One of the most common questions we are asked by customers and prospects alike is “how will we let the other person know they have to do something?” Notifications are a big deal, it’s all very well having great systems with clever functionality, but if you need to communicate with a person that is not connected to the software or out in the field somewhere then notifications are essential. In some cases, notifications can help limit your risks particularly around equipment needing maintenance, calibration or test or examination processes.
Life has become a little easier with smart phones, after all, it doesn’t matter what platform your business uses whether you are Android, Windows, Apple or Blackberry you can always receive an email. But what happens when notifications move from a couple a day to a literal flood? Do they have any value at that point or do they just become a distraction that gets ignored?
That’s when intelligent reporting comes into play. There are some things which you need to know immediately, for those things email notification is still probably the best option, but the vast majority of things you need to know can be grouped together. More than that, they can be sorted for you, more important items highlighted, and potential exceptions formatted in such a way that they stand out from the rest.
This is when Reporter can help you deliver intelligent notifications as custom reports by email. All Reporter needs is to be able to pick up the recipient’s email address from somewhere in the database, so whether that’s their Job Site Portal login, the primary email against a customer account or a project or just the email against a requisition you can pull that email address out to act as the notification recipient.
Once you’ve got the email address it’s up to you to build and design a report that pulls together the updates that an individual or role within the business needs to see. You can use formatting to highlight priority items, organize the report so that the most recent or the highest priority items are at the top of the report and you can tailor the email to suit your subject.
Perhaps your job site needs to get a notification mail on Monday morning telling them which pieces of equipment on site are due for maintenance this week. The mail needs to list all the items of equipment, but it can also show them the type of maintenance due, how close the machine is to its due date for the maintenance activity and a risk code for the type of maintenance required. Then perhaps they should get another mail every morning which just lists any items on the site which are in need of re-calibration or a new examination certificate of some kind, with priority items within 24 hours of a certificate or calibration due date highlighted in bright red.
Perhaps your Equipment Supervisor should get a daily notification of all the equipment that is approaching its estimated off-rent date, or about to hit a minimum charge period so that they can consider whether it’s still needed or if they need to keep it to off-set other machines being taken out for maintenance. Or perhaps a list of expected pickups/deliveries for the day so that he or she can call of any that aren’t needed before the truck sets off from the equipment facility.
Reporter offers some fantastic functionality to build your own custom format notifications either in the form of PDF file or HTML with the ability to schedule notifications to be sent only when they contain relevant information. The simplicity of the Reporter templates which you can design in MS Word without any knowledge of HTML provides you with an easy to manage delivery system for summarized and role specific notifications by email without clogging up the recipients mailbox with 100s of individual emails that will never get read.
To get a demonstration of how you can use Reporter in your Wynne software to deliver added benefit to your rental or construction business, contact your project manager or contact us here.
Written by: Helen Sowerby, Director of Business Development
