global it solution

Business Process Development (BPD)

Organizations recognize the need to better understand and improve their business processes, market agility versus their competition, speed in their decision-making process, and implementation of measurable best practices.
Mid Sized Companies often do not have the in-house expertise to lead and manage the process analysis, design, and implementation activities associated with a successful BPD initiative and need assistance in one or more of these areas.
Businesses run on processes. Successful organizations constantly look for opportunities to streamline and improve their business processes.
There are many compelling reasons for doing so including: reduce cycle times, lower costs, increased growth, productivity gains, quality improvements, and increased value to the end customer.
Nirvana’s BPD process delivers the ability to identify, define, analyze and design flexible mission-critical/enterprise-wide processes that align with the corporate strategic plan (goals and objectives), create market differentiation (proprietary processes unique to a company) and create a competitive marketplace advantage.
Our method is designed to identify and optimize business processes so organizations can respond with precision and agility when making business decisions in today’s changing business environment, enabling them to:
> Identify Quality Improvements
> Automate and Integrate Manual Processes to Increase Efficiency and Accuracy
> Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) while achieving higher service levels and increasing Return-on-Investment (ROI)
> Reduce Redundant Processes
> Decrease Business / Product Cycles
> Regulatory Compliance (SOX, FDA, HIPPA)
> Create & Leverage Best Practice Standards
> Increase Personal Productivity and Satisfaction
Nirvana customizes a precise work plan to address your company’s unique needs:
> Assess the “As-Is” model to include a performance-based analysis of the business and customer-facing processes, supporting applications and infrastructure.
> Design the “To-Be” reference model that aligns with your business strategies through customer requirements identification, target performance monitoring, process and organizational re-design, business case development, and “As-Is”/“To-Be” gap analysis.
> Develop an implementation plan that is focused on business measurements, implementation strategy, project implementation sequence and charters, communication plans, and training programs.

Like many of Nirvana’s service offerings, our Business Process Development methodology was established independent of market and corporate breadth, therefore it is an adaptable solution that will seamlessly integrate into the present enterprise

Consolidation of vendors makes high risk for middle and small enterprises

Consolidation of vendors makes high risk for middle and small enterprises
1. Consolidated products many times get lost in the mix with the larger vendors multi-product menu of product offerings.
2. Focus diminishes as the Consolidator spreads its resources across many products creating uncertain support and product direction.
3. End of life cycle accelerates for many of the consolidated software products leaving the business consumer in an unclear and potentially costly position.
4. Support of an acquired product can become less effective, as consolidation generally includes staff reductions in product support and related help desk areas.

The Niche Vendors
Companies requiring specific industry functional capabilities and/or who desire a closer vendor relationship including influence on product direction may be candidates for what a Niche vendor delivers best. These vendors although generally smaller in staffing, focus 360° of their efforts on providing strong market and product expertise. The results produce a high level of customer interaction, industry specific functionality, responsiveness, product influence and access to senior management.

In a consolidating ERP market, Niche vendors can end up winners because of the following reasons:
1. Consolidation means fewer competitors – An example of reduced competitive ERP solutions due to consolidation is MAPICS. Five years ago they offered three ERP solutions; XA, Point.Man and Frontstep. Today, they are no longer around, having been acquired by INFOR in 2005. Today, two of the three former MAPICS ERP products have virtually
disappeared from the ERP software market. This is common when consolidation takes place, many products get retired.
2. Walk the Talk – Because Niche ERP software companies focus on a single market they are specialists. All staff members are immersed in a single business type and understand in detail business issues and solutions associated with that specific market.
3. Business health specialist – Similar to personal healthcare, when looking to correct health issue you go to a specialist. They understand your specific area of need and offer the expertise. Why would you not do the same with your business? That’s where Niche vendors offer great advantage.
4. Less software overhead means optimized methods – ERP products are very complicated business solutions which integrate all aspects of a business. ERP software that is focused does not require features intended for another type of business. It is therefore optimized by design for its target market and is developed
efficiently with deeper yet specific market functions. Software set-up during
implementation is already streamlined due to
its inherent clean market specific business
logic.
5. Market specific focus – As an ERP business consumer, companies want to see the product remain in tune with their direction and trends in their industry. Customers of a Niche vendor are generally part of a smaller user community and one that collectively has common interests. Those common interests provide much of the R&D input insuring appropriate
product direction. For some customers it is also important to have access to the vendor’s senior management which in a Niche market organization is usually very accessible at the most senior levels

Top Five Reasons to Switch from Clarify Thick Client to Clarify Thin Client

INTRODUCTION
CRM today has gone beyond the realm of its original objective of customer relationship management, which involved sales, marketing and customer service to become the driving force behind strategy formulation of various companies.
The latest developments in the CRM space have enabled integrated customer management and created value by introducing agility and efficiency to businesses - Thus helping businesses not only achieve operational efficiencies i.e. reduce costs, sell more but also add value to their customers.
Modern CRM technologies focus on pain areas such as delayed response to customer queries, agent skill misuse, productivity, lack of integration in communication channels, creation of complete view of the customer, leverage customer insight etc. thus enabling businesses to foster stronger customer relationships.
TRANSITION
Thin clients are devices that can connect to the network but have very limited computing and storage capacity. Thus removing the need for Laptops / Desktop Computers or up gradation of hardware/software of the existing desktop computing environment. Even the old/obsolete machines running on earlier configurations that can hook up to the current network can be used without major issues.
Thin clients also make it possible for enterprises to shift from location centric applications to network-enabled applications and also provide complete customer satisfaction. It not only aids in security issues but also reduces the TCO. Numerous examples can be quoted from Fortune 500 organizations where benefits from transition have far exceeded initial cost of deployment of solution thus lowering TCO (Total Cost of Ownership).
Transition to Clarify thin client from Clarify thick client offers companies an excellent opportunity to manage virtual workforces, disseminate correct and meaningful information to customers at the right time/place that empower each and every customer interaction with the highest level of service satisfaction.
In today's volume driven industry, a transition from Clarify Thick Client to Clarify Thin client helps deliver a focused and differentiated client experience. A Clarify Thin Client environment enables efficient customer interactions while making it easier for a system to adapt to the rapidly changing business scenario.
FIVE MAJOR REASONS
Five major reasons for making the much talked about transition from Clarify Thick Client to Clarify Thin Client maybe understood as under:
1. DELIVER AN UNMATCHED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
A changeover to a Clarify Thin client environment makes it possible to integrate all capabilities essential for customer query resolution into a single application that allows dynamic support for each problem resolution stage.
The new support environment allows for incident management, configuration management as well as problem management aiding in smoothening of operations and increase in productivity of support professionals. Superior operational functionalities and the finesse to handle version upgrades put Clarify Thin Client in a unique position to deliver a distinguished customer experience.
In an era of globalization and Business Process Outsourcing, with clients and workforce distributed across the world, thin clients aid in 365 X 24 X 7 support environment from anywhere in the world without compromising on the security of the data. Thus providing clients with uninterrupted services round the clock.
2. CREATE AND CAPTURE MAXIMUM VALUE
Reduced IT support costs associated with maintenance, support, upgrade, distribution makes the system highly scalable and leads to lower TCO. It also places responsibility of upgrading application with newer patches as well as handling security issues in safer and qualified hands unlike the end user who could be a layman. At the same time end user is unaware of changes that are taking place in the system, as his/her work remains unaffected in case of a crash. Cost of productivity when a desktop/laptop crashes or when the user infects the system by opening or sending a virus can be avoided by deploying thin client. Automation of knowledge management system in thin clients also leads to improved customer interfaces that in turn lead to rapid return on investment.
3. INTEGRATED CUSTOMER MANAGEMENT
Upgrading to Clarify Thin client adds new features/functionalities to existing CRM environment while retaining all the old features, thus integrating legacy applications with new and forthcoming applications. The improved and sophisticated customer interface makes it possible to make efficient problem resolutions and reduce escalations, leading to better customer management and client satisfaction. Customers can also access their data (provided its public), without having the client installed on their machines or even while traveling, over Internet thus keeping themselves better informed about the status of their requests/problems lodged at customer helpdesk.
4. BRING AGILITY AND EFFICIENCY TO BUSINESS
Globalization and structural changes have shaken the Industry to the core. This has resulted is an ever growing need for organizations to become lean and agile. Clarify thin client aids in an organization in this goal.
Clarify Thin Client applications can be accessed from anywhere over the web using an Internet browser thus giving company representatives power of knowledge at their hands With digital convergence, any device would be capable of accessing these applications over Internet. With all the client information at their fingertips, sales force gets better equipped while in the field. Also Integration of applications and processes in an integrated environment enables high value customer servicing, thus bringing in more agility and efficiency to businesses.
5. GET A 360 deg. CUSTOMER VIEW
As the name suggests, system provides 360-degree customer view i.e. complete view of the customer, which would include Master Data, Transactional Data and Analytical data. Thus providing better/holistic information about the customer to all the stakeholders. Easy availability of this data in the hands of field personnel equips them with a powerful tool to manage operations in a better manner.
Clarify thin client customer manager is well equipped to manage customer interactions at different levels (phone, email etc.). The system allows easy customer data access, easy updation of customer data and better case information management.
Thus, for many organizations transitioning from Clarify thick client to thin client is a cost effective initiative that increases customer satisfaction and operational agility.

Making of a Customer Centric Enterprise

Enterprise-wide Customer Challenges
The importance of customers remains same across boundaries. Becoming a 'customer-centric' enterprise is not about implementing a Customer Relationship Management solution. It is the ability of an enterprise to capture rich customer information and analyze it intelligently to know their customer well.
For enterprises, the challenge of meeting customer demands is increasing. Each department requires intelligent and updated information of customers to strategize effective business processes. No customer process and data stays in one department within the enterprise. In most enterprises, fragmented, redundant, and unsynchronized customer data resides across discrete data stores.
Following are some of the reasons for this:
Rapid growth
Mergers & acquisitions
Multiple product lines
Each business unit with their own representation and usage of customer data
Different transactional systems not sharing the customer data efficiently and in real-time, and others.
Because of inaccessibility to customer data across business units in real-time, these business units end up using inaccurate, insufficient and inconsistent customer data. Every department of the enterprise are faced with a different set of challenges due to this inconsistent and fragmented data structure, some of which are:
Marketing
Multiple business units usually capture Customer preferences, but no common view exists to address customer preferences consistently across the enterprise to avoid legal issues like unsolicited emails.
Other challenges faced by the marketing department includes:
Creating effective marketing campaigns and accurately measure its effectiveness
Inability to conduct closed loop marketing
Productivity issues and higher operating costs
Product pricing issues for global customers

Sales
Sales force spends large amount of time on non-value added customer information validation. They also face difficulties in cross/up selling due to non-integrated customer purchase history.
The primary challenges faced by the Sales force include:
Unavailability of updated order status information
High administrative costs for sales credit assignments
Difficulty in collecting consistent customer information from distributed reseller network
Inability to effectively tailor messages relevant to current customer experience
Partner integration

Order Management
The order management process is no different.
The challenges posed to the order management process due to unavailability of single customer data repository includes:
Field Representatives and partners are forced to utilize multiple tools for order entry process
Inadequate cycle time for customer delivery - bookings and Shipping delays because ofinadequate customer information entry (invalid and redundant customers)
Fulfillment linked to initial 'shipped to' or 'staging' sites, but not necessarily inclusive of an end install site, limiting insight/planning for true install base.
Information not effectively shared between functions creates double work and confusion for customers and field reps when ordering solutions
Longer order management cycle time
Support
Inability to accurately validate entitlement of callers; giving away free service
Inability to view complete relationship and sales history for potential cross sell opportunities during support occurrences
Lengthy call times due to non-value added customer information validation .Lack of consistent information being collected upon opening of service cases
Higher total cost to service
Finance & Executive Management
The Finance department and the Executive management on the other hand faces a different set of challenges, as they -
Are not clear on o Root cause of the problem
Benefits that can be drawn from consistent customer master across business units
Changes to internal & external Business processes and policies
Changes to Data management practices
Changes to Information Technology
Efforts and time required

Business Value
Can not offer a unified experience for customers across business units
Do not have single source of truth
Face difficulty in updating and accessing billing, receivables, claims, payables and other information
Face challenges in Forecasting and Planning
Get reduced Marketing effectiveness
Get reduced Sales effectiveness
Get reduced Support effectiveness
Get unclear customer account

IT Department
The challenges faced by the IT department are:
High data management costs due to approach of following after the fact maintenance
Inaccurate data
Insufficient data
Inconsistent data
Discarded data Inability to access up-to-date customer profile in real-time
Duplicate customer data across systems
Duplicates within systems (Same name spelled differently)
Customer creation at multiple systems
Problems Cross Referencing Customers
Sharing customer intelligence
Data and Work redundancy

Shift to Customer-centric Enterprise
The old enterprise model mainly focused on Operational Efficiency. Tools and systems were developed to increase productivity and decrease costs. Profitability was directly related to enhanced operational efficiency while the main investments were made in the merchandising and supply chain function areas. The main reason for the failure of this model was the inability to retain customers and revenues that consistently reduced. With the new model emerging, the focus shifted to customers. Enterprises realized that the most crucial asset on which they could base long-term revenue generation stratergies was: their customers. Leveraging customer information for improved customer satisfaction, lifetime value, retention and customer insight became the profit drivers for the company. Investment focus shifted to reatining and acquiring new customers. Establishment of multiple customer service touch points and effective market strategies came into focus.
Customer Data integration, customer information management and customer insight emerged as the key function areas to transform to a consistently growing 'customer centric' enterprise.
Customer-centric Framework
The customer-centric framework is the end-to-end customer solution. It is combination of Customer Information Management, Customer Insight and Customer Insight to Action. In a Customer-centric framework, customer data integration is strengthened by Business Intelligence applications. Each solution enclosed within the Customer-centric Framework serves specific set of functions to make an enterprise truly customer driven.
Customer Information Management
· Single 360-degree customer view
· Data Quality & Refinement
· Customer ID & Classification
· Rich Customer Information Customer Insight
· Customer Intelligence
· Customer Value
· Customer Profitability
· Product Profitability Insight to Action
· Product Development
· Marketing, segmentation
· Sales and Support
· Relationship Strategies
Business Strategy, BPM
At each phase, the customer-centricity improves the business value through each business function. It helps refine offerings after an intelligent analysis of the market and customers. Some critical Business Questions that makes the Customer-centric Framework successful are:
· In what way and how often do we interact with our different customers?
· What campaigns / offerings are the most successful with our customers?
· Are we effective in selling and serving our customers?
· What additional customer information will improve our efficiency and effectiveness?
· Who are our most profitable customers? What are our most/least profitable markets?
· What segments are underserved?
About Nirvana
Nirvana, The Customer Knowledge Company, develops and delivers Customer Asset Strategies to increase tactical and strategic decision-making capabilities across the enterprise. As a leading provider of CRM, ERP, integration, and business intelligence services to the Global 2000, Nirvana turns customer data into strategic knowledge that positively affects the entire enterprise. Established in 1990 with international offices, Nirvana has a long-standing commitment to global delivery and is uniquely qualified to deliver end-to-end solutions through valuable strategy consulting services and highly skilled engineering execution. Strategic and technology .For additional information on Nirvana's full range of services, please visit our website at ://www.nirvanainfocom.com

Nirvana's SOA Point of View

The Need for a New Enterprise Architecture
The information technology solutions that many organizations have implement over the past decades are no longer adequate to meet contemporary business needs. In today's economy, the global marketplace requires businesses to operate with greater agility, competitiveness, and productivity, at lower cost than ever before—because now their competitors come from every corner of the globe. Technological advances that one company overlooks will be adopted by another and used to their advantage.

As a result, companies must quickly recognize and respond to new opportunities and challenges and growing global competition. We need to respond to customer requirements more quickly and precisely—and to offer tailored responses to the distinctive needs of various customers. Enhancing efficiency and productivity requires faster access to deeper, more accurate, and more timely information for better decision-making. As companies respond to their challenges by setting up virtual supply chains that bring more global partners and vendors into their core business, they need ways to seamlessly integrate with those partners and vendors.

Many IT environments aren't up to the challenge. Their systems are inflexible, incapable of quickly adapting to new business or regulatory requirements. Too many systems are complex, proprietary, and siloed, making customization and integration difficult. The inability to share existing application components increases the time and cost to develop, test, deploy, and maintain new solutions. As a result, too many resources are tied down with fixing, maintaining, and attempting to integrate existing solutions, rather than investing in innovative solutions to new business needs. The IT department, which needs to be a strategic asset to the company, is too often a cost center instead of an innovation center.

Fortunately, trends have been moving in a more productive direction. Technologies like extensible markup language (XML) and simple object access protocol (SOAP) enable new ways to integrate systems. Legacy investments may now integrate with new solutions across platforms, departments, geographic boundaries—even across enterprises
Together, these developments provide the foundation to solve the problems facing business and IT: service-oriented architectures (SOAs).

Organic trafic growth is important to your business

SEO strategy is something that has been difficult to define as the search landscape tends to change quite frequently with new innovations and technologies emerging up all over the place. There are so many dimension and aspect for it .To me, a successful organic SEO strategy should focus on three areas:
Getting Traffic to Your Web Platform via Carefully Selected Keywords
This is really the lifeblood of your SEO campaign. Without proper keyword selection, we run the risk of blending into search results oblivion. A strong SEO strategy begins and ends with keyword selection. In fact it never ends. Keyword research should be ongoing. To remain competitive we always need to develop creative ways to reinvent our messaging and content. Business is a dynamic process, markets change, competition change, supply and demand change and your business should change as well.
Keyword selection is a critical aspect of any SEO strategy. Keyword selection depends on a wide variety of factors such as: Type of Industry, Popularity of our brand, Competitiveness of keywords, Semantic mapping of the user, Stage of Awareness, Head vs. Torso vs. Long-Tail and Time of Season.
The list could go on and on. The fact is that keyword selection is not a one-time thing. You really need to make an effort to understand what terms searchers will be using when looking for your service or product offering.
Relevant, Compelling and Useful Content on our Web site
The greatest SEO strategy that we can incorporate is content development. from a user point of view, content development can be used to improve site stickiness and time spent on your site. We need to provide our audience with the content on our site and targeted landing page that they are looking for. If that means book review, we had better provide the reviews.
Even in 2008, the search engines still like good old fashioned HTML text copy the best. Not content buried in Flash or images, good old copy. However if you need a little content "pizzazz" try incorporating videos with transcripts, blog posts, news articles or the like. If keywords are your lifeblood of your SEO strategy, them content is the rest of your "physical" makeup. Search engines need content to crawl and index and of course rank. To increase your visibility in the organic space of the search engines (ie the natural search results) you need to have a content rich site. Do not expect to rank if you do not have any content on your site. Writing content for the Web is a key factor of any SEO strategy. Yet why is it overlooked by so many? Every SEO strategy needs to focus on content development. You are defeating the purpose if you are not pumping out new content on your site on a regular basis. You want to be an authority on "car insurance" you better have content about "car insurance". You want to rank well for "cosmetic dentistry" you might want to create some additional content for your site. Content development is critical for a successful SEO strategy.
Establishing Authority via Link Development
A strong SEO strategy needs to have this component for without relevant links to your site, you simply will not rank. The sites that are the true authorities are the ones with quality links from other sites and web properties. It’s not always about quantity, but more often than not it is about quality. If you want to rank well in the search engines, you need to build up your external link inventory. Many argue that the best way to do this is to buy links. I strongly disagree. Buying links artificially builds your link inventory. It improves quantity but does not necessarily improve your link quality. For my money, the best way to build your external link inventory is to do it by providing interesting and useful content. Some call this link bait, I call it smart online marketing. If you provide content that is somewhat unique, extremely useful and informative, chances are others are simply going to link to your content. Furthermore you can bet that the links will be of higher quality and more relevant.

Do you think that a site without a strong external link inventory can rank well? Well it does happen, but the "staying power" of these sites to remain in the top organic result is week. A site with a strong external link inventory will almost always outrank a site that lacks quality links. It’s built into the search engine algorithms, linking is still a fundamental factor as to how sites are ranked in the search engine results pages.
Conclusion
A successful SEO strategy must consist of three items
Relevant Key Phrases
Relevant Content
Relevant Links
If you can address these three issues with your SEO strategy you will do well.