Salesforce.com is one of the leaders when it came to introducing the sea-of-change to CRM in the 1990s.

A pioneer and visionary of the SaaS model, the company believes the Internet has democratized enterprise software and that companies all over the world no longer have to tolerate risky, expensive, difficult-to-use software that takes months and years to install and offers little or no return on investment. Bearing this in mind, the fully integrated salesforce.com online CRM service delivers all the benefits of traditional CRM software without with much less risk.  The advent of online CRM or eCRM has shifted the market from an ownership to a rental model, freeing businesses from the hassle and expense of software purchasing, deployment, and maintenance.

The salesforce.com service includes best-of-breed sales force automation, customer support management and marketing automation components for a monthly subscription.

Features and benefits of the service include:

  • Fast access: Built for the Web and available anytime, anywhere
  • Ease of use: Intuitive, easy to adopt, minimal training time, no IT resources necessary
  • Customization and personalization: Easily adapts to a company's existing processes and staff structures and each user's needs
  • 360 degree view of customer: All departments share visibility into every aspect of customers and prospects
  • World-class functionality: Complete and secure service includes tracking, reporting, analysis and forecasting available for sales, marketing and support organizations at a fraction of the cost of traditional client/server CRM systems
  • Wireless access from enabled cellular phones, Palm OS devices and pagers
  • Multi-language support

Continuing its onslaught in the world of CRM, this year, Salesforce.com   launched Force.com Visual Process Manager, a new capability of the Force.com platform that will help companies rapidly automate any business process. With the Force.com Visual Process Manager, customers can, for the first time, visually design any complex business process with an intuitive, visual design tool, and instantly run it in the cloud. In addition, with Force.com Visual Process Manager, organizations can now build business process applications with greater flexibility and automate processes across all departments.

Commenting on the major advantage of the solution, Salesforce.com notes that prior to the Force.com Visual Process Manager, companies had to buy expensive on-premise software, hardware and infrastructure to automate processes. Furthermore, they could not innovate on these processes once they were deployed because the complexity of the software made changes cost-prohibitive.

This has now changed with the introduction of the Force.com Visual Process Manager which combines the elegance of visual process design with the simplicity, low cost, and quick results of the Force.com cloud computing platform - empowering customers to continuously refine and enhance processes to improve operational efficiency or fulfil regulatory compliance. Since it's part of the Force.com platform, businesses can create dynamic and sophisticated business processes within their current Sales Cloud 2 and Service Cloud 2 deployments or custom Force.com applications. Force.com Visual Process Manager helps companies automate specific business processes by guiding users through multiple steps and recommending the next course of action, all without any coding.

Features of the Force.com Visual Process Manager include:

  • Process Designer - The Process Designer enables companies to easily design business processes via an intuitive user interface. It includes a library of process components such as presentation components like forms, questions, and choices, and logic components, like task assignments, decision trees, and approval processes. These components can be added to a visual process design diagram through simple drag-and-drop actions.
  • Process Wizard Builder - The Process Wizard Builder enables companies to easily design wizards that walk end-users, step-by-step, through their business process.
  • Process Simulator - With Process Simulator, customers can optimize the process design by simulating complex processes before they are deployed. For the first time, companies can now test the process flow entirely in the cloud, identify bottlenecks and conflicts, and immediately revise by reviewing each phase of a process.
  • Real-time Process Engine - The real-time process engine runs all of a company's sophisticated processes and automatically scales to meet the needs of any size business. Based on the engine, complex processes can be carried out while enforcing business rules and adhering to best practices.

The Force.com Visual Process Manager is based on technology acquired from Informavores in 2009.

By Shanti Anne Morais

 

 

Advertisement