ForeSite Insight

Are you wasting time without knowing it?

Most businesses have specific, often proprietary, processes which they use every day in order to provide the greatest possible value to their customers.  Any one of these simple processes that has to be repeated many times per day can absorb hundreds of person hours per year as is evidenced in the JR Jones example below.

Automation Candidate Example
JR Jones Company needs to compile weekly and monthly sales reports. The sales numbers come from the accounting system, and the leads and opportunity numbers come from their proprietary CRM system. These statistics must be merged together and manipulated in Excel, and then formatted in Word to meet the needs of management. The process takes each sales person two hours per run to get their numbers to the admin. The admin then spends another four hours per run to complete the process. With only three sales people, this process eats up 640 person hours per year. A time consuming and repetitive process like this is a perfect candidate for automation.

Imagine the benefits of automating your processes:

• Improve customer service
• Increase sales
• Reduce costs
• Reduce stress
• Go home on time

Wouldn’t this time be better spent improving customer service or expanding sales revenue? As an expert in your job, you probably have a few ideas about how your company could be made more efficient, but may not have the technical background to make it a reality. That’s where ForeSite can help.

Other examples of opportunities for automation:

• Manual double data entry
• Manual entry of data provided to you in an electronic format
• Exporting data that needs to be massaged in MS Excel
• Uploading data to websites

For more information about how to get started making the most of your resources, contact us at (860) 528-1100.

ForeSite Adds More Great Talent

Please join me in welcoming Peter Wilson who joined the ForeSite family on September 1^st, 2007.  Although Peter currently hails from Worcester Massachusetts, his roots are in Glastonbury, Connecticut where he and his eight brothers and sisters (yes, 9 children total) grew up.  After he graduated from school, Peter moved to Worcester where he has been managing, designing, and supporting IT environments primarily in the publishing industry.  His thirteen years of experience in this field has enabled us to expand our service offerings to the central Massachusetts region, opening a Worcester office with Peter at the helm.  Specializing in the unique IT needs of the publishing industry allows us to hit the ground running with this niche of clientele.  Peter is a welcomed addition to the ForeSite engineering team and we look forward to incorporating his experiences into our work flow.    Visit us on the web for more information about our Worcester office.

Search Privacy Practices- CDT Report

Privacy is always an issue when it comes to the Internet, but how often do we truly consider what we are revealing about ourselves when typing our search criteria into Google, Yahoo!, or AOL?  Though search engines are competing to offer greater privacy protections to their users, there is still a lot of information being stored each time we conduct a new search.  So how do the top search engines compare on user search information retention?   The Center for Democracy & Technology has recently issued a press release on their findings from Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Ask.com, and AOL.  They have compiled a report illustrating how long each company holds onto personal data.  Their results show that Ask.com currently removes data far sooner than any of their competitors.  To see how each company compares, view the full report issued by the CDT.

SEO – 10 Best Practices

These three little letters have made a big impact on the world of websites. But with the ever changing formulas that search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and MSN use to rank sites, it can be quite overwhelming to try to stay optimized. There may be not be a magical blueprint for developing a website that will be ranked on top, but there are a number of things that should be considered when designing a site. CNET offers these 10 SEO Best Practices as a helpful guide. ForeSite proudly designs all our websites with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind, and offers recommendations on web enhancements for optimal search rankings. If you’re looking to redesign your website, or would simply like to learn more about increasing your rankings, contact us for more information.