Every now and then a project comes up that really tests the foundation of Aristo, our DMS product, and exemplifies how this foundation can provide us some very powerful functionality.

Couple weeks back, while working on Aristo Prospecting, we had a wish-list item to have an automatic alert show a sales person whenever one of "their" customers was in the dealership. The idea is that if you make a point of tracking down a customer when they're in for service you'll help to build your relationship with that client and increase the likelihood of them returning to look at a new vehicle in the future.

After reviewing this concept for a couple hours we came to a startling conclusion... our application already allowed for this! The basis of this was the Customer History, a listing of all Open and Closed activity for this customer. You can see it here on the right side of the screen.

Well the idea of a Customer Alert leverages on this really well - instead of grabbing a customer and looking at all their activity, we just need to change our query and grab all Open items for the dealership, and only show them if I have a relationship with that customer! To accomplish this we add the idea of User Roles.

Each customer can have any number of Users associated with them as either a Sales Rep or an Account Manager. These users now need a simple gauge on their desktop to show them when this Open activity applies to them. Enter the Customer Alerts Gauge!

Again, you can click on these items to get right back into that customer activity. We now have a very simple and powerful tool to help our clients build customer relationships. And all this without a huge amount of development effort! Our Aristo Contact Management dealerships will get a general roll-out on this feature in the next few weeks, hopefully this blog entry will give them a sense as to what it can be used for.

With eSignature rolling into larger beta it was time to address some flexibility concerns that had come up at our second pilot store.

Their chief problem was that when they took a signature on a Hard Copy they wanted the software to automatically print two copies at two different printers - one at the Service Counter (for the customer to take home) and one at the back counter (for the technicians). With our first version of eSignature this was awkward because the user was given one prompting screen and would need to use the "print" dialog twice - pretty difficult in a fast paced retail environment.

So... while we were out at our annual dealer conference last week I bounced this idea around with a couple service managers. We came up with the idea of "Document Actions". The idea is that eSignature already managed the layout of the document, it's not that big a stretch to allow it to also manage WHAT we do with the document once we have it. If we allow our document management infrastructure to take care of this we can specify that this document should be printed on Printer A, then printed on Printer B, and finally reviewed with Printer C. The flexibility can all be managed in our Document Layout interface and tailored to the dealerships processes.

Finally it's worth noting that all this new Document Management is only kicked off if you "Enable Document Management" for that specific document type. Once that checkbox is enabled the background, signature capture, and printing is all handled by eSignature - the existing printing control in Service is totally ignored.