Fueling Enterprise Productivity
Innovation and technology have changed the way an enterprise functions. The modern enterprise knows no boundaries or time zones. Thanks to the way the Internet and technologies have shaped the world, the modern enterprise operates seamlessly in the cloud, and important information can be accessed by employees anywhere and from any device. Various tools such as office suites, conferencing, project management, social software, and department-specific software help users to be informed, efficient, and productive. The modern enterprise productivity tools besides being easy to set up and intuitive, allow easier access to employees, information, and cloud storage, which help in better collaboration and increased efficiencies.
The featured article in this issue focuses on the top solutions that enhance productivity and efficiencies in each of the following functional areas.
Human Resources
In today’s world of growing personalization, Human Resource Management tools vary greatly. The best HR software for any company is very specific to the company’s needs and what it deems important. Traditionally, the Human Resources software solutions maintain record of all its people-based data, such as manage an employee database, archive personnel records, and produce organizational charts. However, to ensure that the HRM solution can grow and change along with your organization’s needs, you must look for these key capabilities:
• Ability to manage job postings, applications, and even onboarding of new employees
• Ability to administer enterprise-wide benefits from enrolling employees to offering specific plans
• Ability to maintain a record of employee performance, track goals and tie success to payroll
• Ability to schedule and plan employee shifts
• Ability to track employee training need and ensure compliance if certifications are required
The Workforce Ready Suite by Kronos is suitable for businesses of all sizes and combines workforce management with human capital management capabilities in a unified cloud platform. Kronos Workforce Ready helps organizations manage their entire workforce from pre-hire to retire. It incorporates these capabilities: recruiting, onboarding, performance management, compensation planning, time and attendance, scheduling, absence management, and payroll management. All employee data is maintained in a single database, with a single user interface to pull reports and launch workflows across the organization. The Kronos Workforce Ready mobile application provides managers and employees address common HR, timekeeping, and payroll tasks quickly and easily on mobile ensuring that human capital management needs are met anytime and anywhere.
Finance
As businesses span various geographical boundaries and with inventories being brought from multiple locations and countries, thereby, bringing in various currencies and taxes, the intricacies in the financial system can be mind-boggling. Enterprise finance goes beyond core accounting and includes other key business processes such as finance management, inventory control, order and purchase, payroll, and human capital management. Enterprise financial software needs to have these important capabilities: automate payments, create invoices, calculate budgets and come up with a forecast, manage resource allocation and depreciate value of fixed assets, streamline processes for employee wages and benefits, compute tax commitments, and manage inventory.
Sage Intact is an enterprise system that includes modules such as basic accounting, fixed assets, project management, and workflow automation. It enables businesses to automate their important processes and provides visibility into their real-time business performance. Sage Intacct helps organizations customize their workflows, screens, and preferences without coding or scripting. Sage Intacct helps companies that are in SaaS business to construct metrics reports with data pulled from disparate applications, aggregate it and perform calculations using Dimensions. These reports enable organizations to analyze SaaS metrics by project, customer, location, department, vendor, item, and employees. Sage Intacct Collaborate is a secure social layer embedded in the Sage Intacct financial management system that allows finance, sales, services and other cross functional teams to communicate within the application whenever there is an issue. Sage Intacct also eases compliance adherence with its tools like auto-tax calculator, multiple sales tax and flexibility with multi-currency support and bank reconciliation.
Email Marketing
Email marketing software enables organizations to communicate with customers, prospects and stakeholders. This software is the primary means to deliver deals, promotions, news, personalized messages, and other engaging content. There are many email marketing tools available today in the market that allow organizations to keep in touch with its community.
Campaign Monitor is a simple, intuitive email marketing software that has an easy to use interface and powerful functionality. It has a feature-rich email builder for designing pixel-perfect emails that are automatically responsive so that they render perfectly on any device. Campaign Monitor has a range of professionally-designed templates and layouts to create stunning email campaigns. Its A/B testing makes it easy to test subject lines, sender details and even different email marketing designs to optimize the campaigns for best results. Campaign Monitor also includes powerful tools to track the success of email marketing campaigns. It allows email automation so that emails are triggered automatically with relevant content like welcome emails, drip campaigns or reminder emails.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
As a business grows, so does the number of contacts, such as customers, prospects, stakeholders and partners. Gone are the days when businesses could use a spreadsheet to manage this data. The need for the hour in today’s connected and rapidly expanding economy is a reliable customer relationship management (CRM) software. CRM software not just records the customers’ contact information but also keeps a track of every interaction—be it phone or email, or channels such as social media or the customer helpdesk. This information is the opportunity repository, and allows organizations to identify prospects for a product or service, identify customers for up-sell or cross-sell, and target new marketing avenues.
Salesforce Sales Cloud Lightning Professional creates a productive and collaborative CRM environment for working with various organizational contacts. A pioneer in the CRM space, Salesforce has managed to maintain its leadership position for more than a decade with a continually expanding and improving features, excellent customization, and a large third-party, value-add partner ecosystem. Despite the huge data and complexity beneath the surface, Salesforce Sales Cloud Lightning Professional is lightweight and easy to operate. One of its strongest points is flexibility that allows organizations to customize the application to suit their needs and workflow, instead of having to adjust to the existing interface. Salesforce Sales Cloud Lightning Professional allows viewing of multiple dashboards assigned to its own data set, and creation of custom reports as summaries, tables, or matrices. Salesforce has a very large third-party app marketplace, the Salesforce AppExchange which offers more than 3,000 available apps and allows integration with many business apps.
Choosing the right software for your business can dramatically improve collaboration and productivity, which in turn increases sales and greater customer satisfaction.