Version 6.1 SYSPRO Contact Management SYSPRO Contact Management
Introducing SYSPRO SYSPRO is an internationally-recognized, leading provider of enterprise business solutions. Formed in 1978, SYSPRO was one of the first software vendors to develop an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution. Today, SYSPRO is a global business solutions vendor, represented on six continents and by more than 1500 channel and support partners. Over 14,500 licensed companies across a broad spectrum of industries in more than 60 countries trust SYSPRO as the platform on which to manage their business processes. Customer focus is a core component of SYSPRO s corporate culture and is one of the key reasons why SYSPRO maintains a strong leadership position in the enterprise application market. By focusing on people and building lasting relationships with customers and partners, SYSPRO consistently excels at guiding customers through all aspects of their implementation and ongoing usage. The aim is to deliver world-class software that gives customers the control, insight and agility they need for a competitive advantage in a global economy. As such, SYSPRO provides a unique combination of robust, scalable technologies that ensure minimal risk and a high return on investment. SYSPRO is continually developing remarkable software that simplifies operational effectiveness and keeps customers in control of their businesses. Our vision is focused on meeting customer needs today and in the future. The most integrated, uncomplicated and effortless business software solution for small and medium enterprises
Microsoft MapPoint Supplier Contacts Contact Activities My Organization Contacts SYSPRO Contact Management Customer Contacts External Accounts Contacts Contact Management is a means of centralizing information about all the people with whom an organization deals, and the people within the organization who deal with them. These can range from customers to suppliers, prospects, sister companies, consultants and competitors. All contacts and communications with contacts can be recorded and accessed as required, thereby empowering an organization to provide a high level of customer service with minimal effort. Not only does Contact Management contain the information for your contacts, it also contains the information for your colleagues contacts in the same and other organizations. Contact Management provides multiple ways of looking at organization lists so that you can view the information in a way that suits you. Information about communications (or activities) that have happened between touch points in both organizations can be stored and queried. This prevents duplication of effort and provides management with a better view of what is happening as well as the opportunity to intervene when necessary. As the system is easy to update, it encourages users to keep the information current. Integration with Microsoft Outlook allows email correspondence to be sent and updated as an activity within the Contact Management system. The contact address information is stored in a structured format and is integrated with Microsoft MapPoint, allowing you to view the address and if required generate directions. SYSPRO provides a free utility that allows users of Microsoft Office to query and extract the contact management data, regardless of whether they use SYSPRO or have it loaded on their workstation. This allows virtually everyone in your organization to have access to the contact management data. The contact and activity information can be accessed using Contact Management Query, which provides an organization view, a contact view and a search view. The query can be launched from the main SYSPRO menu or from locations within the customer and supplier queries. Contact Management Query is the heart of the Contact Management system - use it to quickly and easily view your contact information and search for organizations, contacts or even specific activities. 1
Features The following defines the key areas covered by the Contact Management system and explains some of the terminology used. Contacts - providing a centralized database The Contact Management solution is designed primarily to manage contacts. A contact represents an individual person and contains information such as their address, employer, job title, etc. By recording contact information in the system, all personnel in your organization have access to a common database of up-to-date information instead of local copies of this information. In addition, you can add your own employees to My Organization. This allows you to record communications (such as email) between your own staff as well as between external companies. For example, if one person sends mail to an external customer and copies more than one internal employee, then each internal employee can view the mail sent. The mail is also recorded against the external contact. You can press F8 to view your contacts from anywhere within SYSPRO. Activities - providing a record of phone calls, emails etc. The Contact Management solution allows you to record activities relating to the contact. An activity could be a phone call made or received, or an email sent or received. User-defined activities are also supported. By recording activities in the Contact Management system, all applicable personnel in your organization can be up to date with the most recent contact with the individual. This provides visibility using a common database rather than each person having a local copy of their recent contacts. To record a sales phone call, you simply click on the hyperlinked telephone number against a contact from within the Contact Query. This invokes a dialog allowing you to capture information about the call. The dialog allows you to capture the date and time of the call together with other information to help you record the purpose and success of the activity. It can also include user fields. You can set a follow-up flag together with a date/time which can be viewed in the Contact Query. The description of the follow-up flag can be customized to cater for your requirements. 2
Activities allow you to enter reminders which can also go into your calendar and create a to-do list. Userdefined fields are allowed. Activities can be accessed from the SYSPRO logo on the toolbar which allows you to post a new activity related to the operator logged into the system. When creating activities or meetings these can be included in your calendar control whether it is the SYSPRO calendar or a Microsoft Outlook calendar. Accounts - assigning external contacts Accounts allow you to assign contacts to organizations that are neither customers nor suppliers. An account can represent a prospective customer (prospect), a consulting group or even a competitor. Accounts can be queried in much the same way as you would query customers or suppliers. When you configure an account, you assign it a name, address and location, together with a user-defined account type that can be used for classification purposes. Once the account has been defined, you can link contacts to it. If an account is a prospect, you can later create a customer from the prospect account information - a link is maintained between the account and customer. All financial transactions are recorded against the customer but can be viewed directly from the Account Query. This applies to suppliers as well. 3
Unknown Attendees reviewing and assigning new contacts When recording an email using the SYSPRO Contact Management System, where an email address is unknown (does not match one of the email addresses against one of the contacts), the email is recorded as an unknown attendee. This feature reviews all unknown attendees and, when relevant, creates a new contact and re-assigns the activities to the new contact. The Unknown Attendees Review program identifies unknown attendees previously recorded against all activities. These are then shown in a listview - grouped and sorted by email address. Adding a new contact Review the activities and, if applicable, elect to create a new contact. Linking to an existing contract Alternatively, reassign the activities recorded against an unknown attendee to an existing contact. This is particularly useful when the email address held against the contact was incorrect (either because it was captured incorrectly or it had changed). Filtering and searching activities The review program provides a filter by date, and shows activities grouped and sorted by email address. The date filter defaults to today so that the initial list shown is relatively small. Excluding email addresses The review program provides the ability to exclude selected email addresses. This allows you to filter out activities that you do not wish to assign to a contact. The list of excluded activities will be remembered the next time you use the review program. Unknown attendees recorded against other activity types When posting activities other than email (such as calls, meetings, tasks or user-defined activities) you also have the ability to record unknown attendees. E.g. when capturing details of a meeting you can record the names of all the attendees even the ones not previously recorded in the Contact Management System. 4
Accessing and viewing your information Contact Management Query At the heart of the Contact Management system is a powerful and flexible Contact Management Query. This provides several views into your contact information, allowing you to see the relationships between organizations (customers, suppliers and accounts), their contacts and their activities. Organization View The Organization View allows you to quickly and easily see the relationships between the organizations with whom you deal. You can view All Organizations or, more likely, you can define a list of organizations (customers, suppliers and accounts) with which it is your responsibility to work or regularly interact. Using an extremely simple-to-use interface, you can navigate through the organizations and view their contacts. You can define and work with multiple organization lists. Contact View The Contact View allows you to concentrate on the contacts for a single organization and view the activities recorded against them. If you select an organization, the system shows all activities for the entire organization. If you select a single contact then only that contact s activities are displayed. Filter capabilities are easy to use and can be user defined. They are displayed in a pull-down list and the system remembers the last selection criteria. Search View The Search View allows you to quickly and easily search for customers, suppliers, accounts, contacts or activities. Once the search results are shown, you can use the hyperlinks to drill down to more information about the entity. When searching organizations, you can save the search results as an Organization List and maintain the list as required. You can define search preferences. 5
Structuring your information Organization Lists The Organization View shown in the Contact Management Query defaults to showing all organizations. In many cases, however, it makes more sense to work with just the organizations for which you are responsible. For example, a typical Account Manager is responsible for a number of customers, suppliers and/or accounts. Multiple Lists You can configure as many organization lists as you require. This could be used to group organizations into various types of work that you perform (e.g. new prospects vs. account management) or may represent organizations from different regions, customer size, market or other designation. Organization lists can be published to others working in the same role or company. After performing an organization search you can save the search result as an organization list and either use it immediately or change it as required. Each list can have an associated Notepad for documenting relevant information about the list. When using the Contact Management Query, it remembers the last list you were viewing. In addition, you can set one of your lists as your favorite for quick access at any time. Hierarchies and Company Groups Some of the organizations you deal with may comprise a head office linked to one or more divisions or subsidiaries. The Organization List Maintenance function makes it extremely easy to configure hierarchies to map onto your organizations with many levels of structure. 6
Integration is key to success Although the Contact Management solution can be used standalone, the biggest attraction is its seamless integration to the rest of the SYSPRO suite. This includes instant access to all the contacts defined against a customer or supplier. SYSPRO Contact Management caters for seamless and free integration to Microsoft Office : MS Outlook, for sending and receiving Email MS Excel /Word to query organizations and contacts Create letters including statements Graphs Copy and Paste External customers can be allowed access Integration to Microsoft Outlook Many companies use Microsoft Outlook for their email, scheduling appointments and meetings, and for storing basic contact information. The Contact Management solution integrates with MS Outlook using SYSPRO s e.net technology. This integration allows you to send email and simultaneously record the message as an activity in the SYSPRO Contact Management system. In addition, you can select one or more received email messages and have them recorded in the SYSPRO Contact Management System. This can be automated. 7
Integration to Microsoft Office Most organizations use MS Office applications such as Excel and Word for many of their day-to-day functions. Our goal is for virtually everyone in your organization to have access to the SYSPRO Contact Management information on their desktop, even if they are not regular SYSPRO users. The SYSPRO Contact Management system has the ability to provide contact, customer, supplier and account information in your MS Word session. A pane can be invoked from an MS Word session. The SYSPRO information is shown in a pane alongside your current document. In the example shown, the operator has performed a search on customers. They then selected one of the customers from the search results and drilled down into the customer details. Lastly, they drilled down further, showing invoice information for that customer. When you have found the information you require, you can use the arrow and/or context menu to copy and paste the information straight into your document. Then, with a single click, transfer this information directly into the current documents. This is a free application and can be deployed to any staff, even externally. 8
Integration to MapPoint The Contact Management System stores addresses using a structured format, allowing simplified and accurate capture, selection and reporting. Each address consists of the following parts: Building Street City Locality State/Province Country ZIP/Postal code Thus, if you are using Microsoft MapPoint and have the appropriate map installed, you can drill down directly to view the map of the location. This can be used to get general directions and view nearby points of interest or event print the map. 9
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