But one problem is when you decide yourself to multitask, another problem is when the software tool you are using forces you to stop your activity and switch to a completely different one in order to achieve your goal.

Naturally, when working on Synergy Enterprise, we want to make your workflow as streamlined as possible. Still there are many tricky everyday cases when, for example, you are creating a request and suddenly realise that you need a new document. Or you are creating a new project and find out that an account you want to link the project to is not yet there.

What do you do in such cases? Do you open a new Synergy Enterprise window to create a missing entity and then go back to the new request or project?

In case you do, remember that there is a better way to avoid such evil multitasking: watch the new Synergy Enterprise tip video for details!

(The video is created by Exademy, and the image is courtesy of 43 Folders.)

The Incoming Invoice Register is Exact’s solution to efficiently and easily validate and approve incoming purchase invoices by the correct responsible person in your organization. By doing that your business avoids paying invoices it should not pay at this time or shouldn’t be paid at all thus reducing the effort it puts in money back procedures.

Vincent already explained in his post that an invoice preview will be made available in Exact Synergy Enterprise so that the scanned invoice is immediately visible next to the financial booking information. But what really is the Incoming Invoice Register solution? And how can it help you to take control over that part of the purchase process within your organization?

Still interested? show me how it works!

After a purchase invoice is registered in Exact Globe’s Incoming Invoice Register one or more approval requests are created for the person(s) who needs to approve the purchase invoice in Exact Synergy Enterprise. Whom the approver(s) are, is determined by register codes. It’s also possible to specify whether or not the approvers can approve simultaneously or in sequence. As soon as all approvers have approved the request the financial booking within Exact Globe is updated and ready to be paid based on payment conditions. When the purchase invoice is incorrect and one of  the approvers rejects the invoice, the financial administration is automatically notified. After correction of the financial booking or invoice, all approvers need to approve it again.

I hope this short introduction gives you more insight on Exact’s incoming invoice solution and how it can help you taking control over your expenses.

Feedback is highly appreciated. Watch online incoming invoice register demo of the add-on version here.

Mmm, are you lost? Do you understand what this is about? Maybe you do, but let me explain how we and our customers benefit from Scrum. The power of Scrum is continuously focus on quick delivery of maximized business value.
Through early feedback we can react faster so quality, understandability and predictability of software development can improve. This will give us an agile development process in which we can deliver better products in a shorter time frame.

How?
Scrum contains sets of practices and predefined roles. The main roles in Scrum are:

1. the “Scrum Master”, the facilitator. A key part of the Scrum Master’s role is to protect the team and keep them focused on the tasks in hand.
2. the “Product Owner”, who represents the voice of the customer. He/she ensures that the Scrum Team works on the “right things” from a business perspective.
3. the “Team” has the responsibility to deliver the product. A team is made up of 5–9 people with cross-functional skills who do the actual work (design, develop, test, technical communication, etc.).

During each “sprint”, in Exact a two-week period, the team creates a shippable product enhancement (for example, working and tested software). The set of features that go into a sprint come from the product “backlog”, which is a prioritized set of high level requirements of work to be done. Which backlog items go into the sprint is determined during the sprint planning meeting. During this meeting, the Product Owner informs the team of the items in the product backlog that he or she wants completed. The team then determines how much of this they can commit to complete during the next sprint. During a sprint, no one is allowed to change the sprint backlog, which means that the requirements are frozen for that sprint. After a sprint is completed, the team demonstrates how to use the software.

Benefits!
An important advantage of the Scrum approach is that planning is a continuous repetitive activity. Scrum does not try to predict the future at the start of a project, but aims at continuously improving the estimates based on experience. Each sprint the productivity of the team is determined and this knowledge is used to make a more accurate estimate for the next sprint. Furthermore estimating tasks are being performed by the team itself, and the whole team is doing it. This has two major advantages. First, the estimate are based on the knowledge and vision of all team members and therefore more realistic. Second, everyone is committed to the estimate, because everyone must agree on an estimate during planning. Another important advantage of Scrum is it always serves the business. A Scrum team is always working for the actual most important business goals, and the business may if necessary adjust quickly. And because a Scrum project should yield operating software on a regular basis, and the product owner determines what functionality should be delivered, it is not possible to pass difficult problems to the back. Finally, the Scrum approach has some financial benefits. With Scrum key functionality can be taken in production as soon as possible. The return on investment is higher, and the financial impact of any delay is smaller.

Please share your experience and ideas via a comment to this article  and use the ‘share and enjoy’ buttons!

Microsoft Office is what most people are used to using for sending email, making appointments, creating documents, presentations etc. It works well for these tasks and everybody knows how to use it. Linking Exact’s collaboration tool Synergy with the Microsoft Office applications was a logical progression. Synergy Office Integration, SOI in short, was introduced in 2008 and gives you the option to easily share your work created in MS Office with those for whom it is relevant. For example, with a single mouse click, you can link your documents or email messages to an account, project or opportunity, etc.. You can even create workflow the moment you save a document, so the follow-up action is directly set in motion.

For most of us, MS Outlook is the place we spend a lot of time managing our external communications. SOI brings Synergy to MS Outlook which means you have all of Synergy’s collaboration functionalities you are used to when working within your web browser without leaving Outlook.

Some benefits of using Synergy Office Integration

- All your Synergy functionalities are available within MS Outlook, which allows you to manage all your work from there.
- Synergy Office Integration is supported for Microsoft Office 2007 and 2010. SOI is available in MS Outlook, MS Word, MS Excel and MS
PowerPoint and provides you the option to create and edit Synergy documents in MS Office.
- SOI is integrated with MS Outlook in such a way, you can save your email messages with only one mouse click. The email messages saved to Synergy will be linked to the correct account and contact person. All email messages saved to Synergy are marked so you can easily recognize the email messages that have been saved to Synergy.
- Save all your important documents, Excel sheets and presentations to Synergy with only 1 mouse click. You can enrich your documents or start up workflow.
- Installation of SOI is very easy. You can directly start using SOI after the installation, no additional settings are required. At corporate level all settings can be prefilled; you can change these for yourself if you want to.

Some improvements compared to Office add-in

- Ability to work with Synergy within MS Outlook
- Usability of SOI is much better
- Support of Office 2010
- Easy installation process
- No additional settings required after installation
- Better performance
- Saving email/document with only 1 mouse click
- Installation can be done per user or per machine
- SOI is available for all Synergy users
-‘ Save as’ screen shows fields based on document type
- Possibility to create request when saving a document
- This is only a selection and more to come

What’s new in this version?

- Support of Office 2010
- Option to install SOI per machine next to the option to install per user.
- Performance improvement starting up the Office application

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.

All feedback on this topic confirmed our assumptions, accounts and secondly items are the most important master data, to be maintained centrally. That’s why we decided to start with accounts and aim on creating a prototype, so we can share and discuss the direction we are heading for. The prototype is based on Exact Synergy Enterprise (ESE), and multiple Exact Globe (EG) divisions.

Currently, at maintain Accounts in ESE you can define only a debtor code on divisional level:

We started adding fields to the Division ‘tab’, so it is possible to define different data for the specific divisions. For example, it will be possible to define on Divisional level  who will be the manager of this account.

The exchange of the data will be done by Exact’s connectivity framework. As explained in this blog post Connecting Exact with other applications, exchanging data via XML is not the solution to establish easy, standard connections between Exact’s applications and/or other applications. The main reason is that those possibilities are not standardized and /or do not work real-time.

In my next blog I aim on sharing the first visuals on the prototype!

If you have any questions/remarks or you would like to share topics we definitely should take into account concerning maintain/exchange accounts, do not hesitate to reply to this Post.

Photo credit:bijkerk

I’ve written about Functions and Features versus the User Experience, Simplicity being the new Gold, the Survival of the Sexiest and the fact that it’s all about the User. All these articles have in common that they are changing the mindset towards more focus for the end user of the products and services. I’ve created a short presentation on the progress to embed the User Experience in everything we do. If you can’t view the presentation below you can find it here.

Focus alone is not enough, it also requires special expertise and of course YOU! The user of our products and services as the main source of information on you emotions and feelings. If you want to participate, fill in a comment below or email at ux@exact.com

Image: ovizo0n

So what’s new on the menu?

Appetizer
Do you want to start with something small to whet your appetite?

With the below small improvements and new possibilities you have more freedom and control on reports.

• Link and use more Synergy Enterprise entities in reports, e.g. items, opportunities and more default values
• Use same report definition but with different security/defaults by supporting linked reports, instead of creating new reports
• Improve management functions (security on report groups, link modules to report groups, hide reports in the report tree view)

Main course
Would you like beef, chicken or fish?

Having reports delivered via email by supporting subscription on reports allows you to view reports in MS Outlook or other email applications.
Viewing reports in multiple web browsers gives you even more freedom and control on how the reports should be served.

Dessert
Interested in pie or some ice cream? 

With the possibility to show and compare information from different sources in one report, you can make these key decisions faster.
Together with the support of drill down and drill through you can get a detailed insight, which helps you in your decision making.  

Coffee
Anything else?

By supporting more data sources types (OLE DB and ODBC) you can show information from almost any product in your reports.

Are you still hungry or thirsty?
Please let me know what you would like to have via a reply or mail so we can serve you even better.

Photo credit: macten

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).

One of the parts of this research project is to move from individual boxes for searching documents, accounts items etcetera; towards one place where all the searches can be reached. Hold your horses however. Not one search across all entities (yet), but a simpler way to find what you need. One of the things I am personally enthusiastic about is that it will not only offer you suggestions based on what you typed but it will also open up your history of recently used data. Since a pictures says more than a thousand words, just take a look on some screenshots.

For those of you who have read between the lines, this is not yet a final deliverable nor is it planned for a certain date. Our intentions are however clear; to make Exact Synergy simpler to use and better connected to business processes. So enjoy the sharing but do not yet see this as an end deliverable available in your environment end of this month . I also tried to keep this post simple, so it leaves lot’s of room for interpretation on what you will get. For instance think of a first deliverable where the focus can be on the employee self service functionality.

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