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3 major signs that indicate it’s time to Automate your Recurring Invoices within Dynamics 365 CRM/Power Apps!

December 19, 2020 CRM News and Info

What’s the one factor common to all businesses and holds the most value? Yes. Money. Majority of businesses are focused on sales and revolve around using their Dynamics 365 CRM to bank in more sales. They want to use it to its full utility to capture their leads, convert them, and continue to service them. However, the same numbers are not reflected when it comes to taking action for optimizing the process of carrying out the sales for their customers. This changes when a simple-to-use and efficient solution like Recurring Billing Manager is introduced.

Recurring Billing Manager, now available on Microsoft AppSource, is an app that makes billing a piece of cake. It is a mix of automated intelligence, bulls-eye accuracy, as well as time and effort saving convenience. How do you know if you really need a solution like this? We’ve identified the top signs that indicate a reason for concern and a demand for change. Have you noticed the below signs?

Sign #1: Multiple Billing Schedules prove to be a burden

The biggest question with multiple clients in your billing pipeline is figuring out and organizing when each of the clients has to pay and exactly when the bill should be scheduled. This can prove to become a management nightmare if payments start to slip. But this is old worries with Recurring Billing Manager. Recurring Billing Manager provides Flexible Billing Schedules that change the way you deal with bills.

Recurring Billing Manager gives you the control of billing schedules: set which invoices should be generated, when they should be generated, how frequently they should be generated and what line of items should be a part of the new Invoice.

That’s not all; you can create multiple Billing Schedules and customize them. You can use the common billing attributes such as billing length, frequency, reminders, delayed charges, and even include multiple products as per your requirement. Using this feature of Recurring Billing Manager, seeing multiple bills will only make you happy.

Sign #2: Payments are delayed

A growing company always has limited attention time. When the workload gets heavy or the company has a major upcoming project that needs more eyes, it’s common to have operations like billing that does not stop work fall behind. With Recurring Billing Manager, Reminder Schedules takes care of this for you by sending payment reminders to your clients. You can set up a schedule for reminders with respect to invoices that are past due or for upcoming renewals. What’s more is that every Reminder Schedule will have Reminder Rule(s). These rules outline when the reminders should be sent, the email templates to be used, to whom it should be sent, etc.

So, you can now channel your focus to more pressing tasks while Recurring Billing Manager automates your reminders for you.

Sign #3: Inaccurate/Zero Compensation for Delayed Payments

Let’s be practical. Receiving a cleared invoice right on time through all clients is seldom the case for many businesses. Along with this being an inconvenient situation, it also adds a time and effort consuming overhead to the team for calculating the penalty charges.

With Recurring Billing Manager’s Delayed Charge Schedule, the penalties are calculated automatically for you. You can create a schedule for the delayed charges that the customers must pay for their overdue invoices. The UI is made simple to use so you can simply choose parameters like the percentage of penalty, its frequency and from when it should be charged, and you will be given the calculated penalty.

This helps you to be accurate in your calculations every time and ensures that the additional time doesn’t go to waste. This also eliminates any room for bargaining from clients to wiggle out of paying calculated overdue as sales people have a claim that the systematic and automated generation of penalty is out of their control. Compared to manual control, this allows representatives to deal with difficult situations by simply relying on the automated process of penalty generation.

Did you notice any of these signs in your business? If yes, then don’t wait anymore! End the year with a resolution to make your processes more optimized and your time better utilized. Here’s even a free 15 days trial for you on our website or Microsoft AppSource to try it before you buy it. If you would have us assist you in any way, you don’t have to think twice before contacting us at crm@inogic.com.

So, until the next time – try Recurring Billing Manager and make it the last bill you generate manually!

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

Two equations identical but opposite signs have the same Maclaurin series in Mathematica: Is that possible?

October 2, 2020 BI News and Info

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Recent Questions – Mathematica Stack Exchange

8 Signs You Need to Invest in Your CSP Business

September 10, 2020 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

There is an expansion in CSP revenue for Microsoft partners, as demand continues to rise within the Microsoft Cloud market. Yet, we also see CSPs struggling to accelerate past initial roadblocks to scale their recurring revenue. As your client number begins to increase, so does the workload and the customer’s expectations. What results is a bottleneck creating friction in your revenue growth plan.

If your CSP business is experiencing any of these eight friction areas, it’s time to examine a new process and/or system.

1. You’re using Excel Spreadsheets and emails to track your customer’s changes

This first example is very common, and if you’re reading this, I’m sure you’re nodding your head. Tracking changes through email communication, then documenting that change in an excel spreadsheet can be painful work. Steve Cakebread called out this type of process in a recent interview with his former colleague, Tien Tzuo: “automation is key. A lot of companies realize this way too late. You can’t just throw bodies at the problem anymore. People just don’t want to do that kind of work these days.”

2. Revenue/Sales Models and Billing are not aligned

A sales strategy not aligned with your billing processes is a recipe for significant friction amongst critical teams. Striking the right balance between allowing your sales team to be more creative in product definition, pricing, and deal terms and your billing teams’ ability to support and provision these requests is paramount. Creating a harmonious workflow between each team enables your sellers to spend more time closing business, with your billing team collecting Cash more efficiently.

3. Sales Teams are spending too much time to turn around quotes

If you’re a sales team member, you dread having that quote returned to you with corrections from your billing team. If you’re a sales leader or a business owner, you want your sales team out in the field selling. Creating a standard process for quoting, including product definition, terms, and pricing parameters, frees up your sales team to sell more. Having to customize pricing on every deal creates friction in your sales velocity and slows revenue.

4. Waiting until you receive Microsoft/Provider Invoices to invoice your customers

This area is also quite common with CSPs, who are keen on waiting for providers to invoice before sending out client invoices. The result is friction with cash flow and increasing risk, in that you don’t know what your customers have purchased and have no record through the billing period. This strategy is reactive, which customers don’t like and can lead to attrition.

5. Collecting cash before provisioning

We see this a lot from Dynamics customers, and it’s an outdated model that can decrease client satisfaction. This strategy often stems from the difficulty in accommodating changes or tracking changes between collecting Cash and provisioning. This area is ripe for automation and needs to be examined before your customer satisfaction begins to decrease.

6. You only have one billing frequency

What’s best for you is not always what’s best for the customer, unfortunately. However, this challenge is a good thing because your client list is beginning to grow, and enabling your team to offer multiple billing frequencies without impacting the business is a natural step in your CSP business’s growth. Customers expect certain flexibility, and promoting this within your systems will empower your sales teams to close deals faster.

7. You don’t let customers self-manage

We’re now deep in the customer experience conversation because this is one request we repeatedly hear from customers: they want transparency and the ability to manage their licenses on their own. In the CSP world, customer experience is the leading indicator of customer retention, and providing an optimal experience is why customers stay. Creating a self-service portal is what customers want. Of course, you should put guard rails in place, including a view into when changes were made and by whom. Manually entering these changes, creating reports to track the changes, then processing the addition/reduction all creates a long process.

8. You spend too much time on reconciliation

Reconciliation is undoubtedly a hot-button concern for all billing teams. They want everything to match up correctly, and rightfully so. The fastest way to alleviate this concern is to have an integrated system that connects provisioning with billing. This automation relieves stress on your billing team, mitigates the risk of any error, and helps everyone focus on the areas of work that excite them.

If you’ve read this far, so you must be experiencing at least one of these challenges. The good news is Work 365 has you covered. Even better news: Microsoft Incentive Co-op funds can be utilized for the purchase of Work 365. If you’re a CSP partner and want to accelerate your business’s growth this year, visit the page to learn more about Work 365.

Work 365 is the holistic business application built on the Microsoft Cloud, boosting customer engagement, unlocking sales and service opportunities, and collecting Cash. Explore how Microsoft CSP Partners are growing their business with Work 365.

I am a Dynamics 365 enthusiast. I enjoy building systems and working with cross-functional teams to solve problems and build processes from lead generation to cash collection. Work 365 is a global developer of the Billing Automation and subscription application for Dynamics. Helping companies to streamline business processes and scale their recurring revenue.

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

Jamie Foxx Signs Feature Film Producing Deal With Sony Pictures

September 10, 2020 Humor

Jamie Foxx and his producing partner, Datari Turner, have signed an overall deal with Sony Pictures Entertainment to develop and produce feature films.

The first project in development that Foxx and Turner are producing for the studio under their new deal is an untitled action thriller written by Juel Taylor and Tony Rettenmaier, which Foxx is also set to star in.

“Not only is Jamie Foxx one of the most talented and decorated actors in the world he is also an idea machine,” said Sanford Panitch, president of Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group. “As a company, we have been lucky to work with Jamie in Baby Driver and Amazing Spiderman, but his creativity as a producer is his most exciting role yet. Jamie is wildly creative, funny, and brilliant, he walks the walk, he talks the talk and we are so proud to be in this partnership with Jamie and Datari. We already have a few projects secretly going and this is only the beginning.”

Foxx and Teyonah Parris recently joined John Boyega in the sci-fi mystery “They Cloned Tyrone” for Netflix and Macro. Foxx won an acting Oscar for “Ray” and was nominated in the supporting category for “Collateral.” He starred in the legal drama “Just Mercy” and nabbed the supporting actor trophy at the NAACP Image Awards earlier this year.

Foxx is currently starring in Netflix’s “Power Project,” and will be seen in Pixar’s “Soul” in the role of a passionate music teacher. He’s also set to star in Blumhouse’s “Spawn.”

Turner produced the Netflix film “Uncorked,” earlier this year starring Courtney B. Vance and Niecy Nash, and “Nine Days,” starring Winston Duke and Zazie Beetz. Foxx is repped by CAA, LBI Entertainment, and Ziffren Brittenham.

Source: Variety

Charlamagne tha God Launches New Podcast Network With Jess Hilarious, 85 South, & More On IHeartMedia

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6 Signs You May Be Ready for a CRM Switch

March 15, 2020 CRM News and Info

In today’s evolving business environment, every operational decision is critical — and that includes best practices for managing the customer journey. The customer relationship management platform is an integral part of the process. In fact,
91 percent of companies with more than 11 employees use a CRM system.

Because of the time it saves and the structure CRM delivers (and its ever-growing importance in the overall sales tech stack), it can seem daunting for businesses to make a switch, but the reality is there are a few clear signs that it’s time to make a CRM change, even if it means rebuilding integrations and essentially starting from scratch.

1. No One is Using It

It sounds obvious, but how many of the people who are supposed to be using your CRM platform actually use it? If your answer is anything less than 90 percent, it’s not working as it should.

Generally speaking, low CRM utilization is related to one of two underlying issues. First, it’s possible that some users actually do not need access to the system any longer. Users may make a job change internally or leave the company. Roles and responsibilities also change.

Second, and perhaps the more common issue, is that you may have low adoption of the platform. Perhaps you weren’t given adequate onboarding from the platform in the form of training, documentation and support.

An investment in CRM technology is not a set-it-and-forget-it proposition. Rather, it requires ongoing training, guidance and service to prevent abandonment by users. If your team doesn’t know how to use and maximize your platform, you may experience fallout in the form of low adoption — and if so, what are you really paying for?

2. Your Budget Is Firm… Really

For many vendors, renewal time is an opportunity to increase monthly recurring revenue without delivering any new features or functionality. As a customer, your options are fairly binary: Deal with the hassle of switching providers to save 20 percent, or swallow the 20 percent annual increase, which could represent a substantial amount of money in the long term.

You even could end up paying for features you don’t need. Although it might involve short-term pain, finding a platform that fits your needs and is within your budget — and that you know will stay within your budget — might be the best bet.

A little extra research up front can pay long-term dividends. If you’re not making the most out of your CRM but continue to pay through each price hike, it’s time to switch.

3. Your Data Is All Over the Place

Today’s Software as a Service-driven ecosystem has made data silos more commonplace. Your sales team might use a standard CRM platform to follow up with leads, while the marketing team uses a separate system to send newsletters and special offers. The implementation team might leverage yet another system to keep track of projects and customer onboarding.

Before you know it, your organization uses a dozen or more tools that aren’t meant to integrate and fail to provide a comprehensive view of the customer journey.

Investing in a unified CRM platform for sales, marketing, and delivery is the single fastest and most effective way to cut overhead costs and make the most out of every marketing dollar spent.

It also ensures that employees who engage with customers will have the exact same view of the customer data, whether they work in marketing, sales, delivery or support. That’s great for your customers. Your CRM should be a single shared source of truth on customer data. If it’s not, then you need to look for another CRM solution.

4. You’re Overwhelmed by the Features

There is no shortage of CRM platforms in the marketplace, and thus there is no shortage of features available to businesses. It can be tough for a midsize business to know which features are the most important now — let alone which features will be the most important in the future.

Business models evolve fluidly as new market entrants constantly challenge the status quo and accelerate the pace of change. The target you’re marching toward now could be wildly different from the one you’re trying to hit when you were courting CRM vendors.

This ladders back to adoption rates. If features don’t align with your objectives, your teams won’t use the system… and then what are you paying for?

Midsize companies don’t need feature sets that align with their current needs. Rather, they need solutions that are flexible enough to adapt to meet their needs when things inevitably change. Choose a scalable CRM that can adapt to meet your needs as your company grows or as changes occur.

5. It’s Helping Your Sales Team… and No One Else:

On the flip side, the pace of advancement in the CRM world means platforms can manage anything from marketing to customer support to implementation. Gone are the days when CRM was just a tool for the sales team.

If you want your data to live in one place, which is the best practice for your customers, you need a platform that can do it all.

Get clear on what your priorities are, and make sure you’re using tech that can help the most teams in your organization — whether marketing, customer service, implementation, project management, or anything else — because the functionality almost certainly exists, even if you’re not currently using it.

6. You’re Using Outdated Technology

Cloud computing has ushered in a complete transformation of business and what businesses are able to accomplish. Software that required a robust IT staff and team of database administrators just a decade or two ago now is instantly accessible for a fraction of the cost.

Despite the cloud’s prevalence, legacy systems still plague a sizable portion of midsize companies. CRM is no exception. When your system is installed onto your server, rather than cloud-based, it can create a number of data accessibility issues.

Moving to a cloud-based system can eliminate bottlenecked data, resulting in less administrative overhead, improved transparency, and a healthier pipeline.

Knowledge Is Power

Switching your CRM can be an effective way to boost efficiency, reduce administrative and infrastructure costs, and maximize the impact of your sales stack.

Although it’s not a decision to be made lightly, investing an adequate amount of time to gather helpful resources, talk to your users, and understand your unique situation will help you reevaluate the CRM market with a clear focus.

Armed with this information, you’ll be in an excellent position to consider a switch.

Tony%20Kavanagh 6 Signs You May Be Ready for a CRM Switch
Tony Kavanagh is CMO of
Insightly innovator of scalable CRM software that enables companies to go beyond transactions and grow lasting customer relationships. Kavanagh is responsible for Insightly’s go to market strategy and execution, focusing on small, midsize and enterprise businesses. Prior to Insightly, Tony held CMO roles at Actian, DataStax and Desk, a Salesforce company. Tony holds a bachelor’s degree from University College, Dublin; a Master’s of Business Studies from the Smurfitt Graduate School of Business; and membership in the Institute of Chartered Accounts.

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CRM Buyer

Clear Signs Businesses and Their Accounting Partners Need to Move on from QuickBooks

September 10, 2019 NetSuite

Posted by Jason Glass, Senior Director, Partnership Development

As a starter system, QuickBooks is a logical and economical choice. It provides the basic functionality that companies need to get going, supports a chart of accounts and manages both accounts payable and receivable. But QuickBooks could also be holding businesses back from achieving their full potential. And not just QuickBooks customers, but the partners and independent accountants that support them. As companies start to grow, expand internationally, or encounter more complex financial reporting requirements, their dependency on the QuickBooks system can turn into a burden.

That’s because this general ledger system doesn’t manage inventory across multiple sales channels; provide insights into the products that companies have on hand at a given time; streamline their ordering processes; or manage the reams of data that these companies receive and generate on a daily basis. It can also fall short when it’s time to add a new business, analyze sales or manage complicated cash flow reporting. Indeed, QuickBooks can hold back a fast-growing business.

For independent accounting professionals and other businesses supporting the QuickBooks ecosystem, this means their fastest-growing, most successful clients are either seeing their growth slow, or walking out the door when they move to a different system. Unless, they support a more sophisticated system like NetSuite, these partners constantly need to replace successful clients with smaller, less established customers.

Though most customers probably recognize the shortfalls of QuickBooks and the need to innovate in order to keep pace, some may be reluctant to upgrade, replace, or enhance their business systems. Others aren’t convinced that they’ll be able to find a solution that can meet their needs in an affordable way, choosing to instead just “make do.” Unfortunately, those decisions can turn out even more costly in the long run.

Implementation partners and independent accounting professionals can often play a key role in helping a business to determine when the time is right to move on to a more sophisticated accounting system and what products might be right for them.

Here are five signs that it’s time for businesses to look beyond QuickBooks and implement a unified, cloud-based financial system:

They’re not sure what’s really happening across their businesses. When departments, management groups and teams can’t share information, tools, priorities and goals with one another, the siloed mentality kicks into gear and takes over. Companies can break out of this mindset by deploying a financial system that generates and shares insights and data in real-time across the entire enterprise.
Financial consolidation across systems takes ages. As they grow, businesses may find themselves dealing with a bewildering complexity of foreign currencies and languages, accounting standards, taxation structures and reporting and compliance requirements that far outstrip the capabilities of the standalone accounting applications they’d traditionally used for financial consolidation. Cloud computing offers a scalable model for sophisticated financial consolidation in a fraction of the time, and without the substantial capital expenditure of a typical on-premise ERP system. And by automating key accounting processes, a cloud ERP solution minimizes the risk of error and delay of manual approaches to multiple charts of accounts.
Adding new sales channels, product lines or revenue streams (domestically or internationally) is extremely difficult. As businesses mature and their market share increases, they will surely hit the outer limits of growth in their current markets. In order to implement the growth strategies and gain a competitive edge in the world market, they need an integrated business system that centralizes accounting, order management, customer relationship management (CRM) and ecommerce processes. When everyone has access to the same customer information and transactions, it’s easier to respond quickly to customer inquiries. It allows salespeople to spot opportunities to cross-sell and upsell, and teams can confidently track pending orders, service issues or overdue invoices.
They’re using more Excel spreadsheets and third-party applications to connect data. These band-aid solutions don’t “talk” or share data with one another, which means more human intervention, manual data reentry, errors and steps in the financial management process. With a cloud financial management platform, your clients’ marketing, finance, sales and inventory managers can all pull the exact data they need to understand trends and improve the accuracy of their forecasting. Because they all draw from the same data source, these users will have a more holistic insight into customer behavior at each stage of the transaction, and without the need for spreadsheets or bolt-on applications.
They need better revenue recognition, allocations, planning & budgeting and/or better reporting insights. Financial reporting isn’t getting any easier, and it can be especially challenging for companies that are growing, expanding into new lines of business or exploring their global horizons.

If a business is dealing with any or all of these issues, it’s likely a sign that they’ve outgrown their current systems. A comprehensive cloud-based solution like NetSuite supports all aspects of a businesses by unifying financials, sales, project and product management, ordering, invoicing and revenue recognition on a single platform. It will also help your firm minimize complexity across a broad range of operations, allowing insights into the entire business based on a single, customizable platform.

QuickBooks partners that move to NetSuite can make 30-50% margin on new license sales plus high margins on renewals and service. In addition, they retain their fastest-growing clients while expanding their client base with other companies looking to migrate from QuickBooks.

Visit www.netsuite.com/quickbooks for more information on switching to NetSuite and reach out to the NetSuite Partner Recruitment team today to get the conversation started. Complete our contact form here or email SolutionProviders@netsuite.com to find out more.

Also learn more about adding NetSuite to your practice by reading our whitepaper, “Building Your Oracle NetSuite Practice: Reaching Beyond the Limitations of QuickBooks” and our datasheet “Helping Clients Think Beyond QuickBooks”.

Posted on Mon, September 9, 2019
by NetSuite filed under

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Five Tell-Tale Signs Your Business has Outgrown its Accounting Software

July 4, 2019 NetSuite

Posted by Suzanne Myerson, Public Relations, Oracle NetSuite JAPAC

For business owners in Asia Pacific, there are a few common refrains when it comes to their software systems.

“Our inventory system is very manual – there is a lot of duplication with data entry.”

“We use a basic accounting package for cash/POS transactions and our CRM is totally disconnected from our other systems.”

“It takes us ages to pull financial operational reports to assess our performance.”

If you rely on a basic accounting package to run your business, now might be the time to consider other options, such as moving the processes that are key to your business operations to an integrated system like ERP (Enterprise Resource Processing) that will give you complete visibility into every aspect of your business.

The challenges for a fast-growing business can be diverse. G2, an online review platform with more than 650,000 independent and authenticated user reviews read by more than 3 million users each month, recently demonstrated that fast-growing businesses face many of the same challenges as their enterprise counterparts. In the report, The Power of a Cloud ERP Suite, G2 identifies supporting growth and improving productivity and efficiency while lowering costs as the key challenges. No surprises here.

Yet, many businesses in Asia Pacific continue to rely on basic accounting packages to manage business operations. In fact, smaller and midsized businesses often rely on a patchwork of standalone software silos and spreadsheets to solve their immediate business needs, according to the G2 report. As the business and its complexity grows, these disparate systems create operational inefficiencies that can have a negative impact on the bottom line, hurt the customer experience and impede the company’s ability to reach its full potential.

What are the signs that your business has outgrown its accounting package?

Limited configuration capability – The limited functionality of a dedicated accounting package means that it will be unable to deliver robust financial management requirements such as consolidation, support for multiple forms of depreciation, budget roll-ups, subscription billing or credit limits, to name a few. If you cannot fulfil these tasks with ease, your accounting software is restricting your flexibility and growth.
Limited visibility to make informed decisions – As business models become more complex, owners often need customised reports by role and quality data to deliver fact-based analysis and insights. As the gap between the reporting that is provided and the insights required grows, the business turns to spreadsheets and other workaround tools. How long can your business survive without accurate and insightful reporting?
Spending too much time to keep the system running – Growth across transactions, departments, supply chain, other channels and customers can strain an accounting platform to the point where performance is degraded, or workarounds are designed to circumvent its limitations. Are you spending too much time reconciling data between systems?
Inability to expand to new markets – Whether you want to open a new location, sell to intermediaries or directly to customer via an online presence, businesses need to understand and comply with the unique needs of each channel. Can your accounting software cater to these needs including support tax, financial and compliance needs? If it can’t, you may need to consider a robust financial management (ERP) solution.
Technology downtime starts risking business opportunity – It is said that time is money. What smaller businesses lack in size, they can make up for in responding to new opportunities or customer demands much faster than their enterprise counterparts. Often support is overlooked or even non-existent when it comes to basic accounting software offerings. Do you want to risk it?

If any of these signs impact your business, the time has come for you to consider your options – a platform that delivers financials, customer relationship management, inventory and warehouse management and ecommerce capabilities in a single solution.

Join fast growing businesses in Australia, Asia Pacific and across the globe by selecting a technology system that will propel you to new heights.

Determine whether your business has outgrown its accounting package.

Posted on Tue, July 2, 2019
by NetSuite filed under

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The NetSuite Blog

Chick-fil-A’s AI can spot signs of foodborne illness from social media posts with 78% accuracy

May 24, 2019 Big Data

Chick-fil-A might not be the first place you’d expect to see AI and machine learning in action, but as it turns out, the fast food franchise is using algorithms to parse social media for food safety issues at its over 2,400 restaurants in 47 states. During a presentation at the ReWork Deep Learning Summit in Boston, Massachusetts this afternoon, senior principal IT leader of food safety and product quality Davis Addy detailed a custom system Chick-fil-A uses to track problematic health trends around its restaurants.

The company plans to release the code on GitHub in the future.

“For us in this journey with analytics and food safety, we’re going from a place of hindsight to getting into insights … and eventually foresight so we can stop me and more reactive and [make recommendations],” said Addy.

Addy noted that social media is the most common customer feedback channel for food safety-related incidents, but he pointed out that it’s fraught with peril. Posts are inconsistent grammatically and tonally. Some users are more facetious and controversial than others. And more often then not, isolated posts are difficult to correlate with real-world events.

Chick-fil-A’s goal, then, was to develop an AI framework that could reliably identify keywords, phrases, and customer sentiment from posts to help spot emerging foodborne illness. Its AWS-hosted solution scrapes snippets every 10 minutes from a range of social platforms, which are passed onto a Python routine that filters for over 500 keywords (including words like “illness,” “food poisoning,” “vomit,” “throw up,” “barf,” and “nausea”) and AWS Comprehend, Amazon’s natural language processing service, which checks sentiment and determines legitimacy.

Chick fil A’s AI can spot signs of foodborne illness from social media posts with 78% accuracy

Above: A flow chart illustrating Chick-fil-A’s AI foodborne illness-detecting system.

Image Credit: Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat

You’d think that spotting food-poisoned customers’ angry tweets would be a walk in the park, but not so. Those customers might misspell crucial words like “filthy” or “ill,” and then there’s connotation to contend with — for instance, posts like “I love this place … they make a sick sandwich!” aren’t usually cause for alarm, despite the conspicuous “sick.”

Addy says that initially, AWS Comprehend struggled to suss out the sentiment of certain food-related phrases. After collaborating with Amazon to improve it, though, the Chick-fil-A team was able to achieve 78% accuracy.

So where does the data go? Store managers get push notifications via a bespoke Chick-fil-A mobile app, which highlights words the algorithm identified and enables them to drill in to see full posts. From there, they’re able to contact customers directly if they so choose.

The data is also delivered to a corporate dashboard, where it’s plotted over time to make trends easier to spot.

Food safety isn’t the only domain Chick-fil-A thinks might benefit from machine learning. The restaurant chain is experimenting with computer vision systems that warn employees who’ve been handling raw chicken to wash their hands before they move to other areas of the kitchen, and a separate AI-driven system that instructs team members how to rinse their hands thoroughly. Addy noted that if employees washed their hands “as often as they should,” they’d reduce the risk of foodborne illness by up to 80%.

Chick-fil-A isn’t the first to use AI to identify locations with troubling food safety records. One Google and Harvard study employed an algorithm that tracked the location of smartphone users, identified web search queries indicative of food poisoning, and looked up restaurants visited by the users who performed those searches to identify the origin of illnesses. Caterers in China are reportedly using AI to spot unhygienic cooks, and San Francisco-based startup ImpactVision taps machine learning and hyperspectral imaging — a combination of spectroscopy and computer vision — to assess the quality of food in factories and elsewhere automatically.

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Working in mysterious ways, Trump signs Bibles in Alabama

March 9, 2019 Humor

SNL writersÃ¢Â€Â™ room:
Ã¢Â€ÂœWhat if we do a bit where the evangelicals get Trump to like literally sign their bibles???

OhÃ¢Â€Â¦

I seeÃ¢Â€Â¦Ã¢Â€Â pic.twitter.com/ByEGzVFQRX

Ã¢Â€Â” Ã°ÂÂ™Â¹Ã°ÂÂšÂ˜Ã°ÂÂšÂœÃ°ÂÂšÂ‘ Ã°ÂÂ™Â¶Ã°ÂÂšÂ›Ã°ÂÂšÂžÃ°ÂÂšÂ‹Ã°ÂÂšÂ‹Ã°ÂÂšÂœ (@JoshuaGrubbsPhD) March 8, 2019

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9 signs your AI initiative is destined for failure

May 8, 2018 Big Data

AI is the hot technology on every executive’s lips and in every business roadmap. From startups to Fortune 500s, businesses of all sizes are throwing millions at AI initiatives that are, for the most part, doomed to fail.

But look, it’s not AI’s fault. Most AI failures aren’t AI problems, they’re people and process problems. Broadly, “AI fails” fall into a few categories: failure to launch, failure to navigate, and failure to sustain.

You can save your company millions of dollars and years of effort by taking note of the following nine signs of impending failure to avert an AI crisis before it hits.

1. You’re lacking team buy-in

A successful AI project needs buy-in at all levels — having a gung-ho management team isn’t enough. If the people working on your project are uninvolved, aren’t enthusiastic supporters or, worse, expect it to fail, your project will suffer for it. It may not be explicit sabotage, but internal resistance can circumscribe the success of your project from day one. Additionally, a passion project championed by one person risks failing if that person moves on or leaves the company.

An AI project needs widespread support, oversight from multiple people, and a clear succession plan that makes it easy for someone else to pick up where someone has left off. This same issue is top-of-mind for VCs looking to invest in AI startups.

2. Your expectations are too high

A successful project takes time, resources, and plenty of data. Expecting human-level accuracy right off the bat or demanding instantaneous results will get “fail” stamped on your project pretty quickly. Expectations can also go awry around cost. Your team — and management — needs to understand and be able to communicate budgets and reasonable expectations for ROI.

3. Your expectations are misguided

Expectation management is one of the toughest issues facing AI. AI is a technology, not a panacea for the world’s ills. Consider whether your project is right for AI, whether there’s enough data available, and whether you have a clearly defined goal. You could ask your AI to write the great American screenplay, but is that really the best use for it?

4. You fail to measure

AI isn’t a “set it and forget it” phenomenon. Even the brightest students need guidance or their conceptual errors can compound over time. (Take Google’s Allo AI messaging app and its offensive reply suggestions, for example). Failing to measure your AI’s results as you go means you won’t pick up any issues until they’re long-established — and expensive and time-consuming to address. The proverbial stitch in time can save an AI project.

5. You neglect maintenance duties

Your AI might start out running as intended, but things change. Perhaps a machine goes down, software or hardware advances emerge, or there’s a shift in the type of data you feed your AI. If you don’t have a plan for keeping your project abreast of these changes, it’s easy to end up with the AI equivalent of a brick phone — functional but irrelevant.

6. Your project lacks flexibility

If your problem is dynamic and changing, your AI needs to take that into account. It needs to be able to absorb different data systems that are liable to change, along with new versions and new systems. An inflexible project can glue itself to the current state of the world, becoming frozen in time rather than evolving alongside it.

7. It was doomed from the beginning

Some AI projects just never get off the ground. The problem may be too difficult, or the resources and buy-in may be lacking. Others take a slightly different route: They have some initial success but haven’t been set up for continued success in the face of growth, new understandings, or staff turnover.

8. You started too big

Everyone wants to cure cancer, but a goal this big should never be your starting point. Beginning with a huge, complex system with no definable success marker is an expensive way to get nowhere. It’s much better to start small and aim to hit measurable milestones with accuracy along the way. Even Microsoft’s Healthcare Next, which actually does plan to cure cancer, is building up to it.

9. The project isn’t tied to your business

If you don’t have a process for implementing the outcomes of your AI project into your business, you can consider the project a failure. Your AI might generate a helpful churn report indicating when customers may leave, for example. But if you don’t have a process in place to actually contact these customers, your AI is really just an expensive tech demo.

So beyond the converse of these, what are the signs that your AI project won’t fail? Basically, it’s a matter of sustaining impact. If your project is showing good results that are improving over time, are going in the right direction, and are delivering value, you’re on the right track.

Paul Barba is the chief scientist of Lexalytics, where he is focused on applying force-multiplying technologies to solve artificial intelligence-related challenges and drive innovation in AI even further.

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