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 Exact Globe you have several options to make your own process flows in the main menu. Using these options helps to focus on the things that are most important or frequently used and to have a visual insight into the process you are performing.  The visual process flow of individual orders is widely used, the process flow in the menu is used less. What is the cause of this and can we improve the user experience here?

Maybe the most well known process flow in Exact Globe is the sales order process flow for a single order: 

 It gives you relevant information of the flow of the sales order in an intuitive way. This flow is shown standard in several entry and overview applications.

Exact Globe also offers the possibility to organize your work on the main menu level into flows that are relevant for your daily work.  The most well known of these is the role bar and it is mostly used in combination with the panel menu.  It is situated to the left of the main panel menu: 

 You can define several process flows, in the example you have the logistic flow, finance and reports. The main part of the menu is still the function based menu with the functional tabs and access to all menu paths per function.

Another way of working is the explorer menu where you have your complete functional menu to the left and can create process flows in the central part of the menu:

 Experience tells us that the possibilities to show process flows in Exact Globe are not widely used. The following are 4 statements that may explain why and possible enhancements to the user interface. I am very interested to hear from you if they are correct:

1. What is often seen is that people use the default screens and settings. Could the user experience be improved when Exact offers standard role based or industry specific templates for these process flows?
2. Another reason can be the limited flexibility in creating the process flows:  At the moment you can only add menu paths from either top to bottom or left to right.  Could the user experience be improved by the ability to show multiple flows grouped in one overview?
3. An opportunity for process flows is the integration with Exact Synergy. When using Synergy and Exact Globe you often have processes that require both products. Wouldn’t it be great if you could see this flow from one screen?
4. The advantage of showing the menu in a process flow is that you have instant visual insight into the specific process flows that you as a user are responsible for. Could the usability be improved if you had a direct insight into the KPI’s of this flow in the same screen?

 Of course I am also very interested in your experience with the current user interface and possible enhancements you see!

First of all we introduce to you a totally renewed Synergy Office Integration. It provides you with new opportunities to access your workflow, planning, and nearly all other Exact Synergy Enterprise operations directly from Microsoft Outlook. We know that many, many users of Exact Synergy Enterprise also use Microsoft Outlook and these two products are now joined in one single interface.

Also, a new screen for creating requests has been implemented, already introduced to you earlier in this blog post. We asked your feedback and we got it! Thanks for all your suggestions and comments.

New search functionality in this product update enables you to search for terms with diacritics, as explained earlier in this blog post.Product update 241 also introduces support for both Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008.

Over the coming period of time we will highlight some of the new functionality in this product update on this blog. Please subscribe to our RSS-feeds or e-mail newsletters so we can keep you informed.