IncTechnology.com > Databases

Discovering Your Advantage with CRM

Mike Gorsage — 2009-10-21T17:00:10-05:00

You’ve heard the expression, “the customer is king.” In today’s economy, the customer is key to your future success. The right customer relationship management (CRM) strategies can give you insights that lead to increased revenue, improved earnings and solid competitive advantage.

Bill Gates once said, “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” Whether happy or unhappy, your customers are a vital, often underutilized source of business intelligence. Companies that take the time to understand their customers are better able to anticipate and respond to their needs. They also gain a distinct advantage over their competitors.

At this stage of the recession, many companies have lost sight of the competition, focusing instead on cutting costs and improving efficiencies. And they have succeeded; in fact, today’s companies are leaner and meaner than ever before. But now is the time to look outward – focusing on better CRM to grow top line revenues, improve earnings, and take market share away from the competition.

Know your customers and reap rewards

The key is capturing the right information about your customers. With effective CRM processes and technology, you can build a single “book of truth” about each customer. It’s a data warehouse that chronicles each customer’s history, including the products they typically buy, how often they buy, as well as their individual preferences and any problems they have had in the past. CRM delivers instant, company-wide access to valuable customer profiles and gives you the insight you need to turn this data into actionable information.

With a detailed customer history, you can easily segment customers, identifying which are your best customers and why. Is it their margins? Or is it their consistency of buying particular products and services? Linking your data warehouse or business intelligence system to your CRM process and technology can help you answer questions like these and gain an enriched insight that allows you to know how and when to focus on particular customers.

Profitable communication

Consider, for example, a customer who prefers doing business with your company over the Internet. If you don’t know that information, you may unnecessarily redouble your sales efforts by having a direct sales person call on that client. Had you known the customer’s preference, you could have eliminated the effort and cost of a direct sale and freed up your direct sales force to focus on generating new clients.

CRM is a great way to streamline and optimize your sales force. The information you gather in various systems can show you where to focus your efforts, directing your sales force to certain sets of clients. When implemented properly your CRM system will enable you to be more successful in attracting new customers, responding to new leads and closing deals more quickly. By improving your responsiveness to customers you also build loyalty and decrease customer "churn."

At the same time, you can identify the best ways to cross-sell and up sell to each customer, either through direct sales, telemarketing, Web marketing, or other sales or marketing activities. If your goal is to better enable your website for e-business activity, CRM is the ideal approach. It establishes a single point of contact with your company and enables you to capture vital customer information and put it into various applications. The result is a cost-effective and efficient way to communicate with and learn from your customers.

Creating your system

Practicing CRM does require discipline in the form of a more efficient and integrated internal business system. When it comes to developing a CRM system, it is important to remember that this is an “outside-in” approach that focuses on customer input. The most critical component is spending time with customers, learning what they find most valuable about doing business with you. By doing that, you are essentially identifying your main competitive advantages. From there you can design your processes and the supporting systems that will capitalize on that competitive advantage.

As with most IT initiatives, there is a wide variety of CRM hardware and software available from major vendors like SAP and Oracle. When choosing your CRM system, be sure to couple it with business intelligence capabilities that allow you to capture data in a variety of areas and organize it into a single book of truth about that customer. As you put that information into your CRM software in the right fields and capture all the types of transactions you do with clients, you now become very effective in the way to interact with them.

Keep in mind that CRM can only work to your advantage if you view as more than just a tool for getting more from your customers. It helps you do more for your customers. When you become more responsive to customers and understand the way they want to do business with you, you give your organization a head start over the competition and prepare for the impending recovery.

Mike Gorsage is a Partner and Leader of the Business Operations and Technology Practice for Tatum LLC. Tatum is the nation’s largest executive services firm, providing financial and technology leadership nationwide.

Tech Talk: Data Analysis Helps Drug Firm

Elizabeth Wasserman — 2009-09-10T12:08:02-05:00

Trinity Pharma Solutions, based in Waltham, Mass., has been the technology arm of life sciences consulting firm Trinity Partners since 2004. The company, which employs 30, helps pharmaceutical companies create, deploy and manage data management solutions. But the firm found that it was able to help its customers solve business challenges by better analyzing data, director Glenn Wong tells IncTechnology.com.

Elizabeth Wasserman: How does your company use data?

Glenn Wong: We are a business and tech solutions provider to pharmaceutical and biotech industries, primarily to manufacturers. The mainstay of what we do is to build reporting and analytic solutions to help the sales teams, the folks who sell the pharmaceutical products. We're not just reporting what they did but we help them with data management.

Wasserman: Why did you decide to look into business intelligence?

Wong: It was to help us do our job better. We were actually introduced to TIBCO Spotfire by one of our clients. They said, 'We know you are smart guys and you deal with a lot of data. Take a look at this.' We did and we really liked the software. It did help us analyze information better, faster, easier and with more richness. We started using it internally on projects initially for clients.

Wasserman: What problems did it help you solve?

Wong: In our world, data can be quite complex. Finding an insight or answering a question can take a number of steps. It requires fairly technical knowledge. This product simplified that process and allowed us to get to an answer faster. It also allowed us to get to a better answer. We had a great tool and it wasn't as if we went out to find problems to fix, but as we started to use it, we recognized problems the software could help with and started addressing them better than before.

Wasserman: Such as what?

Wong: In the pharmaceuticals industry we look a lot at segmentation. How do you look at your customers? What are the criteria that let you classify and categorize your customers? With pharmaceutical clients, we're typically looking at physicians as the person you're selling to or trying to influence. One thing that's important is understand prescribing patterns – whether a physician is likely to use a drug when it's first released and what are the patient populations different physicians have. We also try to derive other information. What are your target customers and how would they respond to a different message or market event – for example, if another product, such as a pain medication, would enter the market, are they likely to use that quickly or are they likely to wait and see what the general feedback is? You're looking at patterns of behavior. Depending on the richness of the data, you can look at the promotional response. If I have a sales rep go talk to doctor once a month, does that make it more likely he would use my product? This doctor attended a conference. Could we look a few months down the line and see whether his prescribing changed based on attendance of that conference?

Wasserman: What have the results been?

Wong: It's made us get answers in a more timely manner and it's also made us more responsive to our customers. It allows us to see insights we might not have otherwise seen. Besides the speed and flexibility, it's also a great visual tool, which allows us to see multiple dimensions faster than you would otherwise. If I'm putting together a graph using PowerPoint or Excel, I'm lucky if I can show three variables. With Spotfire, I can put up five or six in the blink of an eye. It’s also made us more responsive to our customers. For example, a client VP asked an off topic question during a presentation. Using the software, we came up with an answer quickly and at the VP’s request, gave him soft and hardcopies on short order. He said, ‘I’ve been asking this question internally for 2 months, and you just gave me the answer in 10 minutes.’”

Tech Talk: Food Maker Grows with ERP

Elizabeth Wasserman — 2009-06-17T11:19:04-05:00

Ateeco, based in Shenandoah, Pa., is the parent company of Mrs. T's Pierogies, a leading manufacturer of the pasta and potato delicacies that can be purchased at supermarkets and other retail outlets around the country. Since the overwhelming majority of the firm's customers order electronically, Ateeco grew and streamlined processes by moving to a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, Tim Coyle, director of technology, tells IncTechnology.com.

Elizabeth Wasserman: Why did your business need an ERP system?

Tim Coyle: We service all the major supermarket chains and big box retailers all across America. Some of those companies are pretty sophisticated. We need a system for bringing in EDI orders since 96 percent of our invoices and orders are sent electronically back and forth. We need a system that can process that, as well as show us inventory balances and keep accurate counts of our inventory. We have 13 frozen warehouses around the country, as well, and we need to know how much product by SKU we have at those facilities so we can plan and have an accurate balance sheet. Since we're a food manufacturer, we also need to do lot tracking and we need to know what raw materials go into today's production run and what customers have ordered in that production run in the even of a major recall.

Wasserman: Have you ever had a major recall?

Coyle: Never. Knock on wood. But we've had some minor ones.

Wasserman: What type of system did you have before?

Coyle: We had a legacy system that was a solid system for us from a financial perspective but it only provided us with tools to provide functions for light manufacturing. However, we're a heavy manufacturing company that also does distribution. We tried to make accommodations to do what we needed but we reached a crossroads where we had to decide in order to satisfy growth and profitability and our strategic objectives over the next five to 10 years whether we would customize this system or find a new platform that was a better fit.

Wasserman: I guess you decided to find a new platform. How did you go about doing that?

Coyle: First we developed criteria. We felt we needed a vendor that had experience in food and beverages, was financially stable, had good references, and had proven methodologies. Most importantly, the vendor needed to help us provide a promised return on investment. ERP systems don't come cheap. We needed a promised ROI that could be delivered. We went through the request for proposal process and chose two dozen vendors. We received responses back from 10. Then after a review process we narrowed our choice down to two vendors. We actually chose a company but our management team was uncomfortable with the platform they ran on. So we went back to the drawing board and re-reviewed our vendor list. We had initially included SAP in the RFP process but they were not a vendor to small and mid-sized businesses. They were going to charge three or four times what we were going to spend. But when we went back to the drawing board, we found on an Internet search IDS-Cheer. They did food and beverage systems for small and mid-sized businesses and has a product called Aris Smartpath SAP All-in-One. It was an SAP produce preconfigured for a small or mid-sized company and further configured for a food and beverage customer. That allowed us to fin a price point in SAP that we could afford. We went live Jan. 1, 2007.

Wasserman: What have the results been?

Coyle: We've been able to reduce our finished goods inventory and be leaner on inventory balances that we carry. We've had a record sales year with a record low level of inventory. That sounds like it shouldn't be able to happen. The ERP system didn't cause that but it allowed us to manage our inventory with a system that we could trust. With our old system, inventory accuracy could swing anywhere from the mid 60s to low 90s. If you're not really sure what you have on hand, it's impossible to plan accurate. Now our inventory at all locations is 98.9 percent accurate. We can say with certainty what we have on hand and carry lower inventory balances. We also close our books now in two days, where it used to take somewhere between 7 and 10 days. We've been able to clean up some of our processes with better controls in the system. Our data doesn't get off base. We've reduced our finished food inventory by 25 percent on average. We're in a period of record sales with record low levels of inventory. It's the best of both worlds.

Tech Talk: Chauffeur Staffing Firm Upgrades to ERP

Elizabeth Wasserman — 2009-03-22T16:31:02-05:00

WeDriveU, based in Burlingame, Calif., launched 20 years ago as a firm that finds chauffeurs to drive clients around in the clients' own cars. More recently, as the company sought to expand into 30 different markets nationwide, founder and CEO Dennis Carlson tells IncTechnology.com that the firm invested in an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to help manage reservations, billing, and staffing from one central computer system.

Elizabeth Wasserman: What type of people do you have as customers?

Dennis Carlson: We have top business executives, owners of private businesses, venture capitalists, families -- anyone who would prefer to be driven around in their own car. We're not a limousine service. We drive the customers around in their own cars. Many of our customers take dedicated drivers, either half or full time, although some individuals use our service occasionally for meetings or social occasions. Seniors will use it for mobility reasons. We also do a very large event business.

Wasserman: What does a business like yours need with an ERP system?

Carlson: Every business needs an ERP system. In the old days, I was using QuickBooks as my ERP and ACT as my CRM system. So basically, I had all the information and nothing was integrated. It got to a point where we were in three large cities -- San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York -- and we were going to go to 10 cities. Employees were signing in remotely and double entering everything into ACT and QuickBooks. I worked with the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Technology Advisory Program and looked around for a long time and talked to a lot of people and finally decided to go with Everest. It's a really robust system built more for a manufacturing company but the great thing is that you can customize it and make it work for your business. Now that one system does it all – from entering customer contact information to schedule rides to billing the customer. Everything is integrated and everything is tied together. I can produce one financial statement by pulling everything together.

Wasserman: Do your managers have remote server access?

Carlson: All the offices around the U.S. are now signing into the office in Burlingame over the Internet. They work with laptops and wireless cards and BlackBerrys to schedule their rides, do their billing, etc. They enter it all into one system that's fully integrated.

Wasserman: What have the results been?

Carlson: We've been running this for three years now. The results have been very successful. It's a very robust system at a fairly good price point. We're using the backbones of it, main pieces. A lot of features we're just starting to implement now. We plan to have business activity monitoring (BAM), so if someone sets up an online account, comes into our website, we’ll have a mechanism to thank them for setting up their account. Whatever happens can trigger a result. Customers will be able to sign in and modify their reservations, add information about where they're going and the system will do it all for us. It will notify the chauffeur of the upcoming ride details. There are ways to use the system to be more productive. We're now starting to work with multi-lingual features of the system because we want to expand internationally. And from a control standpoint, you train your people on one system and they get used to it so we can replicate it as we go into other cities. The learning curve is shorter. We've seen the system getting better and more efficient. We're very happy with it.

Drive Customer Relationships through Technology

Mike Gorsage — 2009-01-16T12:46:57-05:00

Unprecedented levels of market volatility, paired with staggering declines in consumer spending and confidence, rendered 2008 a tumultuous year for companies of every size and industry; the outlook for 2009 indicates even more challenges in the months ahead. As tough as the economy is, now is the time for you to differentiate your business against the competition, take charge of your customer relationships, and invest in the technology that will grow those relationships in the long term.

Driven by information technology, your customer relationships are the key to increased revenue and market share. Pareto’s Principle estimates that 80 percent of sales come from just 20 percent of your customer base. Thus, your first step should be to identify which customers are the most profitable or which customers will be the most profitable. I recommend that you use customer relationship management (CRM) software to gain insight into the needs and wants of your core customer base. CRM software can be deployed to work in tandem with your data warehouse and data marts to extract rich insight into customer activity and their interactions with your business, including products owned and recent store visits.

CRM basics

If you have never implemented CRM in your business, let me offer you the basics about what to expect. CRM technology is offered primarily as packaged software, available from most software vendors either in a premise-based version which is installed on-site or increasingly through software-as-a-service (SaaS), which allows enterprises to use the full functionality of the software without the hassles associated with installation and updates. Ultimately, you should use CRM as a business intelligence tool to determine the buying patterns of your customers, and then develop targeted plans to provide the additional products and services that customers are most likely to buy. Plans can include customer loyalty programs, electronic commerce, and up-selling new versions of products to previous purchasers. Make sure employee training and acceptance is part of your roll-out plan to ensure consistent usage of the system.

Speaking of employees, you should understand that your people are at the heart of any CRM initiative. The information mined from CRM software drives the sales force to improve services and connect with customers on a deeper level. Your sales force can enter, store, track, and access customer information and interactions critical to identifying the customers that are most likely to buy and will yield the most profit and highest margins for your company. Also, as many companies struggle to keep cash on hand in an economy where cash is now king, your sales force can improve the order-to-cash ratio. Companies can also avoid additional costs through reducing duplicate or redundant activities.

Boosting customer satisfaction

While CRM technology yields insight into customer spending and product demand, it also drives satisfaction levels. Poor customer service is the top reason customers switch service providers. A 2008 study of consumers of wire-line, mobile, cable, and satellite services found that, while most consumers are happy with their providers, many would switch for a better experience. The Amdocs Experience Matters Index revealed that of the more than 2,000 consumers surveyed, interest in switching increases significantly when subscribers are offered a better experience -- up to one in three U.S. subscribers (33 percent).

When employees have a clear understanding of all customer interactions, it helps build credibility with your customers. Rather than ask the customer when they last visited the store and purchased a specific item, employees can retrieve the necessary information from the customer’s contact history in the software. CRM tools create institutional memory beyond the most recent customer interaction and are a proven method for you to differentiate yourself through outstanding customer service. A good CRM tool will protect your customer base and build consumer loyalty.

While the current economic climate is leading some businesses to assess expenditures and spend conservatively, now is the time to make key technology investments and set the stage for increased profits and revenue. The foundation of your success -- and profitability -- is your customer base, and driving customer relationships with technology allows you to focus on the core 20 percent that are the most profitable.

Mike Gorsage is the National Technology Practice Leader for Tatum LLC. Tatum is the nation’s largest executive services firm, providing financial and technology leadership to businesses of any size.

Tech Talk: Contractor Automates Scheduling

Elizabeth Wasserman — 2008-12-19T10:23:06-05:00

Roadrunner Drywall is a residential drywall contracting firm based in Phoenix but with offices also in Tucson, Ariz., and Las Vegas. Shane Mustoe, vice president and co-owner, tells IncTechnology.com that the firm, which has 310 employees, cut costs and better managed time for work crews when it automated scheduling and replaced its old dry erase board.

Elizabeth Wasserman: In your line of work, is it difficult to manage projects and keep track of where your crews are?

Shane Mustoe: That's exactly the problem we were having. Drywall contracting is a little different than most trades. Drywall stocking is only done by stockers, who go to a work site and deliver the right amount of drywall. Then we have a crew of drywall hangers, an average of about four guys, who go out to the site and hang the drywall. When they're done, there is usually some debris or scrap left over so another crew goes out with a dump truck and takes all that out of the way. Then we have drywall tapers and finishers, an average of four people on that crew as well. They go out and tape the seams and get ready for texture. In the west, we put a texture on everything when it's complete. So then we schedule a texture crew to go out spray the texture on the drywall or hang the texture. When it's dry, we have crew sand all the texture, clean the window frames and get the drywall ready for the painters. We often have seven different crews to schedule for one job. It's pretty common to have 15 different employees go through one house.

Wasserman: How did you used to keep track of these crews?

Mustoe: We used dry erase marker boards. We had a 30-foot-long wall filled with dry erase marker boards and we would hand write the name of the job, the lot number, the date the job stocked, etc. Each phase of the job would be along the top of the board. We'd use different colors for supervisors. It was hard to keep track of the different jobs. The job flow is at different rates, depending on the size of the job. We couldn't keep it in date order or alphabetical order. There was no way to constantly index them because they would finish at different times. It was hard to see visually where we needed a crew of hangers or tapers. We would have to go over each individual job and figure out who was needed where, who was working, and what jobs needed what crews. We had some supervisors try taking Polaroid pictures of the boards and take them out into the field. It was getting that crazy.

Wasserman: What did you decide to do?

Mustoe: My brother found something in a magazine about Alpha Software and their online database development solutions. There was a package for $99 so I figured I would try it. A week later I had created a scheduling application, which was wonderful, and I went in to our supervisors and said, "Here's how you do it. But go ahead and still keep track of everything on the dry erase board. I don't want to take a risk." I went in a few days later and noticed they weren't using the dry erase board anymore. They said, "We don't need that anymore." It allowed them to sort jobs by whether they needed hangers or tapers. They could look for jobs only on a certain side of town. We could put them in alphabetical order. It saved us countless hours every day in scheduling and it was much more accurate.

Then they started asking for some other things. There are small houses and there are big houses. It would be nice if we knew how many sheets of drywall we used in each house. We had all that information in a paper file. So we just started entering that data in our Alpha Software database. We realized that all that information was coming from estimating. So I went back to the very beginning starting with estimating and wrote an estimating program with the software. Now, when we are awarded a job we electronically move the takeoff information to a job file. Then when the builder is ready to have us start the drywall, we send the material portion of the file to the supplier, the scheduled start date goes on the supervisors’ report, the material budget goes to payables, and the labor budget goes to payroll. When the supervisor enters the name of the employee or vendor into the schedule, this name shows up at payroll and payables so the correct person or vendor gets paid for that job and the correct budget amount is already there as well. When the job is marked as complete by the supervisor, it appears at Accounts Receivables as "ready to bill." As you can see the data is never entered more than once from estimating through accounting. Each employee is unknowingly adding information to each job that continues the flow of information onto the next employee.

Wasserman: What kind of results have you seen?

Mustoe: It's really given us a leg up on our competition. Most of our competitors are still doing things with dry erase marker boards or with a pen and pad. Some have gone to multiple different software programs. By working with only one program that flows like this, we are able to do more work with less administrative employees. We now invite builders into our office to show them how we operate. They are generally impressed enough that they feel more confident in our estimates and our ability to schedule their job within their desired completion dates. This directly translates into more sales for us.

Software to Manage Customers: CRM vs. CEM

Jean Thilmany — 2008-12-18T20:41:41-05:00

The terms sound interchangeable: customer relationship management (CRM) and customer experience management (CEM). But they really help businesses with two entirely different business processes and small and mid-sized businesses would do well with a technology plan that marries the two.

Though the term has evolved since it first made the scene 25 years ago, CRM now mostly refers to software used to manage and maintain customer records while CEM tools help a business enhance its customer interactions, says Ed Thompson, an analyst at Gartner, the IT research firm based in Stamford, Conn.

Essentially the two types of software solutions are pieces of the same puzzle and should be used together, says Patricia Seybold, who owns the Patricia Seybold Group of Boston, which advises businesses on customer relationship issues.

Easy ways to distinguish CRM from CEM

Confused? Thompson offers an easy way to distinguish between the terms.

“CRM is more inward looking and is mainly used in the sales and marketing department, while CEM is outward looking and touches all departments,” he says.

CRM is generally project based, while CEM is sweeping in its focus.

“CRM might look at acquiring more customers or cross selling to customers or increasing campaign response rates. It has a huge range of different objectives,” Thompson says. “But CEM is about four things: improving customer satisfaction, improving loyalty, improving advocacy, and living up to brand promise.”

Business owners generally determine the way their customers perceive the company by surveying those customers. Thus, surveys are the chief CEM tool. CRM software, which is now widely available to the small and mid-size business owner, tracks customer interactions via hard data such as how often a salesperson has contacted a customer. Feedback, or company perception, isn’t really part of the stored information, Thompson says.

But a business needn’t invest in specialized CRM and CEM software, Seybold says. Really all a business needs are set methods for tracking customer experience and customer contacts.

Measuring customer experience

To measure the elusive customer experience, many small businesses turn to third-party companies that develop customer satisfaction and loyalty surveys that objectively measure certain company attributes, Seybold says.

“They help you come up with a set of surveys you can do once a year or whenever someone interacts with you -- whatever you want -- and then you use that information to see where you’re falling short, you make improvements, and resurvey at regular intervals,” she says.

But the survey used needn’t be expensive, she says. Software like SurveyMonkey allows customers to create and distribute their own surveys.

But before compiling a list of survey questions, Seybold recommends contacting a simple focus group with customers intended to uncover their expectations. This ensures questions are on point and target customer needs. A survey that’s off base can’t truly measure customer experience, Seybold says.

Take the example of a lawn maintenance service.

“You find customer critical needs this way. Does the grass grow too high before it’s mowed? Is the lawn mower too noisy? Do the employees clean up after themselves?” she says. “Once you understand what’s important to customers then you can not just their opinions on those items but ask specifically how tall is your grass before we mow it? Is that too tall for you?”

As for CRM software, a business must shop for software to fit its unique needs. The package needn’t be filled with bells and whistles. Seybold has found this to be true at her own small business, her consultancy.

“I’ve tried four different CRM packages and I’ve settled for a very basic contact management approach with spreadsheets because for volume of business we do that works fine,” she says.

SIDEBAR: CRM vs. CEM

The differences between CRM and CEM software include the following:

CRM tracks and manages customer contacts.
CRM is specific to customer or to a company project.
CRM software is most often a database-based.
CEM is generally a sweeping term that refers to gathering customer input the better to change business operations.
CEM gauges many customers’ reaction to the business.
CEM mainly uses survey software to gather customer input.

Bye-Bye Time Sheets. Hello Time Tracking Software

Marc Saltzman — 2008-09-03T13:21:41-05:00

For those who still rely on paper timesheets and punch clocks to track employee hours, it’s time to wake up and smell the 21^st Century. Desktop, online, and mobile time management solutions are a lot more accurate, reliable, and affordable than you may think.

And with a trend towards allowing employees to telecommute and spend more time on the road, digital tools are likely the only way for an employee to conveniently keep track of the amount of work they’re doing -- and an employer to correctly monitor their time, too.

“’Billable hours’ kinds of folks, such as consultants and accountants, would be key users of time management tools, which can also be connected to payroll software,” says Ray Boggs, vice president of research for IDC, a Framingham, Mass.-based technology research firm. “The goal of sharpening productivity and providing clients with the kind of detailed billing info they get from big companies would make this compelling for [small and mid-sized businesses] to use.”

“Although there is always resistance when tools like these are introduced, especially if it's a new concept, there is usually more employee support if it’s replacing a laborious paper-based solution,” Boggs says.

More accurate

Paper timesheets means that data has to be entered into the system which leaves room for human error, explains Michelle Warren, a Toronto-based small business technology consultant.

“But with time-tracking software, employees are automatically signed on when they enter their password at a computer,” Warren says. “And employers will know if the employee signs in at 8:58 a.m. or 9:14 a.m., or if they left at 3:30 p.m., since a password-based solution means no one else can sign on or off for them.”

Less costly over time

Not only is time-tracking software easier and more accurate, but without paper timesheets, companies do not have to pay someone for data entry, plus that employees’ time can now be used for something else.

Warren says prices for time-tracking software, such as Replicon’s Web TimeSheet have dropped dramatically over the past couple of years, making it an affordable purchase for many small and mid-sized businesses. “Plus, they’re increasingly integrated with other solutions, like payroll software, so employees paid by the hour have their time transmitted to HR,” she adds.

Linked to payroll

Boggs says the use of payroll software in small and mid-sized businesses is actually higher than one might think: about one-third of small businesses (under 100 employees) and over half of mid-sized firms (100 to 999 employees) presently use payroll software.

“And this doesn't include those using a payroll service, where the work is outsourced -- just those who have the capability in-house,” Boggs says. “This sets the stage for time management tools, needless to say, because these firms are already putting the pieces in place to track things, like overtime.”

Ideal for telecommuters

Working from home or on the road are both common practices today, and time management tools can help an employer better monitor an employees’ hours.

“Of course someone could just log on into the system and not do any work for a while, so there must be a layer of trust there,” says Warren. “While more costly, a more accurate way of measuring someone’s work -- especially for phone solicitors -- is to have time tracked through VoIP software, therefore all those minutes on the phone are tallied.”

Mobile time-tracking solutions also exist for BlackBerrys, Windows Mobile devices, and the iPhone (including a product called Pocket Punchclock). Some software pools from GPS data, which fuses place-tracking with time-tracking. While truck drivers are used to having their whereabouts monitored, other on-the-road workers might be reluctant to have their locations tracked.

Summary

The reason for moving beyond paper-based time sheets is two-fold, concludes Boggs:

The first is internal: “The productivity benefits, where more precise and timely tracking of employee hours can be done with far less pain on the part of both the worker and accounting department,” says Boggs. “There are added abilities to analyze by group and department so exceptional performance, both good and bad, can be identified.”
The second is the external: “The ability to provide customers and clients with the timely detail made possible by electronic capturing of billable hours,” Boggs says. “In a professional environment, a less than a professional accounting of billable can put a firm at a competitive disadvantage quite independent of actual performance.”

Tech Talk: Restaurant Betters Database Access

Elizabeth Wasserman — 2008-05-19T13:26:26-05:00

Crabby Bills, a chain of seven seafood restaurants headquartered in Indian Rocks Head, Fla., wanted some of its 400 employees to more easily tap into and work with data essential to restaurant operations stored in two SQL databases. Chief information Officer Luis Campuzano tells IncTechnology how new software helped the restaurant improve productivity and keep expenses down.

Elizabeth Wasserman: How does Crabby Bills use database technology?

Luis Campuzano: The main thing is we have two separate databases. One is for our restaurants. That data comes from point of sale, labor information, daily sales, and check information. The other is for our accounting system. The sales data would feed over into the accounting side. We wanted to be able to have one place to go at the restaurants for the manager to be able to combine everything in a usable interface. That's what we were looking for.

Wasserman: So what did you do about this problem?

Campuzano: There are a couple of different solutions out there. We were originally looking at developing something in Microsoft .net. But we needed something we could put together pretty quickly. We know about FileMaker Pro for a while, but when they came out with version 9, with a SQL back end, we realized we could pretty quickly build a front end and combine our two databases. It's probably been up for about five months now. To do the initial front end took about a day. It really goes quickly. We've been tweaking it since then.

Wasserman: What does this allow you to do now?

Campuzano: A lot of the different restaurants call me up and they want to add a screen or a different function. I can create it pretty quickly with the connections. It's a lot easier to put the data out there in a quick fashion. They can use it to go in there and track orders. They can compare how much they spent in dollars to how much they made. All the labor information is now accessible at the store level and they can view the data all in one spot. We're all able to look at the same reports, same screens, at all our different locations. It used to be that with two systems at one time, we might have discrepancies. Now we're able to view both at one time and make edits on the same screen. We used to have to go to two different places to go to find sales information and payroll information. It's now a little less confusing for the restaurant managers.

Accounting and More: New Financial Software

Mary O. Foley — 2008-01-30T15:27:51-05:00

Thanks to its new pumped-up software, business at Menomonee Falls, Wis.-Holland Bulb Farms is … well, blooming.

After years of using a combination of Intuit’s QuickBooks and Microsoft’s Excel to track accounting, inventory and expenses, the 32-person company, which sells specialty flower bulbs, boutique fruit and vegetable plants, and seeds, decided it needed more expansive software to support its first foray into the world of e-commerce. So three years ago, Holland Bulb Farms purchased Everest Software’s Advanced, an integrated accounting, inventory, point-of-sale and e-commerce package. In addition to handling accounting and payroll, the system tracks every aspect of what the company sells, ships, and needs to order, sending internal email notification to the appropriate departments. It also offers customer relationship management (CRM) features that allow the company to notify customers of special offers and promotions, or greet them on birthdays or special occasions.

Holland Bulb installed the Everest system just before going live with its website, explains Erik Thomas, the company’s director of e-commerce, at a cost of between $1,500-$1,800 per year. “I’d say we had a 300 percent return on investment in the first month of the site going live,” he says. Buying the On-Premise version as opposed to the hosted On-Demand version, Thomas said, is giving the company more flexibility to customize the product. Everest’s new tutorials, he adds, make it much easier to train new employees on the system.

Integrated software a growing trend

Integrated financial software for smaller businesses is part of a growing trend, notes Gary Chen, a senior analyst specializing in small and mid-sized businesses at Yankee Group, a Boston-based research firm. “There’s definitely a trend…as the Internet and technology changes, you have traditional accounting packages expanding. It’s definitely a good place to start, because every business needs accounting,” he notes.

Companies like Dulles, Va.-based Everest and Rohnert Park, Calif.,-basedNetBooks, whose CEO, Ridgely Evers, founded QuickBooks while with Intuit, thinks providing a complete business management model to smaller businesses just makes sense. “If accounting is all you need, you can’t get better than QuickBooks,” Evers says. “But QuickBooks is designed for transactions. NetBooks is designed for interactions,” he adds.

NetBooks offers a web-based service for $200/month for five users, documenting everything from incoming orders to outgoing shipments, CRM, and payroll and accounting, too. NetBooks even offers access to a marketing coach through partner Duct Tape Marketing. Evers notes that NetBooks is tailor-made for small businesses without IT departments: “companies where I-T still spells it,” he quips.

Intuit in the act, too

Even QuickBooks’ maker, Intuit, would seem to agree with the wisdom of building on basic accounting apps, notes Chen, who notes that Intuit recently purchased Homestead, a build-your-own-website software package with CRM features. QuickBooks’ 2008 version also includes more flexibility, such as breaking out data in ways that can be used for sales and customer service.

While the newer offerings are more integrated at present, stealing market share away from QuickBooks will be difficult, says Chen. “It’s pretty difficult to knock Intuit off its pedestal,” he says. In the end, “the accounting department has to be comfortable using whatever software is being used, and a lot of accountants are comfortable with QuickBooks.”

SIDEBAR: Integrated Business Software: Who’s Got It?

Intuit, which offers both QuickBooks and now Homestead, a build-your-own website package.

NetBooks, offering marketing, sales, inventory and finances in one software-as-a-service system.

Everest Software Inc.’s Advanced, winner of SIIA’s Best Business Software Product in 2004, is offered as On-Premise or On-Demand, calls itself an all-in-one business operating system, offering accounting, e-commerce, point-of-sale, inventory, shipping, and CRM.