Businesses are faced with a rising challenge today: There is more data that they have to deal with rather than not enough. This fact, coupled with the increased speed in which everything now has to happen, has meant that businesses more than ever have to take all of that data and automate as much of their actions as possible to maximize productivity.
Workflows themselves are nothing new. Six Sigma, Total Quality Management, Business process reengineering, and Lean systems have all focused on some aspects of workflow management and improvement. By establishing and standardizing best practices, many organizations have streamlined the physical aspects of operational tasks.
But more often than not, the software tools to move that information across the organization (such as forms, faxes, emails and even intranets) have not kept up, involving additional complexity, consultation, and process-slowing human error. Systems that are built are often customized to such a point that changing them would cost businesses considerable time and expense. And in most cases, workflows are only built for the most important activities rather than the most common.
LongJump today introduces a graphical Workflow Designer to help businesses map out their data-driven, repeatable processes and route actions across an organization, enabling consistent best practices and streamlining delivery cycles. With the easy-to-use, web-based Workflow Designer, users sharing data and activities in LongJump are empowered to improve operational efficiency and quality and information flow.
With a simplified workflow metaphor, yet with extensive capabilities to support to virtually any business process, both simple and compless processes can be automated and routed throughout an organization. Everything from vacation and expense approvals to hiring processes to creative production projects, to service delivery can be mapped out in LongJump, its data stored, information and actions routed to key constituents, and its status maintained.
To learn more about how to create workflows using LongJump, click here for the feature guide.
Ok. It doesn’t seem that hard a question to answer, but there are still a lot of people who don’t think of relational databases when they think of how to build applications in LongJump. Yet it is the most basic structure in computing and especially web computing. Consider the most popular online sites and services: eBay, Amazon, iTunes, Netflix, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn. At their very core, if you took away the whiz-bang features and the great content, you would have in essence relational databases.
The long-awaited Campaign Manager is finally available. The campaign manager allows to design template-driven email marketing campaigns and distribute them to lists of prospective customers. The Campaign Manager includes some some of the following features and benefits:
Powerful List Management: Import and export lists into LongJump. The Campaign Manager also comes with a complete set of list management tools including merge, de-dupe and the ability to support opt-outs.
Customizeable Templates: The Campaign Manager comes with built-in customizeable templates you can use for your email campaigns. You can also use the built-in design wizard to create your own or simply important your own designs or HTML templates from services like vFlyer.
Image Hosting Included: LongJump is capable of hosting all the images used by your HTML email campaigns taking the hassle out of the process.
Comprehensive Metric and Reporting: LongJump provides comprehensive metrics and statistics on how many people received your email, how many open it, how many opted out and other important marketing information.
White-Listed Delivery: LongJump is partnered with VerticalResponse, the premier email delivery service, to ensure that correspondence is white-listed for delivery across spam filters.
Automate Follow-Up Tasks: LongJump makes it easy to assign a call back to any of your team members when someone opens or clicks on an email. This accelerates the selling process and proactively goes after those who have expressed an interest in your offering.
The LongJump Campaign Manager is an easy, effective and cost-effective email marketing solution that let’s you create professional-looking emails with no technical experise and to establish and build strong and lasting relationships with your customers. Give it a try today!
LongJump comes with two key support and IT applications that can help your business address their support and IT needs and are worth taking a look at. These applications include:
Support Case Manager
The Support Case Manager provides a complete case management support solution through a built-In customer self-service portal. The Support Case Manager is an extremely robust application that allows you to not only track cases securely but also provides such advanced features like notification options, a customizable workflow as well as escalation policies. One of its “killer features” is the ability to integrate it directly into your website using a single line of HTML code!
IT Asset Tracker
Most IT departments maintain (or should maintain) important financial, service and location information on laptops, desktops, servers, mobile phones, and other equipment you may have in your company. Too often we here stories like the 1,100 laptops missing from the Commerce Department or other organizations which is a result of poor (or non-existent) inventory management! The IT Asset Tracker does a great job of help solve this problem by enabling to track assets by serial numbers, asset tags, expiring warranties, lease status, or a list of other factors. Additionally, it comes with the ability to generate financial reports based on asset allocation or department!
OfficeSpace is really a collaborative environment that allows teams and workgroups within and outside your organization to work together! By allowing team members to share calendars, tasks and other important information they can better coordinate team efforts. Some of the key components you’ll find in OfficeSpace include:
Shared Calendars OfficeSpace provides you with the ability to schedule resources (such as conference rooms), company and group events by supporting both group and personal calendars and allowing you to layer individual team calendars.
Task Assignment OfficeSpace helps you organize team and individual tasks into project as well as seamlessly maintain non-project related tasks. You can assign tasks to each other, send reminders, and generate reports around tasks.
Document and Photo Sharing OfficeSpace provides a secured area that centralizes the current and past versions of your documents. Documents are organized in access-controllable folders. Documents can be can easily be updated, backed-up or archived.
Discussion Forums OfficeSpace enables your team to participate and discuss project related items in a searchable online forum. Forums can also be categorized for improved organization.
Microsoft Outlook Integration OfficeSpace enables you to seamlessly synchronize personal appointments and tasks within the application with Microsoft Outlook.
Whether you are considering using OfficeSpace for your sales team, marketing team, or a project related team in your organization, visit the LongJump Application catalog and find out how the LongJump suite of applications can help boost your business productivity!
Sales force management (SFA) systems allow companies to automate sales and sales force management functions and serve an important customer relationship management (CRM) function within the firm. LongJump’s Sales Force Automation (SFA) is a enterprise-grade application that provides a full-blown SFA solution to small and medium-sized companies. This includes many advanced features found only on high-end systems. Some of the key components and features that businesses will find extremely useful in managing the sales pipeline include:
360º Sales Visibility: The ability to view all aspects of your prospects, accounts, contacts, and opportunities.
30–Second Call Log: The ability to log calls quickly (usually in under 30 seconds) with complete access to customer records, call details, and follow-up tasks and reminders.
Built-In Prospect Manager: The ability to manage your potential sales leads collected through your website and assigning them to sales reps based on rules and policies.
Built-In Deal Tracker: Ability to store product and price information, track deal status, and maintain key live metrics on activities related to deals.
Built-In Contract Manager: Ability to track and maintain contract information for licensing or services as an integrated part of your customer management.
Microsoft Outlook Integration: Ability to quickly log emails sent to contacts, and synchronize appointments, tasks, and contacts all with Microsoft Outlook.
If you have a sales organization in your company and need an effective way to manage your sales force, be sure to test drive the LongJump Sales Force Automation today!
Bug Chilla is a bug and issue tracking and reporting application aimed engineering organizations to both track bugs and prioritize feature requests. Most bug tracking solutions focus purely on eliminating software bugs, but how can you track bugs without also considering product management, marketing, and other factors in the product development process? Bug Chilla focuses on both resolving issues as well as helping manage feature prioritization. Additionally, its easy to customize Bug Chilla to meet your entire team’s needs – which means engineering as well as QA, documentation and believe it or not marketing. You can find out more about Bug Chilla and test drive it today on our Application Catalog.
Earlier this week I took a look at the Recruitment Agency Solution and how it (along with other LongJump applications) can be leveraged by both internal and external recruiters as part of the hiring process.
Today we look at some of the other applications in the HR category. These include:
Employee Manager You can use the Employee Manager to securely store important employee data, and streamline time-off requisitions and approvals. It gives you the ability to securely maintain information on employees including hiring dates, review cycles, training, PTO requisition, and benefits data. Like other LongJump applications, the Employee Manager can share information with other applications to relate employee information to other areas of your business.
Recruitment Agency Solution
As I mention in my previous post, the Recruitment Agency Solution provides a complete solution for internal and external recruiting teams that helps them maximize their matchmaking skills! It not only stores candidate information, but matches it to job openings as well as allows you to manage hiring companies and contacts. Recruiters can use it to create candidate and company assessment profiles and obviously store resumes in a central location. The Recruitment Agency Solution also integrates with email, calendar, and task activities to provide a complete picture of candidates and companies.
Job Leads This application provides a simple way to capture job leads from your website. Using a single line of HTML, you can embed a web form on your existing website or blog that collects information from job leads and stores it directly in LongJump! Job Leads also provides email notification and tracking capabilities.
You can find these and other business application in LongJump’s application catalog!
Finding and hiring good people is hard, especially for small businesses. Finding the best candidates to fill your organization’s job needs will ensure that you improve employee retention! The LongJump Recruitment Agency Solution allows both internal and external recruiters to manage your pool of job applicants. Here is a summary of some of what is possible:
Store candidate information: provides a central store for incoming application information such as resumes and CV’s
Managing recruiters: allows you to manage external recruiters that you may be working with
Profile creation and management: ability to create candidate and company assessment profiles
Job and Skill matching: match candidate profiles and information to job requirements quickly and easily
Website Integration: integrate web-based job inquires from your website with the Recruitment Agency Manager
LongJump Platform Integration: share and use data and contacts from other LongJump applications such as email, calendar and task activities.
Here are some other tips and guidelines that can be applied with your use of the Recruitment Agency Solution and within your organization to improve your hiring process and employee retention:
Make a Staffing Plan
What exactly is the type of job that needs filling and how many of those jobs are there? What are the precise specifications and descriptions? Decide in advance what the salary and benefits will be. Create the necessary profile within the Recruitment Agency Solutionand create time lines (Calendar) and budgets as part of the process.
Find Good Candidates What type of advertising will you do to attract the candidates you – newspapers, trade journals, Internet? Consider using a Internet job board or a solution like vFlyer (that syndicates your job posting to all the leading online marketplaces). Use your website to collect information from potential candidates through the web-based integration capabilities of the Recruitment Agency Solution.
Prepare Interview Questions A good interview has a purpose and a direction. Consider using a collaborative environment like OfficeSpace to manage the collection and assembly of interview questions. If the applicant has interviews with multiple team members, LongJump can easily hand the communication, scheduling and collaborative discussions that accompany such interviews. Here are some additional content and legal guidelines than can help in the process.
Avoid Common Errors
Try to avoid any and all of the following common errors. Asking leading questions. Making decisions too early in the interview. Lacking knowledge of precise job requirements. Letting the pressure of your duties shorten interview time. Doing more talking than the candidate. Failure to direct the interview.
Check References If possible, check three references on each candidate. This demonstrates that you are using reasonable care in the hiring process. Careful reference checks ensure that candidates are right for the job and they are who they claim to be.
One of LongJump’s strengths is its comprehensive suite of sales applications that enables sales professionals to sell and manage their pipeline’s more effectively. There is a quick overview of some of the key sales applications that come with the LongJump platform:
Customer Manager
This sales application allows you to store and share customer account information with your sales organization. The Customer Manager gives sales professionals a “360–degree” view of the customer relationships and keeps track of all the activity and communication history that relates to their account.
Contract Manager
The Contact Manager helps your business maintain and automate contract activities for prospects, customers, and vendors. Important account cycle activities like contract and account expirations, and other important events relating to product or services contracts.
Deal Tracker
This application allows you to build sales opportunities with integrated price books and product lists, at the same time providing an accurate outlook into your sales opportunities. Using the Deal Tracker, you can store product and price information, track deal status, maintain key live metrics on activities related to deals, and turn your sales representatives into a goal-oriented, focused sales team.
Prospecting Manager
Use the Prospecting Manager to really focus your sales efforts. The Prospecting Manager to “mine” for potential sales leads. These includes things like driving new prospects from your website and assign them to your sales reps, identifying which prospects need special attention, and even automating parts of you sales channel.
Sales Force Automation
The SFA applications serves as the flagship application for sales teams to track progress and share customer information. If you have used CRM tools before, LongJump’s Sales Force Automation (SFA) provides all of the sales management functions you’re accustomed to in enterprise-grade applications plus much more.
Remember that you can always visit the LongJump Application Catalog for a complete listing of available business applications.
