 How easy is it for your employees to do their jobs? If you ever needed to help your employees unleash their potential, now is the time. When times get tough, the process annoyances that hamper productivity – manual approval steps, data re-entry, software workarounds, and time-wasting delays – can become significant obstacles to recognizing and capitalizing on the opportunities that do exist. As resources become constrained, costs become critical, and every deal becomes more important, efficiency can determine your survival.
A founding principle of Demand Solutions Group is a commitment to eliminate our customers' "value gaps" – the difference between the value and efficiency that you should be gaining from your business applications and what you are actually receiving. Value gaps often emerge when an organization does not continuously adjust its business application to better take advantage of its full capabilities or when the organization has not kept pace with a changing business environment. Over time the gap widens until drastic action is needed, such as replacing the application or engaging in a significant effort to close it.
Identifying and closing value gaps is as much an art as a science, because every business is different. We have historically helped customers close the value gap by combining our veteran consulting staff’s business experience with our business application experience and close observation of how a customer's business processes are actually working. Now we have enhanced our value gap approach with a new value gap identification and elimination tool – the DSG Value Gap Minimizer. As you read this quarter's newsletter, you'll learn more about the Minimizer, and see how DSG has helped other customers identify and close value gaps. You'll also learn about our expanded solution sets that are now available through new partnerships, which we established in direct response to customers' identified value gaps.
Thanks for your business and interest, and as always, please enjoy.
Todd Fitzwater, Principal and Co-founder |
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What's New from Salesforce.com
Salesforce continues to show breathtaking vision and establish itself as the CRM solution provider of the decade. The latest release delivers strong growth in incremental features, a few astonishing new features, and a seamless upgrade.
New Upgrades: Case Teams and Campaign Influences
Salesforce responds to customers' needs with important upgrades to existing functions. The new Case Teams capabilities illustrate this. Case Teams are complex and relevant only to a few very sophisticated Support organizations, and now Salesforce.com delivers them. In another important upgrade, the Campaign Influences feature allows you to analyze sophisticated marketing programs. Click here for more details.
Great Idea!
Salesforce CRM Ideas helps you create an interactive forum for capturing suggestions from customers, prospects, employees, and others who care about your product for objective, actionable guidance. Reports can now be scheduled and delivered via email.
New! More Apps on Force.com
The Force.com platform is now home to a large and rapidly growing set of business applications. You can download them from the AppExchange, or you can quickly and easily build exactly the capabilities you need. This season’s big new features include integrations with Amazon and Facebook, which allow you to exploit the processing power made available on Amazon, as well as target the millions of potential customers on Facebook.
You can preview these features by visiting www.salesforce.com/platform/sites. The platform also allows you to host your web site on Salesforce server – free! An extra charge applies for more than 500,000 page views per month.
What's New from NetSuite
New! Customized Financial Reporting Statements
New financial reporting enhancements allow you to customize income, balance sheet, and cash flow statements. You now have more control over layouts and content, including fonts, colors, custom calculations, and account selection. Enhanced security features allow you to drill down into some areas of the reports and prevent drill-down in other areas. And unlike prior releases, in which only one active custom layout could be used at a time, now there are no limits.
New! Foreign Currency Exchange Enhanced
NetSuite has enhanced its foreign exchange capability to include proper accounting for foreign exchange gains and losses in the period the gain or loss occurred.
What's New from Intacct
Intacct has introduced several enhancements that provide new features and greatly improve ease of use. Also, Intacct continues to partner with other SaaS providers to provide best of breed capabilities. Let DSG support you in using these new features to improve your business.
New! Stockable Kits
Now companies can define kits that contain multiple items and inventory them in an assembled state. These kits can be built up as needed for shipping customer orders, or disassembled into their piece parts, if required.
New! Ease of Use Enhancements
Several enhancements will make accepting and applying customer payments much easier. Intacct has eliminated the need to create batches for each posting date. Now batches are automatic, similar to invoice batches. And users can navigate directly from an invoice via workflow to the accept payments function.
Intacct now also remembers your personal preferences for key reports in the system. Each time you run a report, your preferences are used to provide the output just the way you want it.
New! More Intacct Partners
AvaTax – with subscription to Avalara’s tax service, Intacct users no longer need to maintain sales tax tables, jurisdictions, and agencies. AvaTax enables adding sales tax to customer invoices and facilitates payments to tax agencies and improves compliance.
Wells Fargo – Intacct continues to improve the features of the integration with Wells Fargo Bill Pay. In a new pilot program, Intacct users can now pay bills with wire transfers, outsourced checks, and ACH.
Future Features
Intacct’s pace of innovation is increasing. In early 2009, there will be a major upgrade to the user interface, improved multi-entity consolidations, introduction of user-customizable forms, and the ability to use workflow on multiple transactions at once.
New! DSG Announces the Value Gap Minimizer
Demand Solutions Group officially launched its Value Gap Minimizer – a service that enables us to identify value gaps in existing solutions so that we can help you close them maximize productivity from your solution. The Minimizer uses a combination of automated pinpoint survey tools, results analysis, and prescriptive tactics to return measurable improvements. If you subscribe to DSG Optimize with a Corporate – or higher – level of service, we will be rolling out the Minimizer in your organization soon. If you are not one of our Optimize customers and would like help identifying and closing a suspected value gap, please contact us today!
Welcome Adaptive Planning
DSG has partnered with Adaptive Planning, allowing us to bring you a leading on-demand solution for budgeting, forecasting, and reporting. Adaptive Planning solutions integrate with NetSuite and Intacct to extend their functionality. In this recessionary period, best practices dictate developing multiple business scenarios and planning against them. Adaptive Planning is just the solution to help you continuously model various revenue and cost models, using your actual NetSuite or Intacct data. Learn more about taking control of your organization's financial future. Contact DSG for a demonstration.
DSG Partners with Eloqua
Our new partnership with Eloqua brings you a leading demand generation solution, including the abilities to execute, automate, and measure B2B marketing programs. Lead nurturing and lead management tools will help keep your company in front of prospects, even over a long period of time. We can integrate Eloqua solutions with existing NetSuite and Salesforce.com installations or deliver standalone Eloqua solutions. Contact DSG for more detail about Eloqua and how it can help you.
Get Business Intelligence on Demand with PivotLink
We have also partnered with PivotLink to bring you DSG Analytics. With an out-of-the-box NetSuite integration, a configured set of business analytics, and the power of Pivotlink, you can get a better insight into your business. Gain instant visibility and insight from analyzing your CRM, ERP, financial, or other data by using Pivotlink's sophisticated analytics and multidimensional reporting. Contact DSG for more details about DSG Analytics.
Celigo Connects NetSuite and Salesforce.com
Not able to motivate your sales team to move to NetSuite? Want the best of both worlds? Our newest partnership with Celigo significantly simplifies integration between NetSuite and Salesforce.com. The Celigo integration allows you to completely integrate the two systems and gain full visibility into financial data from NetSuite or sales data from Salesforce.com. Contact DSG for more details. |
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You think you have a value gap when...
OK. So you think you might have a value gap. How do you know if you do, how large it is, and where it is? If you are experiencing any of the following symptoms, you are likely to have a value gap:
The laundry list is getting longer.
If your organization has a growing laundry list of changes that need to be made, it is likely that many of these items are related to a few core application issues.
Employees are complaining.
If you hear complaints about process inefficiencies – things take too long, require too many steps, or users cannot get the information they need.
Adoption is poor.
When people don't use the application, use only a few capabilities, or find it too difficult to use, your organization cannot derive the benefits from the application.
Numerous workarounds exist.
Users relying on other tools to do their jobs. For example, instead of using your accounting solution, they transfer data into Excel spreadsheets, which proliferate across the organization. Or multiple emails take the place of automatic notifications.
These are some of the common symptoms of a value gap. Depending on the root issue, the application might need tuning, its features upgraded, new capabilities added, focused training delivered, or an integration developed for another core application.
Pinpoint the Gap
Identifying a value gap and prescribing the most effective way to eliminate it first requires a repeatable, simple mechanism for identifying where and how large the gap is. Next, it requires applying experience with specific business processes and application expertise. Using the DSG Value Gap Minimizer, we can easily identify a value gap, minimize it, and help ensure that no gaps remain hidden – only to show up later and larger. If you would like to find out more information about the Minimizer, contact us today.
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Network Equipment Provider Manages Rapid Growth
Salesforce.com functions as this company's "glue" – connecting its marketing, sales, and customer service functions. Although the company has strong in-house administration and configuration expertise for managing its applications, it relies on DSG for assistance in extending its current Salesforce.com capabilities. In the past three months, DSG has helped the company avoid a value gap by designing and delivering new lead, case, RMA, channel partner, and approval management processes, together with a variety of tactical enhancements. Because DSG is attuned to the company's business needs and is highly experienced with CRM business processes, we have optimized its capabilities with minimal distraction to its employees.
Cosmetology School Increases Agility
The beauty industry is fast-paced, and a leading cosmetology school recently adopted NetSuite for improving productivity, gaining visibility into its financials, and supporting its Web-based sales efforts. DSG helped the school increase their solution's leverage to stay ahead of a value gap.
DSG migrated the school's student enrollment process from a standalone system to NetSuite, using customized fields and on-line forms that easily integrate with the existing web site. The new application eliminated redundant systems and delivers valuable data that is used throughout the student's tenure at the school to avoid continual data re-entry.
Custom financial statements were developed, which simplify preparation for presentations and audits and eliminate the time-consuming manual approach that was previously required. New mail merge features simplify communication between students and their customers for better productivity. As new NetSuite features were introduced, such as Gift Certificates and promotion codes, the school quickly implemented them. When the school updated its web site, DSG was able to quickly re-design the NetSuite forms to be consistent with the new brand. Finally, an update of user permissions reduced the potential for operator errors and further secured confidential student information.
Staffing Company Supports Geographic Expansion with NetSuite OneWorld
Since early 2008, this firm has expanded its sourcing operations across North America, providing performance-ready workforces to a highly volatile industry. DSG's Optimization Services, including the Value Gap Minimizer, play an important role in supporting the firm's strategic planning and tactical operations. DSG works closely with the firm to support multiple operating business units using NetSuite. As new business units are added to the NetSuite environment, DSG helps define each unit's needs and develops the required custom forms, setup, security, and roles. We also implemented the NetSuite OneWorld Multi-subsidiary Multi-currency product.
Our weekly forums with the firm reveal potential operational pain points, which we address through configuration, customization, integration, training, or working with NetSuite on problem resolution. For example, one of the firm's clients required the firm to enter invoices into the client's procurement system. Every two weeks, the firm would generate invoices and manually re-key the data into the client procurement system, introducing the potential for error and wasting time. It would then monitor a general email inbox for invoice payment approvals from the client and file hard copies. DSG helped the client evaluate an Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) partner within its industry and then developed the software for generating an invoice in NetSuite that includes client-required data, and delivering it to the EDI gateway for secure transport to the client's procurement system. The client’s invoice approval notifications are emailed back, integrated into NetSuite, and logged against the invoice. The custom solution eliminates the need for accounting personnel to enter data twice, provides an electronic audit trail of the transaction from creation to delivery, and automates payment approval tracking. |
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Demand Solutions Group is a privately owned consulting
firm that sells and tailors on-demand ERP, CRM, and eBusiness
solutions to deliver maximum business value for clients.
The company provides a range of road-mapping, launch,
revitalization, and optimization services for leading
on-demand software packages. Demand Solutions Group serves
businesses that range from start-up companies to members
of the Fortune 100, and is based in Silicon Valley, California.
For more information, please visit www.demandsolutionsgroup.com.
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