Five Steps to CRM Success

A customer relationship management (CRM) system can support and improve just about every aspect of any business. However, as with many technologies, most people just scratch the surface of what the systems can do, thus not fully grasping the core benefits. Whether you’re a beginner or experienced user, here are a few tips to improve your CRM experience.

  1. Take baby steps – Start by focusing on the things you already can do, then build from there with your CRM program.
  2. Live it and breathe it – Make your CRM system “the cornerstone of all client interactions,” said Karen Yeates, executive vice president of information technologies for Signature Travel Network.
  3. Begin at the beginning – Record interactions at the point of inquiry, not at point of sale.
  4. Make it a habit – You’ve got to commit to it. If you don’t commit, then you don’t have great data. And if you don’t have great data, what’s the point?
  5. Track the trends – It’s important to use CRMto track sales, so you know what’s hot and what’s not.

CRM data helps you see the big picture, identify the trends, and decide where to focus your marketing efforts.

 

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Infor Integrates Social Media in Email Marketing Product

Infor’s new marketing solutions suite, Infor Omni-Channel Campaign Management, was recently unveiled to benefit data-driven email marketers. This new solution is an updated and rebranded version of former Infor Epiphany Outbound Marketing product from 2006. Infor Omni-Channel Campaign Management helps marketers plan, execute and monitor marketing campaigns across multiple channels, including social media, SMS and email. The updated analytics tool adds flexibility to marketing campaigns by allowing email marketers to monitor changing market dynamics and to change strategy to ensure maximum customer engagement with more personalized content.

 

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Infor Partners with Whole Foods Market

High-end grocery chain Whole Foods Market has partnered with business enterprise software company Infor to build a next-generation cloud-based software for retailers. Infor teams will work alongside Whole Foods Market teams to identify substantial process improvements and develop an open source retail management solution. Infor president, Duncan Angove, and Whole Foods Market executive vice president and chief information officer, Jason Buechel, agree that the new retail management suite, Infor CloudSuite Retail, will enable Whole Foods Market to make better and faster decisions and enhance customer shopping experiences for customers both in-store and online through Whole Foods Market’s digital channels.

 

https://www.arnnet.com.au/article/586793/infor-partners-whole-foods-market/

Social collaboration is at hand with Infor Ming.le and business intelligence for Apple Watch

Infor’s next-generation social business platform, Infor Ming.le is now available for Apple Watch, providing users with wearable technology to help them follow the people, assets, and processes that are essential to business. The Infor Business Intelligence (BI) application will provide mobile users with the ability to process actionable insights in real-time, allowing for easier and more accurate decision-making.

Infor Ming.le is powered by the Infor 10x platform as an embedded function within Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions, drawing information from multiple applications into a simple workflow. Adding to the expansion of the wearable technology market, Infor is better able to serve a wide array of customers with unique and specific industry functionalities.

 

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Top 10 Funniest ICD Codes

The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is used to code conditions for patient records and Health Statistics surveys. On October 1, 2015, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services finalized the 10th revision to ICD codes: ICD-10.

While all injuries are treated and factors affecting health are no laughing matter, some ICD codes are simply too good to be true, yet can legitimately be reported to health physicians. We’ve compiled the top 10 funniest most ridiculous ICD-10 codes out there.

 

10. Hurt at the opera (Y92.253)

Does emotional pain classify as hurt at the opera?

9. Bitten by a turtle (W59.21)

There are many ICD codes for animal related injuries – struck by macaw, pecked by chicken, bit by cow – but the silliest one would have to be getting struck by a turtle. Unless it was a snapping turtle, those reptiles are almost harmless.

8.  Walked into lamppost, subsequent encounter (W220.2XD)

Note that it says subsequent. It’s understandable to have that unfortunate encounter of walking into a lamppost once, but that’s more than any human being should have with lamppost encounters.

7.  Fecal urgency (R15.2)

Sh*t happens.

6.  Burn due to water skis being on fire (V91.07)

Two questions: Are water skis flammable? AND Why didn’t you jump into the water?

5.  Bizarre Personal Appearance (R46.1)

This has Lady Gaga written all over it.

4.  Sibling rivalry (Z62.891)

Better let your doctor know you fought over the remote at dinner time with your sister.  It’s a serious medical condition that you missed Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

3.  Unspecified event, undetermined intent (Y34)

Is that specific enough for you?

2.  Sucked into jet engine, subsequent encounter (V97.33XD)

Again, keyword being subsequent. Can someone explain how it would be possible to survive being sucked into a jet engine the first time, and then being unfortunate enough to go through it a second time?

And the most ridiculous ICD-10 code out there is:

1 .  Problems in Relationships with In-Laws (Z63.1)

If you or someone you know has been a victim of a relationship with their in-laws, help is available.

Here are some honorable mentions that didn’t crack the top 10, but are just as hilarious: parental overprotection (Z62.1), Injuted when knitting or crocheting (Y93.D1),  Swimming pool of prison as the place of occurrence of the external cause (Y92.146), Morbid obesity due to excess calories (E66.01), Lips stuck to instrument (Y92.J4).

 

To view the latest ICD-10 codes, click here

Infor Announces Demand+ to Help Accelerate Supply Chain Forecasting

Infor Demand+ is a new application that is designed to simplify and accelerate supply chain forecasting processes and leverage a modern intuitive planning experience. It offers pre-configured industry templates, enhanced functionality in demand analytics and weekly forecasting, as well as the use of the latest Infor technology including the user experience and the expectation of future software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings. Additional features include:

  • Consumer-Grade User Experience
  • Advanced Forecasting & Improved Accuracy
  • Pre-Configured Best Practice Template
  • Wide-Reaching Business Collaboration Capabilities
  • Performance Dashboards

“Staying on top of current supply and demand is a never ending cycle with manufacturers and distributors… Infor Demand+ helps our customers better forecast their future needs,” says John Bermudez, Infor VP Product Management.

 

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Custom Lawson Portal Message

How to add a welcome message or notification to the portal login page

Custom Lawson Portal MessageLet’s say you want to display a message on the login page for your users. It’s possible you just want to let the know about an upcoming outage, possibly about benefits enrollment dates, or just to tell them about a new event. There’s really no easy way to do that in Portal now. But with a little hacking you can get a really nice message displayed.

You’ll first want to go to the sso.war folder of your IBM profile where you login.htm resides. This can take a few minutes to locate as the Websphere directory structure is notoriously complex. Here’s an example from a client:

D:\IBM\WebSphere\AppServer\profiles\AppSrv01\installedApps\prodCell01\LawsonSecurity.ear\sso.war

Once there:

    1. Open the login.html file in your favorite text editor (I like editplus)
    2. Find the bottom portion of the login box. It’s just below the div that contains the “All rights reserved” message.
    3. Insert your own div there that contains your message and save. Here’s an example of mine:

 

<div style="position:absolute;left:5px;top:416px;width:452px;color=#FF0000;background:#FFFFFF;padding:5px" dir="ltr"><b>NOTICE: </b>Lawson will be unavailable on Tuesday, Sept. 29th.</div>

 

Keep in mind, each time you upgrade portal this message will likely disappear.

 

Lawson SQL Code Snippets

Two SQL queries that we found helpful in the Lawson Absence Management Suite

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Lawson SQL Code Snippets

Lawson SQL Code Snippets

We don’t typically post technical information here on the blog, that’s mostly reserved for the education section of the site. The past couple of week however we were able to write a couple of queries that helped out a customer quite a bit so we figured maybe you all can benefit from them. Without any further delay, here they are:

 

 

-- Get available balances for employees in a specific group and/or plan
select E.COMPANY,E.EMPLOYEE,E.FIRST_NAME,E.LAST_NAME ,E.EMP_STATUS, T.R_PLAN, T.EMPLOYEE_GROUP,T.ACCR_LAST_DT,T.AVAIL_HRS_BAL
From [PROD].[dbo].TAEEMASTER T, [PROD].[dbo].EMPLOYEE E
Where 
-- T.EMPLOYEE_GROUP = 'EXAMPLE' and
T.R_PLAN='XXX' and
T.COMPANY = E.COMPANY and
T.EMPLOYEE = E.EMPLOYEE and
E.EMP_STATUS not like 'T%';
-- Obviously you'll have to change the Employee Group, the Plan code, and the Emp-Status condition to match yours.

This next statement does something rather unique. It reaches into GEN to get the status code definitions for the table field. Nifty!

-- Get all transactions for specific employee group and plan since a specific date including field transactions from GEN
select E.COMPANY,E.EMPLOYEE,E.FIRST_NAME,E.LAST_NAME ,E.EMP_STATUS, T.R_PLAN, T.EMPLOYEE_GROUP,T.TA_HOURS,T.DESCRIPTION,A.VALXLT as 'TYPE',B.VALXLT AS 'TRAN TYPE',C.VALXLT AS 'STATUS',D.VALXLT AS 'BALANCE TYPE'
From [PROD].[dbo].TAEMPTRANS T, [prod].[dbo].EMPLOYEE E , [GEN].[dbo].[VALLST] A, [GEN].[dbo].[VALLST] B, [GEN].[dbo].[VALLST] C, [GEN].[dbo].[VALLST] D
Where 
T.EMPLOYEE_GROUP = 'EXAMPLE' and
T.R_PLAN in('XXX','YYY') and
T.COMPANY = E.COMPANY and
T.EMPLOYEE = E.EMPLOYEE and
T.R_DATE >= '2015-01-01' and
A.DOMVAL =  T.TA_TYPE and
B.DOMVAL =  T.TRAN_TYPE and
C.DOMVAL =  T.STATUS and 
D.DOMVAL = T.BALANCE_TYPE and
A.PRODUCTLINE = 'PROD' and A.FILENAME='TAEMPTRANS' and A.FLDNAME='TA-TYPE' and
B.PRODUCTLINE = 'PROD' and B.FILENAME='TAEMPTRANS' and B.FLDNAME='TRAN-TYPE' and
C.PRODUCTLINE = 'PROD' and C.FILENAME='TAEMPTRANS' and C.FLDNAME='STATUS' and
D.PRODUCTLINE = 'PROD' and D.FILENAME='TAEMPTRANS' and D.FLDNAME='BALANCE-TYPE';

-- You'll have to change the Employee Group, the Plan codes, and the date condition to match yours.

3 Steps For Unlocking Hidden Value In Your CRM Data

Although Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems can do a great deal of reporting customer data, brands need to better identify their high-potential customers to make more informed decisions about how to allocate marketing efforts. It takes three steps for marketers to make the most of their CRM systems, enhance their marketing models, and identify which consumers are optimal prospects for marketing and sales efforts:

  1. Analyze existing high-value customers – Marketers can go even deeper to build pictures of high-potential customers for specific products or sub-brands.
  2. Activate CRM data to narrow and prioritize the prospect audience – This helps identify the customers hidden within the CRM system that are more likely to be good matches for the product or service being promoted.
  3. Leverage high-potential customer personas in marketing efforts – Brands can focus marketing efforts on high-value consumers in the appropriate marketing medium.

These steps can help improve the cost efficiency of marketing efforts across the board. Marketing teams can feel more confident that their efforts are being directed at shoppers that are more likely to have the ability and interest to respond to each marketing promotion.

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7 Significant ERP Trends

Enterprise Apps Today interviewed IT experts to determine what’s going on with Enterprise Resource planning (ERP), where it’s all heading and what companies should be doing about it.

  • ERP’s Cloudy Future – Migrating to the cloud enables companies of all sizes to evolve their IT infrastructure.
  • Hybrid Cloud – Have the best of both worlds with on-premise applications AND cloud appications integrated to your system.
  • Better ERP Reporting – Improved reporting, facilitated by analytics and tighter integration is a current trend in ERP.
  • Fighting ERP Tradition – Companies hesitant of change want something that can help them solve their problems with simple solutions.
  • SMB ERP Adoption – The move to the cloud has led to greater SMB adoption of ERP.
  • ERP Platform Approach – There is a move toward businesses making a strategic platform choice first, and then working with individual departments to choose applications that fit the overall platform strategy.
  • ERP Vendor Consolidation – There will most likely be more mergers in the near future.

We are likely to see a growing cloud ERP presence, heavier SMB buy-in, more analytics and a smaller group of ERP vendors to choose from as the field continues to thin down due to mergers.

 

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