Exact Synergy

Exact Synergy unites the workplace and reveals the costs, inefficiencies and redundancies hidden by the complexities of your business. Synergy, from Exact Software, provides a Web-based Business Process Management solution that connects the people, processes and knowledge that matter most to your business. By creating a real-time, accurate view of the organization’s personnel, financials, workflow, documents and asset information, businesses can obtain control over their operations, enhancing decision-making, analysis and scenario planning.

With Exact Synergy, your entire value chain can obtain a portal view into the workplace: including employees, business partners, suppliers and customers.

Benefit from Synergy is derived by its emphasis on the importance of the whole business, as well as the interdependence of its parts. The Synergy solution integrates and captures corporate data within a single database, allowing all members of the value chain to view and act on this data, based on their access and roles within the system.

• Cut expenses
• Reduce head count
• Increase employee productivity
• Consolidate remote operations
• Drive corporate priorities
• Gain a competitive advantage

In today’s world, advanced technology is widely used in global enterprises to solve important business problems and improve productivity. Now, Synergy provides these same benefits to midsize businesses, enabling them to better understand their organization and make more informed operational decisions. Synergy delivers a complete solution suite to analyze, report, manage, and operate your business.

• Workflow Management tells you what everyone is doing, all the time
• Web-based Project Management enables team members to contribute via the Internet
• Complete Relationship Control including Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Supply Chain Management and Partner Relationship Management
• Web Shop includes intuitive online cataloging and inventory control, enabling seamless e-Commerce ordering over the Internet
• Document and Knowledge Management, including content management for all portals and Websites
• Consolidated, real-time Financial Management, Budgeting and Reporting
• Human Resource Management, including organization, salary, rollups and workflow reporting
• Anywhere, anytime access via the Internet, including your favorite wireless handheld device

With Synergy, the focus is on extending your enterprise applications in order to obtain a much needed operational visibility across the entire business. Business processes typically occur outside the scope of ERP or back-office systems.

Therefore, it is imperative for an organization to integrate and associate all workflow processes to every business facet in the organization, including HR, documents, projects, finances and assets.

• One Source of Information: – All business information and the activities surrounding them are located in one comprehensive, collaborative platform, making information available to employees, management, vendors, suppliers and partners as business issues affect them.
• Activity Monitoring / Exception Management: – Any business activity can be examined, analyzed or triggered at any time, including involvement, follow-through, bottlenecks and exceptions.
• Role-based Security Model: – All business information is based on roles and rules-based schemas in order to control and limit access. Assets, documents and projects are given specific security clearance ratings so only those who possess the rating can access such information.
• Business Analysis and Statistical Reporting: – Rather than a traditional reporting paradigm, Synergy contains continuous monitoring capabilities to manipulate hundreds of pre-defined report templates for greater flexibility in obtaining the most relevant business information and responding quickly to change.
• Organization-wide Integration: – Business components that are otherwise separate such as projects, customers, financials or product information are intrinsically linked for more related interaction. Any adjustment to one facet automatically updates or triggers any other business process or component that is related or affected.

With Synergy, nothing is left on the table when it comes to your corporate relationships-a complete CRM toolset provides both broad-based views and specific information about everything from product updates, sales standings, customer support issues and any related documents.

• Two-way Workflow Management: – With Synergy, realtime views of the issues and actions by both you and your clients enable consistent, up to the minute insight into both the details as well as the big picture-an open, transaction-based system.
• Customer-specific Reports and Statistics: – Built-in analytics are the only way to know what your customers are thinking and to respond to their issues quickly and effectively. Synergy’s native real-time analysis tools, reports and ad hoc querying can help you recognize issues before your customer does.
• Financial Management: – All customer-related financial transactions are automatically associated with their account information, including outstanding payments or marketing co-op amounts, making them easily accessible to your sales reps and remote offices when needed.
• Document Management: – By electronically storing all documents, Synergy provides an automatic, accessible audit trail of all paperwork associated with your customer.

With Synergy, knowledge management is intuitive and controlled rather than disorganized and chaotic; by publishing all documents online and making them available through the Internet, employees, customers, vendors and business partners are fully informed of what is happening in your company.

All documents in Synergy are electronically stored and are associated to corporate workflow, projects and assets. This makes visibility into knowledge capital multi-faceted and provides an automatic audit trail that translates into streamlined communication for a more productive and visible workforce.

• Document Creation, Storage and Management: – All documents in Synergy include category and type definitions that foster more robust organization. Meeting notes, product announcements, policies, education manuals or supplier invoices can be categorized by marketing, management, finance or by any category defined by your company.
• Security Definitions: – Every Synergy document requires a security level for controlled accessibility. This means your documents can be shared at various levels within the company as well as externally at your discretion.
• Consolidation Without Duplication: – Once a document is scanned, uploaded or entered into Synergy, it is the only version that exists for reference, ensuring that identical information is shared by all those who view it. Multiple copies no longer exist, simplifying cooperation amongst employees and speeding decision-making.
• Organization-wide Integration: – Business components that are otherwise separate such as projects, customers, financials or product information are associated with each document for more relevant interaction.
• Website Creation: – Synergy documents can be published to create Websites for specific audiences, containing content such as product and service information for clients, customer management administration for sales reps or human resource policies. By having access to a unique Website through Synergy, information is provided in a succinct and organized manner to those who need it.

Synergy from Exact Software is a powerful tool that can solve many of these HR problems by streamlining processes, reducing paperwork and cost, and increasing access to information. However, most organizations have a number of employees who don’t need the full power and capabilities that Synergy has to offer. The Synergy Employee Self-Service Portal (ESS)extends the HR benefits of Synergy to the rest of the workforce by providing only the most relevant capabilities with complete security control. ESS users have company-defined privileges to critical information and capabilities such as vacation requests, expense reports, and timekeeping records, anytime and from anywhere they have an Internet connection.

ESS gives employees predefined privileges and capabilities to quickly view and request critical information with complete security control. They can request vacation or other time off, submit expense claims and enter timekeeping records, anytime and from anywhere they have an Internet connection. It makes your organization highly accessible and transparent.

• Keep Employees Up-to-Date: – It’s not uncommon for some employees to be unaware of relevant company news. But it takes a lot of time and money to produce and distribute hard-copy newsletters. With Exact’s Employee Self-Service Portal, you have a central news page accessible to all your employees in record time and with minimal effort. Those who work outside the office can keep abreast of the latest developments via the Internet (like new customers, new products, policy instructions, etc). What’s more, you can assign a security level to news items you want to be viewable only by employees above a certain grade.
• Reduce Redundancy and Increase Accuracy: – Too much HR department time is taken up by routine activities like processing changes of address, looking up a new mobile phone number, and entering requests for leave. The possibility of mistakes is greater than when the employee (the source of the information) enters the data the first time. With the Employee Self-Service Portal, your employees will be able to edit their own name and address data, and also enter requests for leave and keep their work schedules up-to-date. The data is also accessible and editable securely via the Internet. So, employees can update sensitive data from their workstation or from the privacy of home.
• Facilitate Communication: – If an employee is not present, it is often difficult to find out whether he/she is visiting a customer, on vacation, or has simply popped out for a few minutes. Looking up contact data often necessitates starting up a separate computer application or wading through the company’s ‘telephone book’. Using Exact’s Employee Self-Service Portal, you can rapidly find all relevant data of other employees, like their telephone number, e-mail address, position, etc. You can also retrieve their work schedules to see at a glance where they are and when they will be available again. For even more convenience, employees who use Microsoft Outlook can synchronize their Outlook calendars with Synergy.
• Save Time and Money: – Sending out pay stubs is a time consuming and expensive chore. Besides printing out prepared pay stubs, there are the costs of envelopes and postage. The same applies to the annual employee benefits statement. Using the Employee Self-Service Portal, your employees can retrieve generated pay stubs and annual benefits statements. Each employee’s data is made inaccessible to others through security levels. Your company will save time and money by providing pay stubs online instead of physically posting them. In addition to this data, the employee can view other personalized documents, like a contract of employment or performance appraisal report. Here again, the documents will be viewable only by the employee concerned.
• Measure Employee Satisfaction: – Employee performance and productivity drives your company’s revenue. An HR professional needs to keep in touch with what makes the workforce tick in order to measure and manage costs and productivity more accurately. It’s no coincidence that the management of many companies has made employee satisfaction a Key Performance Indicator (KPI). All too often, however, an employee satisfaction survey turns out to be a complex and expensive exercise. With ESS, you can ask employees (anonymously if desired) about their motivation and their opinions on policy, management and their own personal contribution to the organization. The survey is easy to prepare and is answerable immediately and simply. Pressing a button gives you an analysis of the results. ESS allows you to make employee satisfaction an integral part of your HRM strategy.

With Synergy, guesswork is eliminated through a complete HRM toolset that allows for both broad-based and specific views of all human resources, including your employees, contractors and applicants throughout the HR lifecycle.

• Resource Planning: – Planning on individual or group levels with graphical overviews of absence statistics, workflow performance, budget activity, offsite assignments, consultant hours, etc. that provide immediate views into resource allocation and better insight into the dynamics of your company.
• Staffing: – Recruiting is streamlined with centralized management of job descriptions, an applicant tracking system, and Web portal functionality for creating a corporate career site.
• On-boarding: – New hires have a central source for HR information like benefit enrollment forms, the corporate directory, the policy and procedure manual, and other training materials. They can get up to speed quickly with instant access to critical information determined by their role and security level, such as all of their predecessor’s work product and their team mate’s work-in-progress.
• Performance Management: – Workflow activity and employee audit trails give management teams greater visibility into who is doing what, translating into a more efficient division of labor. Formal procedures such as performance evaluations and individual development plans are created, securely stored, and easily accessible to those with the proper access rights.
• Employee Self Service: – Employees have one source for corporate news and benefit information as well as restricted access to personal data such as pay stubs, PTO allowance, etc. They can also submit and track requests like time cards, expense reports, vacation requests, address changes and more.
• Training & Development: – Scheduling and approving training can be automated within Synergy and each employee’s training and certification history is available from the employee record. Built-in testing capabilities are also available and can be used for internal certification as well as employee satisfaction and opinion surveys.
• Exiting: – Streamlined processes such as automated exit interviews and asset tracking take some of the headaches out of off-boarding. More importantly, the knowledge doesn’t leave with the worker. All of the employee’s workflow, documents and projects are retained for reference.
• Organizational and Value Chain Collaboration: – By bringing together the people, processes and knowledge that matter most to your business, Synergy creates an accurate, up-to-the-moment view of your organization’s personnel, finance, workflow, documents and asset information, enhancing decision-making, analysis, scenario planning, and ongoing management across your entire business, making your most valuable asset more creative, productive and competitive.

By making individual workflows and corporate goals visible, an organization can spot redundancies and decrease errors, while at the same time increasing productivity. With accessibility to the same information and the same set of rules, Synergy enables your company to become more responsible, reliable and proficient.

With Synergy, workflow consists of request types that are customizable; a request type is any action that occurs within an organization, including those involving appointments, HR requests, training, sales, marketing or finance. All requests are linked with their corresponding resources, projects, assets and documents so that all corporate operations are traceable and interrelated.

Only when a task has flowed through the required individual for approval can it then be considered completed. At any time, work can be viewed, remarked on or generate an alarm so that bottlenecks are avoided and follow-through is ensured.

• One Source for Activities: – All activities, and the information surrounding them are located on one collaborative platform, making workflow available to employees, management, vendors, suppliers and partners as tasks and requests are created.
• Activity Monitoring / Exception Management: – Any task can be examined, analyzed or triggered at any time, for notification on involvement, due dates, follow-through, log jams and exceptions, including urgency level parameters.
• Automated Flow: – Based on the request type, tasks automatically appear in an individual’s workflow, according to the necessary actions dictated by the task. A task can require documentation, collaboration or deadlines, and can be defined to follow a resource path until the request has been processed.
• Role-based Security Model: – Access to all information is based on roles and rules-based schemas, in order to control and limit use to a need-to-know basis. Requests are given specific security clearance ratings so only those who possess the rating can access such information.
• Analysis and Reporting: – Synergy contains continuous monitoring capabilities to observe ongoing workflow through pivot analysis and divisional or departmental statistics in order to procure the most significant business information and respond quickly to action.
• Enterprise-wide Integration: – Activity that might otherwise be isolated is by default linked in Synergy. Projects, customers, financials and documents are inherently associated with one another in order to reflect the details of work, creating one intrinsically linked business process.