As a business grows, staying on top of both day-to-day operations and managing unexpected events become more challenging. It’s also places limits on how quickly you can grow, especially during busy times. How quickly can you bring new staff up to speed? Is “how things are done” the exclusive knowledge of a number of long term employees? Experienced staff can be relied on to carry out complex tasks, however new hires will take time “to learn the ropes”.

What happens if a small but important task isn’t done? All managers know that no matter who small, some uncompleted tasks can have serious knock-on effects.  And if something does get missed, how are managers informed so they can take action and resolve the problem?

The Task Intelligence feature of Pronto Xi from ABT Group means you can quickly and automatically assign tasks to staff and be alerted if the task isn’t completed. Tasks can also be synced so they appear within Microsoft Outlook.  Multiple tasks can even be combined into a complete workflow.

If a task isn’t marked as completed within a set amount time frame, alerts in multiple formats can be sent to other staff members. If these follow task alerts aren’t properly acted, the task can be escalated to more senior staff with different security levels. Notifications can be via e-mail, displayed via on screen messages, SMS or even kick off other business applications and processes.

Some real world examples of Pronto Xi Task Intelligence might include:

• Customer service call received but not allocated to a technician yet
• Customer service job not completed with their SLA (service level agreement)
• Stock received into a warehouse but not placed into inventory ready for sale
• Key customers not receiving their monthly calls and follow ups
• Regular equipment maintenance not carried out
• Plus almost any business other business scenario

Important events that need immediate attention can easily be missed in any business. Pronto Xi can also alert and escalate when any business “event” occurs. Often these are based on defined financial event, though they may include almost any part of a business’ operation.

These events can be when one or more threshold is reached or an event happens.

Some examples:

• When a PO is over a certain amount is raised
• A budget milestone has been hit or missed
• A large order from a key customer is received
• When a sales is made, but costs associated with it lower the profit to a certain level
• Sales drop below a certain level for period of time
• Normally popular items slow down
• A sales is made to a certain customer
• A service technician is allocated certain types of jobs.

Alerts can be customised according to whom they’re sent to.  A CFO might receive full details of a large order received whereas the warehouse staff might only need to know they need to schedule packing of select items. They can be based on almost any field and even on changes over a period of time.

We’ll cover the BI (Business Intelligence) features of Pronto Xi in greater depth in part II of this article, but here’s a few key points in the meantime.

Bringing all business units together

Another change businesses coming from traditional, SME accounting packages will see when moving to Pronto Xi is the deep insights that can be gained from combining data from all areas including financials, sales, distribution, customer service, manufacturing, rentals and industry applications as part of the core “system” and not disparate add ons or external applications.

Access to your entire business unlocks business trends, helps you spot movements in customer purchasing behaviour, staff productivity and more.

Pronto Xi had hundreds of “out of the box” reports and KPIs plus ABT Group knows how to further slice and dice your data to bring out the best in your decision makers. IT administrators can define access and role to fine tune who can see and distribute information. Customisable reports and dashboards can be accessed through a web interface from anywhere on any device.

BI from Pronto Xi can either be used directly within the system or integrated with a number of Microsoft products.