Newsletters :: Business Process Management and Workflow Software, Web Forms, Hosted Workflow Forms

Newsletters

March 2006 | November 2005 | October 2005 | April 2005 | January 2005

April 2005 - Issue N. 5

Subscription to Newsletters
Sign up for our free newsletter and receive information about our services and products.

Learn more about us:
Products
Workflow Solutions
Partner Program
Support& Training
About Us

Contact
For more information you can contact Colosa at 305-675-1400 or email us at info@colosa.com

www.processmaker.com

Let us hear your COMMENTS or QUESTIONS about this newsletter

Colosa, Inc.
2655 Le Jeune Road, Suite 1112
Coral Gables , Florida 33134
Tel: (305)-675-1400
info@colosa.com

Copyright © 2006 Colosa Inc. All rights reserved. Colosa is a registered trademark of Colosa Inc.

How Can You Implement Best Practices in Your Firm?

It seems that everyone these days is stressing the importance of implementing Best Practices in business. Yet how does a firm implement Best Practices into its every day operations, and just as importantly, how does a firm ensure that these Best Practices are followed by its employees?

Best Practices are processes that through research and experience have proven to lead to the desired results and success in business. They are most effective when they are implemented throughout an organization and used faithfully by employees. Unfortunately Best Practices can be difficult to implement. All too often employees resist the new changes and continue to use the old, familiar way of doing things. Or maybe your company has dozens of employees and each one manages certain company issues in different, unpredictable ways. The end result is that the company receives no benefits from its Best Practices. In fact, the company’s productivity actually declines because of the time and resources wasted unsuccessfully installing the Best Practices.

So how can you avoid this problem? Here are 3 easy steps to successfully bring Best Practices to your firm.

Establish a team to define and document your company’s Best Practices. This team should analyze not only standard industry practices, but also how successful employees complete tasks. Often these employees will develop new ways to tackle a problem that can be used by other workers in your organization.
Focus on processes that improve productivity. Examine your operations and identify areas where there are inefficiencies, bottlenecks, or time and other resources are wasted. If you can improve these processes you can improve productivity, and once you improve productivity you will notice that your bottom line also improves.
Utilize a tool that implements Best Practices throughout your organization. A Business Process Management (BPM) system not only automates your Best Practices, but it can also enable and support these new practices. With a quality BPM system you can be confident that your employees will follow your firm’s Best Practices every time they complete a process.
Monitor your processes by using a BPM system that gives you easy access to critical dashboards and custom reports so that you can monitor the operational health of your organization.

Colosa’s Fluid Productivity Suite is the perfect tool for implementing Best Practices. With the Fluid Productivity Suite you can map out your Best Practices, assign users to complete specific tasks, establish rules that determine what to do in case of exceptions, and monitor the progress of processes in your system. Also we provide users an easy to follow interface that allows them to complete their tasks step-by-step. This helps prevent errors as users can clearly see if they have finished all the required steps in their assigned tasks or not.

Staying on Top of Things: Know the History of Your Process
It’s important when completing a process that there is some record of the Process History. In reality though, the majority of businesses have no way of monitoring this. Employees receive a file from one of their co-workers with little or no information as to what has happened to the file before they received it.

This need not be a problem. With the Fluid Productivity Suite, each user can access a Gantt chart for quick analysis of the Process History. This is useful for several reasons. First, this allows managers to identify bottlenecks. Second, users can easily track who handled the process before them and what they did. Most importantly, the Process History serves as documentary evidence for internal audits.

The best part about Colosa’s Fluid Productivity Suite is that it does all this automatically. No longer will you have to worry about keeping notes or trying to remember dates. Process History: One more way Colosa is helping improve your organization’s productivity and making your life easier.

Colosa Builds e-commerce site for HelloMundo
Miami, Florida – April 4, 2005

Colosa recently completed an e-commerce site for HelloMundo, a U.S. based company that transmits telephone calls over the Internet using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). As a result of this service, customers receive low rates, outstanding quality, as well as Caller ID, Call Waiting, Voice Mail and many additional features.

The new site will allow HelloMundo to receive payments on-line for its services and includes a backend system for the administration of client information. HelloMundo’s clients stretch from Canada to Argentina, so it was important it had a quality system that could handle a large volume of customers. Alan Friedman, HelloMundo’s Director, stated, “It was essential that our new e-commerce site was flawless. We decided to work with Colosa because of their reputation of being able to handle large, international projects.”

Working with members of HelloMundo, Colosa’s team was able to deliver a top notch product ahead of schedule. Fernando Ontiveros, Colosa’s Chief Technology Officer, “It is important to us to build long lasting relationships with our clients. The best way to do that is to exceed their expectations. I am very proud that our team was able to do this with HelloMundo.”

Tips: Training New Employees
One of the most time consuming tasks companies face today is training new employees. It can often take months for a new employee to fully grasp what he or she is doing, and how it relates to the goals of the company. Several organizations simply accept this is the way things are, but now you can change that.

With Colosa’s Fluid Productivity Suite training is made easy. For starters, you can show a new employee a map of all your important processes. This will allow the employee to visualize the process, and give him/her an easy reference to pull up at any time. Also with the Fluid Productivity Suite, the steps an employee must complete are laid out in a clear format so a new employee knows exactly what he or she must do for any given process. This makes it much easier for new employees to understand their responsibilities. Finally, with the Fluid Productivity Suite managers can monitor in real-time how new employees are doing. This way, if a new employee needs additional training it can be taken care of immediately, as opposed to finding out weeks or months later that the new hire is not up to speed.

The Fluid Productivity Suite allows you to increase the effectiveness of your training program and permit your firm to focus on business – not teaching. As a result, you, your new employees, and most importantly your company all win.