2015 R1

Elephants never forget – and neither will you with 2015r1 CRM

For some time JAVELIN has contained basic functionality to allow contacts with customers and prospects to be recorded.  It has always been the intention to develop this into a full blown Customer Relationship Management system (CRM) and 2015r1 see the first release of this optional module.

Here are the key features now offered:
 

Prospect Database
Prospects allow existing and potential customers to be recorded along with any other contact that may be involved in long running projects (Engineers, Architects, etc.)

Opportunities
Any opportunity to ultimately make a sale can be recorded.  This record can be as extensive as required, with an infinite number of user defined fields added automatically or selectively to suit specific projects.

Activities
Details of contacts (i.e. phone calls, conversations and emails) can be registered against prospects, customers, opportunities, quotes and sales orders, all optionally linked to any of the other entities for total cross source analysis.

Tasks
Actions can be placed against individual users to follow up previous activity or perform future tasks. Email alerts can be sent to users and incomplete tasks are placed on the individual’s ‘To Do’ list, which can be displayed on demand or when they first log in.

Automated Actions
Key business functions (e.g. confirming opportunities, printing quotes, revizing sales orders, etc.) can automatically trigger Activities and Follow Up tasks (e.g. progress the quote).

Definable Business Flow
Intermediate status changes of key entities can also be set to trigger activities. Customisable links between different activities / tasks can be established with definable timescales between each.

Campaigns
Sales campaigns, such as E-shots, exhibitions, etc. can be recorded and activities linked. Activities and Tasks, coupled with status codes, allow the organization of such Campaigns to be monitored and progressed. Initial contacts can be imported en-mass from functions such as external mail shots and subsequent successes (opportunities, quotes or sales orders) registered to allow analysis of effectiveness.

Reports and Inquiries
JAVELIN CRM has been designed with flexible configuration of analysis codes and data to enable individual sites to get to the data that’s important to them.  This data is organized in a logical manner within the SQL database allowing full access via Crystal or any other report generator. However there are a number of master enquires and reports (To Do lists, Project Timeline, Predicted Work Value, etc.) included as part of the functionality to allow most simple interrogation (and some complex) to be performed directly.

But that’s not all ….

As you can appreciate the major effort in producing the full CRM suite has taken much of our development resource. In addition our back office boys are hard at work bringing some innovative advances to the scheduling and capacity planning areas which are not yet ready for exposure. Even so 2015r1 does have a couple of new offerings in addition to CRM:

Scheduling
More news about these developments later but in preparation the planning board has already had the .NET treatment.  Apart from improvements in the speed of loading and drag drop reactivity there would seem little difference other than a useful detail drill down area, but the changes behind the scenes pave the way for real time buckets rather than individual days and better validation of manual manipulation.  Watch this space …

Sized Part Nest Issue
Sized parts (area and length based dimensional stock elements) are becoming a favourite option for many sites, as is operation nesting (grouping several ops form different works orders for easy handling in SFDC).  But the two technologies created some problematic topics when attempting to amortize material issues over nest.  This has been resolved in 2015r1 by building in some logical assumptions and automating a whole series of issues and returns of offcuts.  The result is a simple ‘pick and poke’ material issue function that logically amortizes the identified material over the nest and returns the desired offcuts to stock in a single action.  It even offers the ability to ‘second guess’ the offcut when using coiled material.

Multi Sales Confirmation
With more sites making use of the Quotation and Estimating functions in JAVELIN and the advent of Configured Parts potentially generating quotations with many line items this development was a logical progression of the existing ability to confirm individual quotation lines into sales items.  The simple checkbox selection system allows anything between a single item to the entire quote (9999 lines) to be placed on to a sales order in a single operation with the minimum amount of user input, in addition to creating new Parts, BOMS, Routings and Works Orders for all levels of the structures of parent items.

As usual these developments only form the core of the release.  For full details of how moving to JAVELIN 2015r1 can help you contact Andy Mills.