Productivity Software

Archive for the ‘productivity software’ Category

I would like to set goals, schedule tasks, develop and track personal projects.

Thank you

I use a very cheap and easy software called Anytime Organizer. I have used this for many years (nearly a decade now) and use it to take care of all the scheduling for my business.

Before ACT!, a division of a Canadian printing company experienced a typical response rate of 5% or less in their direct mail campaigns (data from Direct Marketing Association or DMA). After fully integrating ACT! CRM (customer relationship management) software into their business, their direct mailing campaign response rate rose, not only by 10, 20 or 50%, but to a whopping 74%! Not only did this increased response do well for the bottom line, but it also garnered a DMA 2006 International ECHO Award for the company. This just goes to show the power of being able to create a targeted campaign with specific products for specific customers. ACT! software made it possible for this company division to re-organize their customer care focus in a more detailed manner.

According to a VP, it was not possible for them to generate targeted lists in so very short a time and with very high levels of precision. With the addition of ACT! CRM to their system, they were able to do all of it in one single day.

Prior to installing ACT! CRM in their system, the company suffered through inconsistency and lead tracking methods. In addition, customer information files had no hub or centralized location. They agonized over the amount of time wasted searching for files from different departments. The entry of ACT! provided a solution for all of these problems by standardizing marketing and sales methods and providing a central database where all files are stored and organized. Today, their concerned employees have access to the central database to use for quick referencing customer information sheets. The need to run around from one department to another has been eliminated. This gave the company the benefits of efficiency and increased productivity.

The level of success that ACT! gave them has prompted other divisions of their company to look into acquiring the same CRM technology currently in use by this one single division. ACT! software provided a solution that gave them the necessary push to move ahead of other divisions in terms of sales performance.

To fully utilize the benefits that they received from ACT!, additional ACT! add-on software was installed to provide them with automated email marketing and response tracking capabilities. They got all of these benefits by integrating Swiftpage with their current ACT! CRM system.

The beauty of ACT! software lies in it’s compatibility with Outlook, Palm OS and other handheld devices. This compatibility eventually evolved into remote interconnectivity where field personnel with the right equipment are able to access the central ACT! database. This assistance that this system provides sales personnel on call is priceless. Just before knocking on the client’s door, a sales person may extract the client’s information from the database in order to come up with a definitive strategy that will entice the client to buy.

There is a lot more to ACT! than what is written here. Of all that is written though, one thing cannot be denied. Utilizing ACT! software helped a company rise from the doldrums, all the way to the pinnacle, in just a few short days.

Sayed Ally
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/solid-success-through-act-crm-software-140869.html

But there is no need to despair. If your company is still new and follows few steps here, it can easily compete with any other company confidently and increase its market share. These steps involve reducing expenses by applying simple processes and cutting costs by improving productivity, designing a better way of doing things so as to complete the work in time and also ensuring customer satisfaction. This will naturally increase profits and your business will grow briskly. You must have observed that the main aspect here is to improve the processes and methods of carrying out services. In short, your delivery mechanism should be fine-tuned. Field management software come handy here and provides you with all the benefits stated above to help your business to grow. For more details go to www.page-brand-generator.com .Field management software helps in faster and accurate notification about any job. There is a simple need to just enter the data regarding any complaint or query received by your call center and the software automatically has the readymade answer to every such query related to the service provided by your company.

By storing all customer information in one single location, the need to search multiple spreadsheets, databases or pieces of paper is eliminated. Access to historical or current client Job along with financial information can be done just by a simple Search in the search box.

As the work is completed faster, the customers are happy and this gives your company a definite competitive edge. Using this software also helps your workers who are on the field to use mobile interfaces and contact you and they need not come rushing down to office every time they face a problem. They can solve the problem on the spot using the varied friendly interfaces.

Another great feature you can use is that there is no need to worry about some work getting lost. The moment a job is completed, it is marked by the field worker and it is immediately invoiced and billed to the customer’s account thus eliminating need to store and this avoids loss of Job.

Most field management software is shipped at competitive rates and also helps in cutting costs invariably. There is less paper work thus cutting on cost of expensive paper, the invoicing is done immediately thus avoiding costs on field workers. For more details go to www.scripts-to-sell.com .Field management software can be easily integrated into your business with the web interface. These applications are hosted on secure servers and what is required is to just sign up. It is possible to connect to the system with the help of any personal computer situated anywhere at any time.

Arvinder Jeet Singh

There are many business scenarios that prompt companies to inquire into, and rollout, document management software solutions. Some companies are required by contract to implement a document management software solution to satisfy or serve a project for a particular client. Others are required to use a document management software application in order to comply with HIPPA, ISO 9000, or SOX. Unfortunately, one of the most common reason companies rollout a document management software solution is because of an extremely costly mistake that is determined to be due to outdated or inadequate document management tools.

In the last category, the client is usually managing documents in a Windows Explorer environment and maybe going as far as to attempt to track some indexed data in a separate spreadsheet. This approach, although sometimes effective with smaller businesses, becomes problematic once a company experiences growth or begins to handle multiple projects. Continuing this type of approach, once the level of documents, users or projects increases is no longer cost effective but an expensive accident waiting to happen. With increases in volume, clients experience an increase in tracking revisions, in the number of lost documents which is usually attributed to misplaced documents and loss of productivity with users spending excessive amounts of time looking for those documents

Many obvious problems are associated with this archaic document management approach. It is time consuming to search the spreadsheet and then navigate to the document you are trying to find. Also, once you find the document, there is no way to know if someone else has the document checked out. Even if you have a cell for tracking this, there is nothing to actually keep a person from taking the document. Think back to a time before electronic files when a “Librarian” would log documents in and out of a file room. There is no Librarian in Windows Explorer watching the users. Therefore, there is nothing to prevent two people from editing the same document simultaneously and someone’s edits are going to get overwritten as a result. The bigger problem comes when the file is ultimately distributed and no-one realizes it is the wrong file until it is too late.

Engineering construction companies have put the wrong drawings out for bid which resulted in construction immediately followed by demolition. Manufacturing companies have manufactured thousands of parts, even shipped them, before realizing the drawings they used to make the parts were not the current approved set. Companies have literally lost millions of dollars from distributing incorrect project documents. The price of a sound electronic document management software system can be a fraction of the cost compared to mistakes that come from poor tools. .

Imagine a company who has multiple projects going on and hundreds of people accessing documents across these projects. Regardless of the reasons a company decides to take the plunge into document management software, every company that acquires and implements professional document management software ends up obtaining benefits beyond their initial objectives. User friendliness and well thought out system implementations, with respect to your organizations business rules, can create uniformity in document storage, uniformity in how documents are revised and named, and speed up document retrieval exponentially. Clients can also benefit from immediate on-the fly reporting instead of spending hours generating reports manually.

Bret Lawson

Recently I read a news article that the official working hours in the Indian Information technology (IT) services companies have been increased by more than an hour from present 8 hours to more than 9 hours. It is also stated that some companies have gone extra mile and increased it to nine and half hours and the article says that this is all due to current economic downturn. And companies are squeezing the employee more by monitoring the amount of time spent for lunch break, coffee breaks and smoking. It is well said that “Desperate times call for desperate measures”.

Globally almost every company is affected due to this and are looking out for the ways to cut the costs and increase the revenues. The reason for increasing the number of working hours is by increasing that number by at least one hour per day, the companies gains extra 20-22 hours per month on a single employee for the same cost of the employee (read salary here). This not only increases the number of man hours but also decreases the number of employees needed to complete the same task for the company. From the employee’s point of view, it is very bad. If we consider a typical working day of a software company employee in India, it takes about 1-1.5 hours to reach office and same amount of time to reach home in the evening from office, and after considering the work time, he will be left with only 12 hours. Out of it, if we consider 8 hours for the sleep, he will be left with only 4 hours to spend at home or with family. This is not desirable as this will effect negatively on the productivity of the employee in the long term making him stressed out.

It is common to see the employees working long hours in almost all Indian software companies. They spend more time at work than with their families. Rather than focussing on short term gains, companies should focus on long term advantages because the dissatisfied and stressed out employees lose interest in the work and thus not willing to cooperate. This will lead to decreased productivity.  

It is a general notion that making the employee work more hours increases the productivity but it has no evidence and is nowhere proved either scientifically or by any other method and in my opinion, the productivity of an employee does not depend on how many hours he works but how much he/she enjoys his/her work. Maintaining a work-life balance is extremely important for both the employer and employee as this will help boost the productivity and thus helpful in the long term. Many companies boast about the ‘fun at work’ in their companies but most of the times the opposite thing reflects in their employees.

Instead of making the employees to work for more hours by rule, companies should look out for the ways to keep their employees happy so that they enjoy their work and willing to work more voluntarily and thus is more productive.

Also making the employees to work creatively helps to boost the productivity. This is possible by providing the right training and education to the employees in which they are interested in.

Do you think the way the companies are reacting to the economic slowdown is right? Let me know your thoughts on my blog.

Praveen Kumar Tumma

Real estate businesses big and small require quality organizational strategies in order to be successful.  That’s why realtors are turning to CRM real estate software to keep track of their contacts and clients.  CRM or customer relationship management software is designed to store information on both current and prospective clients in a very accessible manner in order to improve organization, marketing and services.  CRM real estate software such as RealtyWare is designed to provide such management abilities specifically to those in the real estate industry.

With the help of real estate software, realtors can quickly improve their productivity and their ability to manage customers and properties.  By using CRM software, realtors have the benefit of complete histories and activity tracking for each and every contact.  With freely definable multi-level groups, users can organize and categorize clients and properties in the manner of their choosing.  Real estate software also allows realtors to link properties directly with clients easily and efficiently.  Managing clients who have several contact numbers or who own several properties is also easy, as each client can be assigned multiple communication methods and properties without having to enter the same information over and over again.

By centralizing all the critical information that real estate professionals need regarding contacts, properties and future prospects, everything is instantly accessible.  Moreover, CRM real estate software allows realtors to create and maintain a clear picture of every aspect of their business.  In addition, many aspects are highly customizable, so realtors can organize information according to their preferences and can easily create convenient templates for a variety of tasks.  With such exceptional organizational potential and many customizable features, it’s no wonder that more and more realtors are turning to CRM real estate software to keep their businesses on track.

Mark Mathers

A challenge awaits the physician who has had enough of the frustrating inefficiencies, financial penalties, and antiquated practices associated with maintaining a paper-based medical office. So the decision is made to digitize the practice. Any initial enthusiasm quickly wanes once an initial search for medical software uncovers hundreds of products and vendors. It doesn’t take long before the 300 or so electronic medical records system screenshots and feature/benefit grids begin to look remarkably similar. The sheer number of vendors occupying the EMR (electronic medical records) market is unmanageable without a basic product assessment/elimination strategy.

For physician practices with limited time and resources, the selection process can appear overwhelming. Fortunately, physicians can begin to narrow down potential systems by eliminating uncertified products, as well as those built upon dated technology architectures.

• Eliminate products not certified by the CCHIT® (Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology).

By confining research only to CCHIT-certified EHR (electronic health record) products, a substantial number of systems are quickly eliminated. As of this writing, 53 ambulatory EHR systems have successfully met the 2007 standards, while only 18 have met the more rigorous 2008 criteria. Using CCHIT certification as an initial benchmark is prudent for a variety of reasons: The CCHIT is the leading Healthcare I.T. certification organization, and is publicly endorsed by the American Academy of Family Physicians; the American Academy of Pediatrics; the American College of Cardiology; and the American Medical Association, among others. In addition, a CCHIT Certified designation ensures that a product has met the basic requirements for functionality; interoperability; and security and privacy.

A 2008 CCHIT certification warrants the product’s utilization of standard formats enabling the exchange information with other systems – known as interoperability. The exchange of patient information on a regional or national level is the underpinning of a more efficient and less costly healthcare system. Future tax incentives and Medicare reimbursements may be tied not only to utilization of digital medical records in general – but specifically benefiting practices with CCHIT-certified EHR systems.

• Eliminate products that do not operate on a shared database for billing and patient charting.

As little as five years ago, “interfaced” practice management/billing and patient charting systems were the norm. Today, “interfaced” systems are technologically inferior to medical software that has been developed from the ground up by a single vendor, on a single platform, and utilizing a single database – described as ‘integrated’ or ‘unified’ electronic medical records and practice management systems.

Interfaced systems are still sold today, so it is a “buyers beware” market. In the past several years, there have been a number of mergers and acquisitions between vendors having market share in one side or the other (scheduling and billing or charting/EMR) but desired a comprehensive solution to offer physicians. As a result, there are products currently marketed as a “suite,” but were developed by disparate vendors on different platforms, tied together using a separate application. Although generally transparent to the practice, there may be questions of data integrity; patient safety (for example, a patient’s practice management/billing record does not match the clinical record and lab results get overlooked in the mess); and even the vendor’s long-term maintenance of the system.

Unfortunately, uncovering if a system is integrated or interfaced is not always straightforward and may require the buyer to conduct some detective work. The first step is to ask the vendor questions about the product’s history – which company developed it, does it utilize a common database, and is there a single login for billing and charting? Some interfaced systems require users to log in separately to access the practice management/billing and the clinical portions of the software.

Following the elimination of uncertified products with dated technology, the pool of suitable products begins to shrink and the specific needs of the practice should be defined and considered.

• Establish a Budget. Medical software systems vary widely in cost. By establishing a flexible budget early in the process, practices can avoid wasted time looking at systems that are too expensive or potentially not robust enough to meet the needs of the practice. Ask questions about ongoing maintenance costs and what the maintenance covers, just as a buyer would ask when making decision to purchase a car.
• Specialty-Specific Content. Not all EMRs accommodate all specialties – regardless of what the sales rep claims. For example, some leading vendors have well-developed content for family practice; ob/gyn; internal medicine; and ear, nose, and throat; but may not fare as well in specialties such as oncology or chiropractic. By asking the vendor to demonstrate the product’s performance in a specific specialty, the number of potential candidates will decrease.
• Scalability. Just as not all electronic medical records systems accommodate all specialties, most are geared toward a specific practice size – with features and cost typically reflecting the product’s expansion capacity. In general, if the practice expects to add providers or additional locations over time, it is important to start with a product that is stable and feature-rich enough to handle the workflow of a larger practice – even if the product’s features may not be fully leveraged early in the product’s lifecycle.

Finally, it is time to ask questions about the vendor’s service and support – the most ambiguous, but arguably most important aspect in the decision making process. After all, you can purchase an electronic medical records software system with every bell and whistle, but if the implementation is disorganized; the training inadequate; or the post-installation support lacking – productivity will drop; providers and staff will be frustrated; cash flow may be interrupted, or worse.

• Take stock of in-house I.T. (information technology) resources.

Does the practice have a staff I.T. department or a trusted medical office I.T. company? If not, it’s important to ensure that the software vendor offers I.T. services. Improperly installed hardware or inaccessible support personnel can have a detrimental effect on the success of the training and implementation.

Some smaller practices opt for a web-based installation to decrease the cost of hardware and eliminate the need to maintain servers and other equipment. Web-based installations are known as SaaS (Software as a Service) and are delivered by an ASP (Application Service Provider). The electronic medical record ASP hosts the software in a secured data center, and the end-user (the practice) simply accesses the system using a web browser. All that is required is a high-speed internet connection and a workstation. Access to the data is dependent upon the internet connection, so mission-critical applications are not appropriate in a SaaS environment under most circumstances.

The alternative to a web-based installation is Client/Server, requiring an onsite server and regular maintenance of the system by the vendor. Both types of installations have advantages and disadvantages, so it is important to discuss installation with potential vendors.

• Assess technological skills of clinicians and administrative staff. Ensure the vendor’s project planning and implementation staff can aid the practice in choosing who the functional area “champions” will be.

Training, EMR implementation, and “go-live” support expenditures account for a substantial portion of the total initial system cost, and careful planning is essential for a smooth implementation. The vendor should provide a project coordinator that will help the practice make critical decisions and schedule the project timeline. Most practices utilize a combination of web-based and on-site training prior to go-live (the days or weeks dedicated to using the new system). In addition, the vendor should provide onsite support for the practice during the go-live. The number of training days, go-live days, and the delivery (web-based or onsite) is determined by the size of the practice and the skill levels of the staff. Follow-up sessions to reinforce original training or introduce advanced concepts is important for continuity.

To keep costs down, some practices may utilize a heavier web-based training plan for the bulk of the staff with designated superusers who attend advanced training. For practices with less technologically savvy staff, more handholding through onsite training may be the best option. In addition to improperly installed I.T. (hardware, networking, security, workstations), insufficient training or post-implementation technical support are prominent failure points in medical software implementations.

• Who supports the practice following the go-live? The original training and implementation staff, or a separate call center?

Not only does unresponsive medical software technical support frustrate and discourage users, it fosters lost productivity when users struggle with denied claims; unanswered questions; or broken functionality. Still, large vendors often outsource support to overseas call centers – lowering vendor overhead at the expense of high-quality, timely, and knowledgeable support.

By asking relevant questions, evaluating the needs and culture of the practice, and systematically eliminating unsuitable products and vendors – practices can enjoy the host of current and future financial and patient safety benefits that an electronic health records system provides.

Andrea Schroeder

ie… I would like to block certain sites from my computer (facebook, twitter, espn, etc.) but only during working hours, to help force myself to be more productive during the week. I’m sure there is stuff out there that I can manually turn on and off, but that would require the discipline to leave it on during work and would defeat the purpose. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

try Sentry PC, a smart site blocking and time limiting tool:
www.monitoring-softwares.com

By implementing QA processes slowly over time, using consensus to reach agreement on processes, focusing on processes that align tightly with organizational goals, and adjusting/experimenting/refactoring as an organization matures, productivity can be improved instead of stifled.

I work at home & have been searching for, among other things, a *free* time clock/tracking program for quite awhile. I browse CNET, but also started to look into ZDNet & have a list of other sites to search. I have tried several programs, not just time clock related, productivity based as well. I am overwhelmed as an independent self-contractor who doesn’t have a set schedule. That has been quite a struggle… especially as I get paid per "email". I’m at a point where I don’t know what I want nor what to do (frustration-wise).>>> I NEED to make a schedule, but I need help. Does anyone know of ANY software, articles regarding scheduling, time tracking, perhaps tracking my comp usage (though that seems a bit big brotherish o.O)…I would also REALLY like a magnifying program as I work with ONE system via Citrix that I cannot zoom into and my monitor is 20.1". I have tried Windows magnify and dozens of other programs. If you know of ANY (free, heh) please let me know.

And yes, I have Excel and Onenote and have tried just using them, which I may just have to do. I just wanted something automated to track progress etc.

Looking through articles regarding working from home I mostly see pleas of how to do so, what is a scam, working with toddlers etc etc. None of that applies to me. I have the job. I have a dedicated office. I need help being a good boss for myself without someone looking over my shoulder. No, this is not the ideal job for me, but it’s all I have and I need to make it work!

Please HELP! Thanks
???Please Note: I am NOT LOOKING for a work at home job. I have had one for over 6 months that found me. The place that contracted me was on Under Cover Boss. There is no SCAM. That being said, I appreciate the links, but that is not at all what I’m asking for

Well www.xpenser.com can track expenses, time, and car mileage. I use xpenser to track my time with clients. It could be helpful to you and is free.

Other things that help me are www.rememberthemilk.com it is a to-do organizer and so is www.reqall.com

Evernote also helps me keeping all my notes in one place and all text is searchable even in images. Anyways hope this helped a bit