UniPhi 12 - Notes for resources

Until UniPhi 12, nearly all data captured in UniPhi was captured against a project. This included all CRM information. Organisations would set up sales lead projects and add issues for contacts that they are engaging with. Then all the communication features of UniPhi would come to live to track all correspondence across the entire target organisation, it's various locations and the people within that location.

However, feedback from our customers was that sometimes you just want to log a comment against a person. It may be a coffee catch up, a phone call that doesn't relate to the sales lead issue or a thought bubble. So, UniPhi 12 comes with comments made directly against the resource. This is the first bit of formal functionality that is not project based.

To add a comment a user clicks on the target contacts name or searches for them (using the new advanced resource search functionality if necessary) and there between the basic contact details of the resource and the custom fields created is a comments panel.

And just like the issues system, it is threaded with the ability to filter for who made the comment in the thread so if you have a collaborative approach you can filter out all other comments other than your own (or the BDMs or other filtered resource).

With the expansion of custom field functionality and the adding of assets to the resource module, the UniPhi 12 release comes with a range of non-project based data. I'm sure UniPhi 13 will see us leverage these steps into the non-project based world.

UniPhi 12 - Mail Merge

UniPhi has had a "Mail Merge"type functionality for some time now. We call the mail merge fields template variables. Template variables are queries on the UniPhi database that return text, tables, paragraphs etc into a rich text box that can then be rendered to PDF as a letter or report. The key use of template variables has been in the addressing of forms and populate of paragraphs of text with specific project information like budgets, due dates etc. This significantly reduces transpose errors when issuing consulting reports.

However, again due to the requirements of a new client, we have enhanced this feature to be able to generate numerous documents in a single merge. This new functionality draws on either a selected resource list of contracts list to insert dynamic information into one document per selected resource/contract as per the screenshot below:

Mail Merge Wizard Form

The end output is a single PDF with all relevant documents combined and ready to print as well as an individual PDF per contact. This functionality will greatly reduce the administration burden of property sales for developers come settlement time.

UniPhi 12 - Customer Dashboard

UniPhi's web application features a graphical Dashboards tab which presents a live and fully transparent view of your organisations project data. Among the available dashboards are Summary, Time, Submissions and Issues. Each of the UniPhi dashboards present a neat graphical summary view of the information stored in UniPhi, and are designed specifically to appeal to those of us who relate more to a graphical presentation of information than tables and data.

Based on requests and feedback from our clients we have expanded the selection of dashboards to include a new Customer Dashboard tab.

The latest view of your customer data

The Customer Dashboard presents the "Top 5" customers in terms of revenue and profit across your organisation. The dashboard contains 4 graphs which display your present top 5 customers for the quarter and over the past year with a comparison to the same time last year. 

The graphs each show:

- Top 5 Revenue in the Quarter

- Top 5 Profit in the Quarter

- Revenue by Customer

- Profit by Customer

See your most valuable customers, at a glance

Filters can be applied in order to view this valuable data through different lenses. For example you may be interested in seeing your top 5 customers across your entire portfolio, or per specific sector, project type, or by location. As you may be aware, each of the categories of information appearing in these filters is able to be defined by your UniPhi administrator so you will always have the ability to focus on the information that is most relevant to you and your organisation.

UniPhi dashboards adhere to our core design principles whereby data entered once is made available in numerous places, and in real time. This means that each time a revenue contract is created anywhere in your UniPhi deployment, the value of that contract will immediately update the customer dashboard, so you always see your top 5 as of right now. Having this information available dynamically means that you no longer need to wait for a report to be compiled, consolidated, and distributed to understand how your business its tracking today, and not last year, last month, or last week.

These are the four graphs we've developed so far but like all database driven systems, there's endless ways of aggregate customer data. Leave a comment on the blogger site if you think there are better metrics for customer information. Your thoughts will drive our next round of development.