E-forms – how to get away from Excel
It continues to amaze me how many businesses, both big and small, rely on spreadsheets and emails to report on their business. A time sheet here, a KPI there, right through to budgets – all done in a spreadsheet and passed on through the business via email.
Now don’t get me wrong, this is perfectly fine for small companies (and by small, I mean less than 20 employees) but any more than this, a basic e-form application can deliver immediate benefits to both the user and the business.
Take for example a recent client of ours. They are required to keep stringent records on all communications with their customers, no matter how trivial. However, rather than having a central storage area, this information was shared around by email. It was of no real surprise then, when a critical piece of information went walkabout, so did their client.
E-forms are perfect for such applications, and can quickly be measured by both increases in customer AND staff satisfaction.
Rob,
I completely agree. Every new client now gets heavily involved with InfoCapture – our only real challenge now is how to make such a powerful application easier to use!
I was recently asked to export everything from an Infocapture project into excel. The purpose was primarilary for backup and to create some graphical representations of the data (something that can already be achieved using the Claromentis Dashboard engine).
However, I believe the real reason for this was the comfort of Excel.
Users are bound to excel for a simple display of their data, all presented in a soft and friendly spreadsheet, with pretty total columns at the end.
Claromentis Infocapture will always struggle to compete against this comfort zone, but this is natural. No-one likes to move away from something that they are comfortable with, particularly if it’s easy to use.
However, Claromentis Infocapture provides so much more than a spreadsheet. With all of the features Infocapture offers, not forgetting the simple to use report wizard; users can begin to establish a new comfort zone within the Claromentis application suite.
Protected by permissions, comforted by automation of processes, re-enforced by SLA’s, knowledge of all history, reminded by notifications, and topped of by a report wizard that allows the user to export the results back into Excel!!!
Infocapture undoubtedly offers a safe-haven for all users to collect, process and review information easily and efficiently.
Ye, without doubt the comfort factor is numero uno. The biggest way to get over this (apart from continually improving the produce)is to educate our clients. That said, finding the time for all this seems to be the biggest hurdle of them all!!!