journey, with 90% of organizations considering them to be a key factor in the decision-making process. In addition, 85% rated one-on-one online product demos and video product demos as highly important to their buying journey, further showing the important role of trials in determining how and what is purchased.

Embarking on the digital buying journey

Digital channels allow businesses to move far more quickly than they can with traditional sales processes. While many B2B purchases still require a higher level of touch with a salesperson or team, businesses are increasingly showing that they also want alternative options for faster, lower-touch ways to buy. It’s clear an omnichannel approach to B2B buying, one that provides digital options as a faster way to purchase when needed, is essential to move business forward.

The pace at which change and technological advancement are occurring across industries is a major driving force in the behavior shifts happening in the B2B buying landscape. Purchases are now based on needs of the moment, and brands are choosing to engage with the solution providers that give them the best, most personalized experience, tailored to their unique business goals.

As more brands look to source and purchase the solutions they need via online channels, B2B businesses need to let go of traditional sales methods. The path forward will require organizations to leave behind the comfort of being a legacy provider in favor of building new relationships with customers online – ones that map to their growing digital needs in order to keep business moving.

This article was originally published on CustomerThink.com and is republished by permission.

Learn more about the best ways to create omnichannel customer experiences. 

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Under Pressure: 78 Percent of People Feel More Pressure from their Employer than Family When Making Big Decisions

February 6, 2020   NetSuite

Business executives are more anxious about big decisions at work than critical decisions at home that impact their family, according to a new study conducted by Oracle NetSuite. The new study, Unlocking Growth, which provides insights from more than 1,000 business executives in the UK, France, Germany, UAE, Benelux and the Nordics, found that 94 percent are overwhelmed by data when making decisions. Over a quarter are putting risk mitigation ahead of potential success to avoid impacting their career, and 21 percent rely on gut feel and intuition to make critical decisions.

“There’s a lot of talk about a changing economic, technological and political backdrop, but when you step back, organizations across Europe have an increasing number of growth opportunities if they can focus their time and resources in the right places,” said Nicky Tozer, VP EMEA, Oracle NetSuite. “To achieve that focus, organizations need to address the decision-making and planning challenges identified in this study so they can use data to adapt to change faster than their competition and unlock new growth opportunities.”

A Culture of Decision-Making Pressure

Executives across countries and industries are under immense pressure when making critical business decisions and as a result many are putting risk mitigation ahead of potential success.

  • Most executives (78 percent) said they experience more pressure when making a big decision at work than in their personal life.
  • Fears about negatively impacting revenue (40 percent), damaging personal reputation (22 percent), losing their job (17 percent), and adversely impacting co-workers (13 percent) are the top four areas executives are concerned about.
  • Risk aversion is even higher amongst organizations that define themselves as high-performers – 62 percent admit they actively pursue risk-averse decisions, even in the knowledge their choice may not be as successful.

An Unhealthy Relationship with Data

Information overload, time pressure and a lack of trust in senior management is strangling the decision-making process and leading executives to default to ‘gut feel’ to inform their decision-making strategy.

  • Almost all (94 percent) executives are overwhelmed by data during the decision-making process. Executives in France (99 percent) reported the biggest issues with data, while executives in the UK (92 percent) reported the least.
  • Time pressure and more complex processes are also making decision-making harder. 27 percent of executives have had less time to focus on critical decisions in the last year and 28 percent note more people have become involved in the process, an issue that was particularly prevalent in the UAE (51 percent).
  • Only 19 percent – falling to 12 percent in the Nordics – of business executives noted they trust senior management when seeking decision-making guidance. Colleagues (39 percent) and industry peers (21 percent) were the most trusted.
  • 41 percent of respondents expect to turn to a robot as a source of support when making critical decisions in the next year. Executives in France (51 percent) were the most likely, while executives in the UK (33 percent) were the least.
  • 67 percent acknowledge they are not making highly data-driven decisions, with UK executives (73 percent) the most likely to only partially consider data or default to “gut feel”.

A Positive Outlook for Growth and Message to Senior Management

Executives across countries and industries expect their organizations to grow, but highlighted the need to rethink the planning process to ensure data can be used to adjust business plans and that everyone is working towards a clear plan for success.

  • 56 percent of executives expect their business to grow in the next two years. Executives from the UK were the most positive (63 percent) followed by the United Arab Emirates (57 percent), Germany (56 percent), Nordics (54 percent), Benelux (50 percent) and France (49 percent).
  • Retail industry executives (33 percent) were the most confident that their organizations will exceed growth targets followed by manufacturing (27 percent), distribution (22 percent), and software and technology (29 percent). Executives in professional services (16 percent) and nonprofit organizations (11 percent) had the least confidence.
  • Almost three quarters (74 percent) of executives say their organization is good at capitalizing on new opportunities, but there are serious concerns about the planning process. Only 31 percent say they are proficient at adjusting business plans based on data analysis and almost one quarter (24 percent) do not think senior management provides a clear plan for success, dropping to just 16 percent in the Nordics.

Methodology
For this study, NetSuite partnered with Raconteur to survey 1,050 manager level and above employees. Respondents originated from the UK (300 respondents), France (150 respondents), Germany (150 respondents), United Arab Emirates (150 respondents), Benelux (150 respondents) and Nordics (150 respondents) and represented small and mid-sized organisations from across a range of industries. Participants took part in an online questionnaire and were surveyed in October and November 2019.

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 19,000 customers in 203 countries and dependent territories.

For more information, please visit https://www.netsuite.com.

Follow NetSuite’s Cloud blog, Facebook page and @NetSuite Twitter handle for real-time updates.

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.

Trademarks
Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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Meena is Google’s attempt at making true conversational AI

January 29, 2020   Big Data

Conversational AI is a catch-all term for natural language models for artificial intelligence that can interpret human words, speak to people, or carry out tasks or computation with natural language.

But talk to any of the best-known AI assistants today — Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant — and they’re not exactly conversational. They can tell you jokes, answer factual questions, and even respond to multiple queries without the need to keep repeating a wake word, but conversation or chit-chat is still very much a human endeavor.

To share progress towards deep learning designed to carry a conversation, Google today introduced Meena, a neural network with 2.6 billion parameters. Meena can handle multiturn dialogue, and Google claims it’s better than other AI agents built for conversation and available online today. It even told an off-the-cuff joke.

Google today also released Sensibleness and Specificity Average (SSA), a metric created by Google researchers to measure the ability of a conversational agent to maintain responses in conversation that make sense and are specific. Humans rank around 86% in SSA, and in initial tests, Meena scores a high of 79%. Mitsuku, an AI agent created by Pandora Bots that’s won the Loebner Prize for the past four years, got a 56%, while Microsoft’s XiaoIce, which speaks Mandarin Chinese, got a score of 31%.

The work is detailed in “Towards a Human-like Open Domain Chatbot,” a paper published Monday on preprint repository arXiv.

Meena is trained on 40 billion words and utilizes a seq2seq model and a variation of the popular Transformer architecture. Google first released Transformer in 2017, but since then the language has grown to rank among the highest performing language models around.

SSA evaluates dialogue based on static performance with a fixed set of prompts or interactive performance, which allows for free-flowing conversation. Each evaluated conversation was required to last at least 14 turns and no more than 28 turns. Results are then arrived at based on the percentage of turns considered specific or sensible. SSA penalizes responses with generic responses.

The SSA standard Google proposes is different than the metric other AI assistants have set for assessing a truly conversational AI.

Now in its third year, the Alexa Prize is a challenge for teams of student developers to create AI that can hold a conversation for up to 20 minutes. The finalist last year got up to about 10 minutes. The latest round of finalists will be announced in May. You can speak with last year’s finalists by simply saying “Alexa, let’s chat.”

Amazon is already beginning to grow its multiturn dialogue offerings. Conversations is a feature that packages voice app recommendations in conversational multiturn dialogue. At the time of launch last summer, Amazon VP of devices David Limp called it “the holy grail of voice science.”

Microsoft acquired the company Semantic Machines in 2018 and last year began to showcase more multiturn dialogue for users of the Microsoft Bot Framework.

AI assistants that can maintain a conversation may be able to secure closer bonds with humans and do things like provide emotional support to people, or cure the loneliness epidemic, as former Alexa Prize head and current Google Research director Ashwin Ram put it in 2017.

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Samsung’s VP of research on making Ballie mobile, personable, and nonthreatening

January 26, 2020   Big Data

During a keynote at the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month, Samsung unveiled Ballie, a small, autonomous rolling sphere with a built-in camera, microphone, and speaker. Details were tough to come by (and still are), but in an interview with VentureBeat, Sajid Sadi, vice president of research at Samsung and the head and cofounder of the Samsung Think Tank Team, shared the vision behind the robot and his hopes for its future.

Think tank

Think Tank Team is the roughly 50-person skunkworks department behind tech underpinning products like Samsung Flow, the Galaxy Gear S2, and Samsung Health. The team is responsible for Project Beyond, a 3D omniview camera in a carryable form factor, and Project Green, an in-house farm-in-miniature that taps fogponics materials developed by NASA. Think Tank Team also developed the Spot, which turns any normal TV (and the space in front of it) into a touch- and gesture-sensitive area. And it commercialized Health+, the family of heart rate and stress-sensing algorithms on every recent Samsung smartphone.

Sadi, who graduated from Columbia University with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and from MIT with a master’s degree and PhD, was also the cofounder and chief architect for education tech startup Tikatok, an acquisition target of Barnes and Noble. He was among the Think Tank Team’s founding members roughly seven years ago, and a lead on Project Small, progenitor to the Galaxy Gear.

 Samsung’s VP of research on making Ballie mobile, personable, and nonthreatening

Above: The Ballie concept Samsung demoed during a keynote at the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show.

Image Credit: Samsung Ballie

“We have experts in different areas — everything from physics to machine learning, computer vision, mechanical engineering, electronics, software, industrial designers, visual designers, you name it,” said Sadi. “And what this essentially allows us to do is to solve a problem with the optimal solution.”

Design

With Ballie, two issues off the bat were mobility and personability. The robot needed to be able to traverse a range of different floor types, from hardwood to tile, carpet, and concrete. And it couldn’t look intimidating to those who might encounter it, including children and pets.

Think Tank Team considered a cloth design before settling on the current iteration: a two-wheeled scalloped plastic frame that’s about the size and weight of a grapefruit. The thinking was that the plastic would better stand up to wear and tear, as well as to accidental bumps and scratches inflicted by overzealous users.

“If you think about all the robots that we have in the house today — vacuum cleaners, lawnmowers, and whatever else — they basically operate behind the scenes,” said Sadi. “They’re invisible to you until you see them. Ballie is intrinsically different, because it’s … working with you much more directly. It’s more like a human being in that way, and so there’s a need for it to be safe for you mentally, not just physically — you have to relate to it in a positive way.”

 Samsung’s VP of research on making Ballie mobile, personable, and nonthreatening

To this end, Ballie communicates where it’s “looking” by physically pointing its camera (which is flanked by a flash and a four-LED status indicator) in the direction of an object (or subject). It rolls and pivots on its axis deliberately to avoid startling anyone nearby. And like a well-trained pooch, it follows behind a person upon command, maintaining a close but comfortable following distance.

Sadi notes that Ballie can be told to “go away” if a person within view doesn’t wish to be observed. It also employs AI that works without an internet connection to minimize any unnecessary transfers of data. “We want the software to be secure across the board … [and to guarantee] that data isn’t just being channeled up to some server for things to happen,” said Sadi.

Ease of use

As is true of most devices, Ballie needs to be intuitive to use. That’s why Sadi and team designed it with out-of-the-box functionality that requires little in the way of configuration. AI enables Ballie to serve as a fitness assistant, as well as an interface to various devices — like smart TVs, motorized curtains, and autonomous vacuum cleaners. It can act as a security robot, patrolling rooms at night and when folks are away during the day. And it taps into smart home device platforms, like Samsung’s SmartThings, for enhanced orchestration.

Ballie can also double as a home monitor for children, pets, and elderly users — particularly those with limited mobility. Sadi notes that Ballie’s ability to move around enables it to respond to a person wherever they are. Parents could ask Ballie to check up on kids to make sure they’ve completed their homework, for instance, or monitor the types of television shows and movies they’re watching. As it’s doing all that, it might also watch for health-related emergencies, like falls.

 Samsung’s VP of research on making Ballie mobile, personable, and nonthreatening

Above: Samsung’s Ballie can offer alerts for senior caregivers.

Image Credit: Samsung

“We’re doing a lot of research to make something that’s approachable, not just to someone who’s very technical, but to my 70-year-old dad,” said Sadi. “We want the motion to be important. [Ballie is] connected to an individual … so that [allows] care scenarios.” He added that the technology is “proactive” in this context — “you don’t have to press a button.”

Developer tools

Sadi cautioned that despite what’s been shown publicly, Ballie is internally considered a concept rather than a product — at least for now. That said, he asserts it will be priced “affordably” if and when it ever comes to market, and that it’ll improve and grow over time through regular software updates. He also expects that many of Ballie’s systems will be exposed to hobbyists who might wish to tinker.

“Not hitting a good price point and, in addition, not hitting the right feature points where people get enough value from the device [is] not having a product-market fit,” said Sadi. “We have to answer the questions: How do we take all of robotics, which has been around for just over century, into account and bring it to the house? How do we introduce people to the idea of robots that track with you? How do we make those robots useful? How do we make it hospitable? How does the robot actually fit into your life?”

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Coat Giveaway Becomes a Powerhouse Nonprofit Making Life Better for Thousands of Economically Disadvantaged Students

January 8, 2020   NetSuite
little%20foundation%20(1) Coat Giveaway Becomes a Powerhouse Nonprofit Making Life Better for Thousands of Economically Disadvantaged Students

Posted by Morgan St. Clair, Social Impact Communications Manager 

Clearly, Rose Hanley was onto something when, after handing out coats at an inner city elementary school in St. Louis, Mo., in 2001, she decided she’d found her mission.

In fact, she’d found even more than that: She’d discovered the seed for a trailblazing nonprofit, The Little Bit Foundation, that would grow to provide support in the form of everything from clothing and dental hygiene kits to books, STEM curriculum and career discovery for thousands of economically disadvantaged students.

But as the foundation gradually expanded its reach over its first 15 years, complexity caught up with it. With only QuickBooks to run an operation that was supplying students at more than 20 St. Louis schools, things grew chaotic.

Despite having $ 250,000 worth of inventory consisting of 400 different SKUs, the nonprofit had no inventory management capabilities, and orders were being managed by hand. The result was a lot of inaccuracy.

“We’d run out of stuff and for us that’s an issue,” said Tim Hydar, director of distribution. “We don’t want to tell a student we’re going to have a coat and then next week, when we come, we don’t have that coat.”

Add with managing more than 100 volunteers, it was clear the foundation needed a more sophisticated technology platform, one that would allow it to scale the operation by providing abundant access to data and powerful reporting capabilities.

Eventually, The Little Bit Foundation chose to deploy NetSuite after engaging with the Oracle NetSuite Social Impact team. During the fall of 2016, the foundation managed the implementation itself, although it has turned to the Suite Pro Bono and Suite Capacity teams for help solving specific problems.

Opening the Floodgates

The move to NetSuite has opened things up in a big way. In the three years since, the foundation has expanded to 42 schools, now counts 250 weekly volunteers, and is able to seamlessly process 250 orders each day. Hydar believes the nonprofit could handle 1,000 daily orders.

Operationally, the foundation is able to ensure that schools are more prepared than ever by verifying every item on every order, and providing school administrators with lists of what to expect for each student.

To accommodate the scale NetSuite helps make possible, the foundation moved out of the 3,500-square-foot donated space it occupied and into a 33,000-square-foot building it purchased. That has enabled it to expand its inventory to more than $ 1 million worth of goods representing 900 SKUs. And those goods are more varied than ever. The foundation has added a junior category for girls, and begun distributing dental and feminine hygiene kits.

The larger facility has also made it possible to create pick aisles, which has helped shrink order assembly from an average of eight minutes per order to just two minutes. Meanwhile, the foundation received two donated handheld scanners from the Schnuck’s grocery chain, and it’s deploying NetSuite’s Warehouse Management System Lite, which will enable it to take full advantage of those scanners for more efficiency.

The foundation also has been able to easily support two different distribution models. For short-term needs, the foundation establishes a stocked boutique at each of its partner schools, which students can visit if they need clothes that day, whether it’s because their clothes are tattered or they have an accident at school. For meeting longer-term needs, the foundation places orders for new items that are delivered the following week by volunteers.

The foundation’s expanded reporting capabilities are enabling it to provide schools with detailed summaries of its activities. It tracks all programming, distribution of goods, and the growing list of services it delivers, which now includes medical screenings, eye exams, and hygiene instruction. (The foundation even places washers and dryers in each school so that students and parents can do laundry free of charge, using donated detergent, which is also tracked.)

The foundation also has begun establishing mentorship programs, such as the one it’s formed with Riverview Gardens School District in which it tracks each student’s history, year by year, and provides guidance to help high school students transition into the world.

“That is just an example of how a district said, ‘Here’s an issue of ours. Our students aren’t ready. When they graduate, they don’t know what to do next,’” said Hydar. “And so we came up with a program.”

The foundation also uses NetSuite to perform voluntary audits, which it uses to demonstrate its financial and operational health to potential partners and donors.

Diving Deeper

Next summer, the nonprofit plans to revisit its CRM situation. It currently uses an application called DonorPerfect to manage information on donors and donated items, but it’s not integrated with NetSuite. Hydar said the plan may be to engineer a full integration, or simply standardize on NetSuite CRM.

In the meantime, as The Little Bit Foundation expands its NetSuite use, it constantly discovers opportunities to realize additional benefits. And while it managed the initial deployment itself, Hydar said the help the foundation has received from NetSuite and one of its partners Allied Cloud Solutions, has been invaluable as it seeks to add advanced modules and create complex reports.

“We’re able to ask NetSuite Pro Bono team and the Suite Capacity people, ‘Hey, this is a specific donor we need to report for. These are the criteria we need. Can you help us create this?’ And by the end of the Pro Bono project, we have that,” said Hydar.

“Without the partnership that NetSuite has given us, we would not have had all the success we’ve had.”

Posted on Tue, January 7, 2020
by NetSuite filed under

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