The ESS portal gives your employees access to their personal data in a secure and transparent environment. As an employee you can for instance enter or change your time off period, enter an expense claim or change the personal address. This undoubtedly leads to reduction of administrative costs.

In the new simplified version of Exact Synergy, that will be available as a beta version in product update 244, we particularly focus on ESS features. One of them is Time Off.

The screenshot above is the entry part of Time Off. As you can see the screen is truly focused on getting the task of asking time off done easily. Also the user is presented the information he or she naturally needs, for instance “What is my balance?” The entry fields are linked based on the choices the employee made so the employee can quickly fill in the request and ask for approval without being confronted with unnecessary fields that may be left blank.

Now you can ‘dream’ about how to spend your personal time while entering the request instead of the think about which procedures to follow to enter a time off request. And that makes a lot more fun…

If you have any questions regarding this post, please create a comment to this article.

Image credit for the header image: neloqua.

In the coming product update (244), we extend the IIR functionality with a document previewer, which shows automatically a preview of the scanned invoice that is attached to the IIR request. The big advantage is that the resource does not need to click on the hyperlink to open the attached invoice. The document is already visible in the request and the resource can directly compare the content of the invoice with the financial transaction lines in the request.
This saves the user a lot of time.

If you have any questions regarding the IIR document previewer, please create a comment to this article below or let me know directly via vincent.henricks[at]exact.com.

Image credit for the header image: cybrgrl (from Flickr).

On behalf of the Product Management team, I am pleased to announce that Exact Synergy Enterprise will move into the controlled release phase for product update 243 as per April 9. Our stakeholders were very helpful to verify the functionality for this update. Your feedback is very much appreciated so that we can make this update general available. This new product update is planned to be generally available in May.

More than 30 customers are already lined up to participate in the controlled release and start using it. On top of that all of Exacts partners/resellers will be able to download the 243 release as well.

Vladimir Bataev posted the article ‘Five highlights of the product update 243 of Exact Synergy Enterprise’ on March 31. A summary of the highlights:

• Request labeling;
• Time & Billing;
• Notifications on updated requests;
• Synergy mobile;
• Integration with Microsoft SQL Reporting Services.

 I will give you an overview of other items that you can expect in this update.

CRM

• Faster access to back office reports of the customers: quotations, sales orders and sales invoices are available from the account card;
• Complete controls over contact details for customer and reseller portal users with editable external references for social networks;
• Multiple contacts can be added during account import;
• Richer mail merges with additional tags for the main debtor;
• Opportunity management: tighter control over reasons why opportunities get lost.

 HRM

• More flexible absence calculations based on calendar and working days;
• Improved absence balance overviews in hours and per 4 weeks in the absence and cost analysis reports;
• Instant Visibility of Information in Competency, Performance Review, and Target Agreement Profiles;
• Easier overviews on people search results with sorting on various columns.

 Business users

• Business users can take part in workflows, because roles can be assigned to them;
• A Business user can edit documents that he or she created;
• Business users can see all requests and documents attached to their customers.

 Employee Self Service users

• Employee Self Service users can now participate in workflow routing. It is now possible to add roles to employees who are assigned the Employee self service user license type.

 Data synchronization

• Near real-time data synchronization between Exact Synergy Enterprise and Exact Globe. This offers customers who are currently using Exact Globe and Exact Synergy (asp) in an integrated scenario, to migrate to and start benefiting from Exact Synergy Enterprise.

 Smaller enhancements

• Synergy Office Integration: an easy overview of unread activities;
• Support for fully-fledged CRM template in the templating tool;
• Customizable project and contact cards;
• Filtering on pending remarks so that it is easier to see what colleagues need to be poked.

For HRM a large number of standard HRM reports and KPI’s will be added in the coming period. The first set of reports that you can expect includes a birthday list, absence overview, Inflow/Outflow, FTE per cost center, expiry date contracts, etc.

I am looking for suggestions from your side. If you have ideas about additional HRM reports, please create a comment to this article below or let me know directly via vincent.henricks[at]exact.com.

Photo credit: Jorge Franganillo