framework2009 Journal - Contract Management Solution

This year we’ve opted to move away from the traditional Christmas Card and limit the impact we have on the environment, by designing a more environmentally friendly e-card.

We will be pledging the money we would usually spend on designers, printing and postage to The Lincolnshire And Nottinghamshire Air Ambulance Charitable Trust. Additionally, we have purchased a tree to plant in our gardens at Software Europe head office.

(direct link: http://www.software-europe.co.uk/information/Christmas/frameworkChristmasCard.html )

We hope you approve of our efforts to help reduce our carbon footprint and contribute towards a highly commendable charity that saves many hundreds of lives each year.

All that’s left to say is that I hope you have a lovely Christmas and a successful and happy new year!

From all at Software Europe

20 November 2009: Ask the expert - webinar

On Wednesday the 9th December at 3pm Andy Cay, Management Consultant at State of Flux, will be joining our framework consultants to answer your contract management questions.

This is a wonderful opportunity for you to learn more effective ways to maximise your contract management; and with the event being hosted online you don’t have to leave the comfort of your own desk.

Register to attend here >>

02 November 2009: Gartner Keynote Speech

Watch the Keynote speech from the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando:
http://www.gartner.com/technology/symposium/2009/sym19/keynotes.jsp

Synopsis:
“As global economies steady, priorities shift to growth. But there will be no return to the old normal. The new normal demands dramatic changes in what it takes simply to run the business, let alone continuing to innovate and responding to still-volatile market conditions. You face daunting challenges and will need superior vision and leadership to succeed in the coming year. An ensemble of the greatest Gartner minds will deliver an evocative perspective that will set the stage for a powerful week.”

Neil Everatt, Managing Director

18 September 2009: User Group Success

Tuesday morning, at 9:07, we welcomed the first attendee to the Software (Europe) Ltd annual User Conference; this year’s event also gave us the opportunity to celebrate twenty years in business with our customers.

The conference was a mix of product updates, roadmaps and presentations from some very interesting third parties that provide complimentary services. We would like to thank the speakers from Software Europe, State of Flux, Pinsent Mason and ARX who educated and entertained the delegates.

The big news of the conference was the launch of a new product, GreenLight, this is the latest solution we’re adding to our product portfolio and is already looking very popular. This new system plans to revolutionise the way any paper based approval processes are managed. The idea behind it will allow any workflow to be created electronically and the approval process automated saving your organisation time and resources, as well as helping your company work towards a paperless office.

After seeing GreenLight in action the delegates at the user conference were buzzing with ideas on how they could utilise it at their organisation and since we’ve been back in the office we’ve set up a number of meetings to discuss with them further what they could achieve. GreenLight moves an approval process such as car parking permit, holiday request etc and puts it online.

The imminent release was also discussed at length, the new features and functions being very well received. We also discussed the future development of framework with some exciting new services that will enhance the task of contract management beyond anything else that is in the market today.

On Tuesday evening our delegates helped us celebrate our anniversary experiencing fireworks, casino tables and good old fashioned music. I would like to wish congratulations to Niki McKenna who claimed victory (and a bottle of champagne) at the roulette table winning a total of £1210 (in funny money!).

Overall the two days were a great success and we’ve had some fabulous feedback from all who attended.

Neil Everatt, Managing Director

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12 August 2009: The future of Saas

It is a fantastic time to be in the SaaS industry, although those just starting out are going to find it tough for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, it is not acceptable to deliver your services without a serious look at your security. I’ve said this before but a poor attitude to security has already caught out many; the news has reported some very big names who have suffered the embarrassment of having their systems compromised.

Software Europe has gone to great lengths to ensure the security of our systems: Read our Security Charter

The second reason is more fundamental, delivering a service through the internet does not mean that the customers’ expectations are any less. You still need a support infrastructure that has depth and experience to support customers who will be remote. Customers still want to talk to real people if they are having problems and that means you need a helpdesk that is easy to contact and understands how a remote user might see the problem.

Neil Everatt, Managing Director

17 July 2009: The next release

The next release of framework is nearly upon us. We have focused part of our development on moving the solution in to our core architecture, this means we can accelerate development going forward. We are code sharing with our other SaaS solutions so that we can really maximise our development time.

The major new additions are Tasks and Workflow. The most exciting opportunity for our customers and prospects is using our Workflow system to create automated business processes.

Learn more about GreenLight our new workflow solution, powered by framework

Neil Everatt, Managing Director

22 June 2009: Ad-hoc solutions powered by framework

Our framework contract management system uses advanced technology to record and store contractual commitments; information that is vital to the procurement team and any department that needs to understand what their organisation is contractually bound to provide. We’ve been working on a huge project with a major international legal company to add new functionality to service their specific needs. These additions are quite specific to their business but once deployed will save many hours and provide a competitive edge that will see them advance their business. Creating this new functionality has brought additional benefits to framework, our executive reporting system will shortly be enhanced as will a whole new set of features that are termed Workflow.

We are excited about our Workflow system which is currently called ‘Greenlight’ (this name may change prior to official launch), the functionality will work with our existing online products to deliver some very interesting add-ons, we have already secured a project that will solve a paper form problem for one of our new customers and we expect the interest to grow significantly amongst our customers and prospects.

Neil Everatt, Managing Director

27 May 2009: Contract management in the world of Twitter

I’ve recently created a Software Europe twitter page to help highlight to our customers and those who would benefit from our solutions what we’re up to in terms of development, keeping you abreast of industry related news and any events we intend to hold.

But in addition to this I’ve set up an RSS feed to alert me every time ‘contract management’ is mentioned in the world of twitter. I was quite surprised at the results. Many didn’t realise the complexities of contract management, there are now a lot of courses centred around contract management at universities and a lot of people find the task painstakingly boring and tedious.

But what is most apparent is that many are starting to realise the true value of contract management and how doing this effectively can save them time and the company a lot of money.

When I see a new post centred around peoples’ frustrations with contract management, I’m still debating whether posting a link to framework would be intrusive or informative…

Tracey Turton, Marketing

8 May 2009: User Experience

Many years ago when mobile phones were first launched the network providers, at the time Cellnet and Vodafone, had an interesting problem to overcome. This new technology meant that a call could be placed and routed electronically, and if you had a good signal on the analogue network that meant this call processing stage could be a silent event. But users would often cancel a call and redial because they thought that nothing was happening. Comfort tones were introduced to simulate the cackle and pops associated with a regular phone call. Callers felt at ease because they had a feeling that something was happening, it was a backward step to resolve a problem. Today, things are a little different -calls connect quicker and we are all now used to cellular technology.

As the world of online internet systems continues to expand we’ve had to deal with a similar issue. In most cases the response times are so fast that there isn’t a problem, but if you want a report that covers the past 7 years of your spending patterns across your 10,000 users you will need to wait a few seconds for that to be processed. We are looking at how we provide user feedback to ensure they feel confident that the request has been accepted and is working. In particular, the “new user test”; this is simple and requires that we find a user who has never used or even seen our products and we watch them. We ask them to complete tasks and evaluate what is causing confusion or what might be misinterpreted. We also ask them to generate an activity that may take a few seconds to complete, and then watch how they react. For our User Experience team this provides some incredibly useful feedback which is then channelled back to the development team. If you have any suggestions on how we can further improve the way our solutions interact just let us know.

Neil Everatt, Managing Director

24 April 2009: Views of a new employee’s first month

Rachel Watmore joined our framework sales team last month, and shares her thoughts on her experiences so far:

Having recently joined the Software Europe team and being fairly new to the world of contract management and the benefits you can gain from centralising all contract and supplier information. I have been quite amazed with the functionality and benefits of framework, I didn’t realise there was this type of software out there, how naive of me!

Although, it turns out, I am not the only person unaware this solution existed, I visited a prospect last week and they too were amazed with what framework had to offer. They admitted not being able to cancel or amend a contract within the required timeframe due to lack of visibility on a number of occasions, which proved quite costly to the company (not what you need in this economical climate), so they could instantly see the benefits from our contract management solution. Key features that were important to this organisation are: email notifications of contract renewals and storing financial information on suppliers and knowing the risks involved with them. Both of which will save them money, which is surely what every organisation strives for? We also appreciate different functions are important to different organisations, which is why Software Europe and framework are so unique. We understand and work with our customers to configure every detail and implement our software solutions to suit each individual organisation and help them achieve the full benefit of our software.

Last week, I also visited an existing framework customer and was really impressed with what I heard. Within a few months of using our contract management solution, this customer was able to easily see they had 5 very similar contracts with different supplier’s active, each in different departments. They rang up 1 of these 5 suppliers to gain a quote for all 5 departments as opposed to 1, which worked out be to a £160,000pa saving based on that one quote they attained! If they didn’t have a contract management system in place it would have been extremely hard to see these contracts, group them together, and realise that they don’t need 5 different suppliers for one job. Therefore they would keep spending their money wastefully, I can’t afford to waste £160,000 can you?

I am very pleased I joined Software Europe. The team are very knowledgeable, helpful and really care about their customers and I am looking forward to talking to companies about how we can help them!

Rachel Watmore, Spend Management Consultant

14 April 2009: Our helpdesk really is open 24/7!

It’s nearly 8am in the UK and our helpdesk have just received a call from a customer who had forgotten their password, nothing major there you might think and I’d agree. There is a password help option on the login page for both our SaaS solutions, but sometimes if you are in a rush you just want to talk things through with a real person, and have your query resolved instantly.

The caller this morning wanted exactly that, and sure enough within a few minutes the password had been reset and the caller could happily continue using the system. I’d like to point out that this caller wasn’t an administrator or a senior contact, but one of the many thousands of users that rely on our solutions to make their jobs better and easier.

You see, we provide support for every level of user accessing our solutions, that means that day and night our customers and their ‘customers’ can access the help they may need. Running a 24 hour support service is vital if you are providing a service to people working non office hours, or your system is an important part of your customers business operation.

For over 20 years Software Europe has always been available, that’s approximately 7290 days our business has been open, with the closed sign having never been used.

Neil Everatt, Managing Director

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13 March 2009: Security Security Security

Any visitor to our offices will see the impact of our security systems before they even get into the car park, not that we want to prevent our customers coming to see us. Far from it, we positively encourage them to come and see how serious we are about looking after their data and services.

“Nibley House”, Software Europe’s Head Office, was built in 1995 and at the heart of the design was security; security in terms of access, data, and that of our personnel. Obviously, I can’t share with you the exact specifications of our security deployment but we firmly believe we are entrusted with our clients data and services for a very good reason.

Last week we had an inspection from the security team of a new customer, they are very major UK employer and needed to not just feel confident about our security but see it as well. I got a very complimentary email shortly after the visit thanking us for hosting their visit and congratulating us on our attitude to security. We of course will not be complacent, security is an ongoing project that will never be complete, but I believe we far ahead of many competitors in this world of Software As A Service and United Computing.

Neil Everatt, Managing Director

04 February 2009: Customers help drive functionality

Now that 2009 is well under way, myself and the Steering Committee have been discussing the direction for short and long term product developments. It is always interesting to look at the customer requested enhancements and ideas to see how they feel the products could be improved, and how they should evolve. We believe this sets us apart from our competitors but also shows our customers that we are not a ‘sell and run’ organisation!

Not surprisingly, there are not many requests around product usability and more of the ‘nice to haves’ and in an ideal world we would wave our magic development wand and the products would be doing the ironing and making toast by this time tomorrow morning!

Melanie Dickson, Account Manager

Happy New Year 07 January 2009: Happy New Year

Well we’re a couple of days into 2009 and almost back into full swing; but we didn’t really stop working throughout the holiday season. At 4pm on Boxing Day we had a support request, all was handled by the team within 10 minutes, and the client was very happy with the service they received. When we explain our service levels to new customers you can see a little doubt in their mind who wonder if 24x7 support is really available, but here’s the proof. We’re going to ask the customer if he would mind documenting his experience so we can share the reality of our support with new clients.

We’re expecting a really busy period now, a number of new customers joined us just before the Christmas break and our implementations team are already configuring the systems. The sooner we get our customers live, the sooner they start to see the benefits!

Neil Everatt, Managing Director

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