Sweeping Enhancements to CRM

EssentOne™ Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has been enhanced to help users find contact information faster and easier, and to provide more information about individual Contacts.

EssentOne CRM manages Customer information including Addresses, Contacts, Business Rules, and much more. What’s new is greater ease of access to Contact details with greater visibility.

There are three main improvements:

Contact info at glance: Contact details like an individual’s phone number and email address have historically been available within the Customer Profile. Users open the Customer Detail then, within that, the individual Contact, where the phone and email are listed. We’ve added a new way of finding Contact information to remove manual steps and streamline order creation . Now, in addition, when users search in Contacts, the phone and email will show directly in the search results, with no need to drill deeper and open the Contact detail. This is especially time-saving when working with large Customers with a large number of Contacts.

Expanded detail: We also added more granularity to the information available about Contacts. The Contact Detail now includes a new dashboard that shows Notes, Activities, Opportunities, Quotes, Orders, Invoices and Returns that are directly related the Contact. (Previously this information was available at the Customer level but not the Contact level.) The Dashboard information can be filtered by date range and by sales representative to narrow the results to the specific information needed.

Contact information via Sales Order: Users no longer need to navigate away from a Sales Order to find Contact details. Contact details are now linked within Sales Orders. You now can access a Contact Card that shows important Contact details.

Leveraging Offerings History for Improved Analysis

New dashboards and deeper detail now provide greater visibility to popularity, trends, and future needs among a company’s offerings.

Offerings – products like physical items, services like decoration, and charges like additional fees for specialized work – have always been robust in EssentOne. Offerings include details descriptions, images, customer pricing, vendor costing and General Ledger postings, all integrated.

Offerings in EssentOne now allow users to easily see historical information from previous sales orders and purchase orders in new, crystal clear transactions display The dashboards can be sorted by date range, supplier and customer. This reveals popular items and provides visibility of sales and purchase trends to better prepare for future needs.

Streamlined Process for Third-Party Billing

EssentOne CRM has always made it easy to fill new orders with accurate and automated customer information. The business management system uses default business rules for each customer to populate orders with customer specific settings, without re-keying details for each order. Bill-To information such as Contact, Delivery Method and Overrun billing rules can default and prepopulate.

New integration capabilities for Alternate Bill-To brings the same automation to transactions of three or more parties. EssentOne now supports the ability to define an Alternate Bill-To with the same default and population functionality as standard Bill-To. For example, sometimes an order will be sold and shipped to one customer while the invoice will be sent to a different customer. The new Alternate Bill-To functionality streamlines management of invoicing to a 3rd party, with less time spent and fewer errors invited.

Greater Flexibility for Adjusting Shipping Costs

When using third-party shippers like FedEx, UPS, or USPS, shipping costs are often merely estimates. The actual amount the third party shipper ultimately charges may differ, especially if logistics or order details change, and it makes a difference in the profitability of an order.

Through integration with major carriers, EssentOne has historically captured Shipping Costs for accurate job costing. Users define the rules for Customer Shipping and the system applies the rules and costs to each order.

EssentOne has now expanded the flexibility of shipping rules. Shipping Charges now can be adjusted even after the shipment has been made. When shipping costs don’t match the original projection, the changes can now be more easily managed for greater accuracy in job costing and order profitability.

Continued Improvements for PromoStandards™ Trading Partner Integration

Essent® is the leading provider of trading partner integration in the promotional products industry, leveraging the Essent OrderTrax® Network to connect distributor, supplier and decorator systems through almost any integration protocol, including ever expanding offerings of PromoStandards.

Several PromoStandards endpoints have been enhanced, fully supported by the Essent OrderTrax Network and ready to be implemented by the award-winning Essent integration team:

Inventory Availability 2.0.0

About the endpoint: The Inventory Availability endpoint allows a distributor to look up a supplier’s inventory information, like the available products and how many are in stock, at any time without phone calls and emails.