In Acumatica 2020 R1 there are a number of enhancements to the connections for the connected workplace so that a complex organization can work together seamlessly to deliver information, whether they’re in the office, out in the field, or wherever they might be.
In this demo from Summit 2020 you will see a demo of a field service workflow that easily takes a lead from marketing, then to sales, then to the technical team and on to dispatching.
We’ve started with a lead from the marketing team, they qualified it for us, sent it over to sales, and sales now, because they understand they need to go out and actually perform this service, can send it directly over to the service and the technician’s team.
Video Transcription:
Doug: So in this example, we’re going to set up a demonstration where we have multiple people involved. We’re going to start with a marketing person. That’s me. Jessica is going to be our salesperson. Once the salesperson does it, we’re going to be a dispatcher. I’m going to do some dispatching.
Once I’m finished dispatching, Jessica is going to go complete some work in the field. And if you’re not busy of looking back and forth like a tennis table, I’m going to take it back and I’m going to make the payroll and pay Jessica for the work she did in the field. So all of these things are going to happen seamlessly in this demonstration. So if you could switch to the monitor and we’ll get it started.
So here I am, I start the demo. I’m a marketing manager, keeping an eye on my leads in the last 90 days, not looking good. I’m going to go ahead and add a new lead. Now, part of the 2020 R1 features is we’ve changed the lead workflow and we’ve changed all the CRM workflows.
We’ve gotten a lot of feedback that everyone likes CRM. People are using it, most of our clients have CRM operational, but they want it to be easier to use and more streamlined with the workflows. So we’ve created a new workflow engine that allows you to do that. If you don’t like the flow that I’m showing you here and that doesn’t pertain to your business, you can go in, and without coding you can easily change it and add other things. So let’s go ahead and create a new one.
I’m going to call this the Summit 2020 lead. One of the new enhancements with CRM is I can just enter a company name and basically be done with it. Instead, I’m going to save some typing and I’m going to go pick an existing contact and make a new lead for that. The system’s going to prompt me that it’s going to overwrite all the data that’s in my lead, and I’m okay with that because it’s going to move things forward.
Now, once my lead is saved, you’ll notice there’s a button up here called open. Open, this is a configurable item now. It didn’t use to be configurable, but in 2020 R1, as part of the new workflow engine, you can take actions that appear here and easily position them for the next logical step.
So now that I’ve done my job as marketing, I’m going to go ahead and open it, and I can control, using the workflow engine, if the popup appears and what appears in the popup. Now it goes to the next logical stage, which is qualify. Now, some of you may have an inside sales team whose job it is to qualify leads. All these would pop up on his dashboard, he’d be notified of things that he needs to work. In this case, I’m just going to go ahead and quickly qualify it. Once again, totally configurable whether it pops up or what process you follow.
Now, at this point, my work in marketing is done. You can see that it’s officially been qualified by marketing. So this allows me to take a step back and start working on my next project. So I’m going to pass it back to Jessica, who’s my salesperson, and see if she can take Sam Malone and move him ahead.
Jessica: Thank you, Doug. All right. Now, like Doug said, I am a salesperson perhaps back at my office, maybe out in the field, but I’m always staying in the loop with what’s going on inside of Acumatica, whether that be from a mobile device or from my laptop.
So why don’t we give my dashboard a refresh, see if I have any new leads in there, which I, in fact, do. I’ll drill down and we’ll check out what has come in from marketing today, and I, in fact, see that I have a brand new lead here that I have developed or that I have accepted from marketing. Marketing has qualified that lead for me, so I do know that this is something that I’m ready to move forward with.
In that regard, if you notice this accept button right in the top, I will say that, yes, I actually would like to take this lead. No need for me to reject it and send it somewhere else. And since I’m local, maybe I’ll go stop by, see Sam, give him a call even, if necessary. He tells me that he is, in fact, interested in purchasing some equipment from us. It’s going to be a pretty speedy project that needs to be completed, so we’ll also have to get some installations scheduled for him right away here.
Because I have this information now, I can use the CRM workflow in 2020 R1 to immediately convert this lead to an opportunity. Like Doug mentioned, if there’s additional steps in your workflow process, we can certainly modify that for you, and I’m taken over to this opportunity record now.
On the opportunity, like I mentioned, it’s a pretty standard equipment installation that Sam is requesting. So I can use another fun Acumatica feature and just drop in from a template here. As I do that, I’m going to see a few line items appear, one for the equipment that Sam is requesting and another one for the installation charge there. On this sales opportunity now, I will go ahead and hit save.
At this point, just to recap, we’ve started with a lead from the marketing team, they qualified it for us, sent it over to sales, and sales now, because they understand they need to go out and actually perform this service, can send it directly over to the service and the technician’s team.
To do that, I will go up to my actions and I’m going to say that I would like to create a service order. All of these workflows inside of Acumatica, completely connected and seamless. Now, on the service order, like I mentioned, Sam tells us it’s a little bit urgent, so the last thing I’ll do here is just make a note for my dispatcher that this is an urgent installation we need to get done sooner than later if we can. Okay.
On the service order now, the service team is going to be informed in real-time about the work that they need to perform. So why don’t we see how the dispatcher treats this from the service end now that the sales work has been completed. Doug.
Doug: Thank you, salesperson. So I’m the dispatcher. I come in early every morning. I spend hours and hours trying to figure out what routes to send my people on. So on my screen, you’ll see that I have appointments ready to be scheduled. I didn’t come in early enough, I still have plenty of them to go.
I see one here and this one has a note on it. Oh boy, not another one, urgent. So we’ll go ahead, open that guy up, and with one click of the button, I will schedule an appointment. So now this gets me ready to start scheduling this process.
So now I’ve got an appointment ready, and now everything’s cued up and ready to go, but I need to, instead of spending the hours that I used to, we’re using a new partnership with WorkWave. They have a route optimization service that we’ve connected to, and as part of that, we’ve created a new screen in Acumatica called, appointments, scheduling optimization. Let’s see if I can make that a little bigger.
You can see, we can come in and we can take appointments that already are assigned and reschedule them. That’s if an order comes in in the middle of somebody’s day, we can reshuffle their day a little bit and optimize that. The other thing is, we can take all the daily unassigned appointments, including that new urgent one that just came in, and we can schedule them.
Now over here on this side, you see I have a list of different people who can take advantage or I can schedule. Jane Doe is going to be the one that I’m going to go ahead, but I could schedule multiple people at once if I chose to. So with the new partnership, this simple one click away is now making a call out using AI and ML and machine learning from our partner, WorkWave, to make that connection and propose an optimized workflow for our person that’s out in the field.
Now, immediately, Jessica could be notified of this, but before I turn it back to her, I’d like to show the resulting optimization that appeared on her map. So we can go in, we can take a look at Jane Doe, her appointments, and we’ve scheduled most of our things in and around Las Vegas, finishing up over there in Henderson towards the end of the day. So all that, it took a series of appointments, figured out travel time, figured out appointments, the duration, and scheduled it quickly and easily so that now Jessica can go do her job in the field.”
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