A Case Study in Custom Dashboards and Portals
As a cutting edge emerging technology company, our customer wanted to make an impression on the market when it unveiled its new real-time rock property analysis services offering. Although the “end” of the analysis process is a few simple numbers, these numbers are used by oil and gas exploration companies to value their discoveries and guide their drilling and completion projects. Simply delivering 4 or 5 simple numbers in “real-time” could serve to lessen the perceived value of our customer’s methodology.
The Problem
Since our customer’s newest product offering involves a recently developed process, they needed a way to track its own efforts so that processes could be further optimized, saving money for our customer and driving additional value to the client in terms of reduced processing time.
In order to drive additional business, they also wanted an attractive way to present the process – and the end results – to clients that would create value and differentiate them in the marketplace.
Finally, since this process is critical to their business, our customer wanted the new software to integrate and support their entire business process including AR, Sales and Operations.
The Solution
Entrance developed a Customer Portal that allows clients and staff to manage all aspects of a customer, including: account information, work in the sales pipeline, and work in progress. One customer may have a number of jobs in progress, each of which may have a number of material samples being tested – The software allows clients to enter new samples and have them assigned a unique job ID for tracking purposes. At the same time, they can also arrange shipping through UPS and print sample and shipping labels. Customers may upload images of samples and get the status of existing jobs, including tracking shipping and results.
Clients are able to add and monitor funds on their accounts, view and pay outstanding bills via credit card, and spend existing account funds to request additional work.
In the back office, salespeople can create new clients, jobs and samples from within the same system. They are able to view jobs and samples for specific clients and to add and edit user rights for clients to view the status of existing work. Operations staff can manage receivables, upload images of work in progress, see a list of samples that have been completed and create new samples. On the accounting side, employees will be able to view Accounts Receivable status, run AR reports and view existing jobs and account status.