A Case Study

IMAGINE THE FOLLOWING SCENARIO...

You work in a small retail office (for example let's say a real estate office) with a total of 10 staff. 5 years ago you upgraded to windows 98 and had it networked amongst your 10 desktop computers. There is one shared printer. Your main source of advertising properties is the front window and the local paper.
Your staff use their computers only for typing spreadsheets and client proposals etc, and maybe use a spreadsheet to monitor their commisions/sales. Clients details, sales, aquisitions, contracts and other paperwork are all paper based and stored in a filing cabinet.

Am I getting close to your situation ??

HOW DO WE HELP ?

While there may be nothing fundamentally wrong with the above picture, this office is clearly not making most out of it's expensive network. This computer system, while it may be a little out of date, would have cost between $15k and $25k and can still be used to increase productivity and workflow using the existing software available (i.e. MS Office).

Lets list some of the main business activities and solve them one by one:

• Resource tracking (including tracking staff movements)
• Messaging (eg. Memo: "Mrs Hunt called about signing the contract 4pm sat ??")
• Printing legal documents (standardisation)
• Advertising of products and services
• Client demonstration tools (loan calculators, repayment systems etc)
• Data storage - (eg. filing system) .

Resource tracking & messaging - can easily be accomodated using MS Outlook. Our highly skilled team can train your staff how to use mail and other features of Outlook that will help your staff to know who is dealing with which client and when they are in or out of the office.

Printing - We can provide customised templates for commonly used documents in MS Word such as Contracts and proposals, Lease agreements etc. This helps to ensure that there is some quality control in the creation of these documents, and keeps legal costs down.

Advertising - We can recommend e-commerce solutions for business promotion on the web - either through personal web-sites or other existing services such as www.realestate.com.au or www.property.com.au.

Client Demonstration tools - large paper charts and graphs can be confusing for many clients. We can change these into simple computer based calculators that are easy for you to use and easy for the clients to read.

Data storage - obviously requires the implementation of a database, but need not necessarily be expensive. For most small offices, MS Access or other similar databases will suffice for the storage of most details. We can customise your database to allow mail-merging with MS Word for mail-outs, as well as storing a database of images (ie properties for sale or sold). Imagine being able to search through your database of hundreds or thousands of properties to find the ideal house for the clients chosen area, chosen price bracket and chosen size, etc !

While these processes may already exist in your office, chances are they are not making use of time/cost saving customised computer software that can do the job for you the way you want it - after all you deserve it, don't you ??.