Practice what you preach

Many people ask us what we use to systemise our processes at Konsult and Web Design Magic and how has this progressed over time. Well, we started out just the same as many people – with a good old spread sheet. We had a shared spread sheet that held all our leads and opportunities and paper based job sheets. The office was an absolute nightmare for greenies as I think we used 1,500 trees per year simply keeping track of our jobs and times. Not to mention we had to store all this paper. We really needed an electronic system to manage all this information!

It was around 2002 – 2003 when a tool called SharePoint was starting to become popular with larger organisations. It promised to allow the creation of Intranet style portals – and it did that, but in a clunky sort of way. We didn't really take much notice until a few years later when we were introduced again via the Web Central Managed SharePoint product. From there it is history - we saw the increased potential of SharePoint and offered it as a product.

Our first internal version was rolled out and we called it “Kozmo” and yes, it is named after the Seinfeld TV series! Kozmo managed all our contacts, shared calendars, document libraries and it’s biggest role was our job system. It soon became apparent how important Kozmo was to the company as it started to automate certain processes and efficiently replaced the old paper trail type systems. As the company grew so did Kozmo and soon it was the centre peace for the whole organisation. With increasing staff we were able to manage holidays, meeting rooms, knowledge bases and share documents. We could also grant our customers access so they could integrate with our team online.

After using Kozmo for 3-4 years we needed a new job system that could look after other emerging areas of our business.The concept of a CRM was introduced and there was no better progression than to Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Introducing CRaMer

CRaMer (yes, also a Seinfeld character!) was developed on Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 and upgraded to Dynamics CRM 2011 in early 2011. A full custom job system was developed that allowed us to not only manage sales leads and opportunities, but now we had a full CRM (see future blogs) that managed leads, opportunities, contacts, contracts, jobs queues and scheduling plus much much more.

We still use Kozmo for our client portals and for document management and plan to do so for some time. At the time of writing we are planning the implementation of SharePoint 2010 (Kozmo II) and CRaMer to allow seamless document management for accounts and jobs.

So, as you can see we use the systems we build. They have been a part of our organisation for a long while and we would love to show you how you to can benefit from them too. Send your details and we will show you how.