2007-11-14
B2X Corporation Acquires Certain Assets of David Brooks and Marisa Christina from Hampshire Group, Limited
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Automate Your Business Processes 2005-01-03 By Lauren Simons
No matter how much technology you pump into a company, it seems that you just can't escape the basic hands-on tasks of everyday business, like signing off on purchase orders and invoice approvals or tracking time sheets and activating customer accounts. Although many people believe that it's simply too complicated or too expensive to computerize these kinds of processes, Nsite, a Pleasanton, Calif.-based company offers an online service that it says "automates manual processes that require judgment, decision making and approval and are being done today through e-mail, spreadsheets and paper forms." Improving the Process "The first time you initiate a process — say for invoice approval — you create a route path that lists all the people the electronic document must go to. You pick the names from a drop down list of your registered employees or vendors." Hausler points out that creating the route path is a one-time event. From that point on, the system automatically knows where to route the document. "The Predictive Routing Engine lets you make changes on the fly," she said. "You can add or delete people from the routing, and you can even make real-time changes to a form that's already been routed." Since the service is based on the ASP model, you can use the service anywhere as long as you have access to a Web browser. "This is especially handy for keeping track of business expenses when you're traveling," said Hausler. Specific Processes Sales Operations SmartSuite
Spend Management SmartSuite
Customer and Field Services SmartSuite
According to Hausler, automating these business processes helps companies be more efficient. "Nsite gives the processes more visibility within the company," she said. "At any give point in time, you can logon and see the status of a proposal, approval or an expense. Automation makes it much easier to keep projects and tasks on schedule." A Real-World Opinion "Putting together educational classes and programs for kids is a very paper-intensive proposition," said Joe Sorisi, Platform Learning's CIO. "Just one course requires numerous approvals for the number of students, teachers, the curriculum and supplies. "Multiply that times the number of courses and then expand it across 18 states. It takes a lot of departments to put the puzzle together." Prior to using Nsite, Sorisi said their business processes were paper intensive and required lots of hand-offs. "We didn't have any efficient way to track the status of any given process. "We went looking for a way to work smarter." Platform Learning chose Nsite because the ASP model-based service met the company's requirement for rapid deployment. "We were up and running quickly," he said. "Nsite streamlined our processes and now we can visibly track what's going on and see what's going where and who has it." The other big factor, according to Sorisi, is that IBM hosts Nsite's service. ROI Before automating with Nsite, handling these tasks manually tied up the company's resources, work hours and its ability to make decisions quickly. "These tools are so flexible," said Sorisi. "They help us get the kids into the classes sooner. That saves us time, and time is money." Pricing Structure Lauren Simonds is the managing editor of SmallBusinessComputing.com |