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Sage KnowledgeSync Alerts

November 24, 2014

Transcript:

"This is Daryl Scott, the technology I want to talk about today is the Knowledge Sync alert system. This is my favorite system I work with because of the information it can provide, and the problems that can help you avoid. I wish I would have been available when I was an IT manager back in the olden days.

What if you could get emails like these to alert you to critical issues. Here you see an email that’s gone to one of our truck drivers to make sure that he renews his driver’s license in time. And here, we have an alert going to our CFO, who wants to know when large AP invoices are being processed.

Okay, so what is Knowledge Sync? Some have called it, your invisible 24/7 assistant. Others have called it a smoke detector for your data.It gets the right information to the right people at the right time. Knowledge Sync monitors your database—checking for things you told that you wanted to know about. And when it finds them, it sends you an email. It saves you from having to check to see if there is a problem, it lets you know if there is. You get to spend time dealing with any issues that come to light. You don’t have to spend time searching to see if there are problems.

Let’s look at some examples. In HR, you might want to know if you have driver’s licenses or other important certificates expiring. This comes from a real-world example, one of our early Knowledge Sync installations.Where a trucking firm had a driver get on the road with an expired driver’s license, was involved in a bad accident and it cost the company a lot more money than it would have if his driver’s license hadn’t been expired. The President said, ‘don’t ever let this happen again.’ They purchased Knowledge Sync. We installed it. And now, 60 days before a driver’s license expires the driver and a supervisor, both get emails and again, 30 days out. 14 days before the expiration, the supervisor gets an email, and again three days before. And if a driver’s license expires, the President gets an email. Everybody in the company knows the President is going to get an email if that driver’s license is expired. And since the system has been installed, he never has.

In accounts payable, the CFO wants to know when invoices are posted in excess of $10,000. In sales order, the sales VP wants to know about quotes that are issued over $50,000. And both the sales VP and the CFO are interested in customer trends. In particular, want to know if their customer’s purchases drop off over 25% of their previous three-month average. Of course you can run a report to get this information, or you can build a query and pull the data yourself—if you know how, but even then, you have to run the report and look to see if there’s anything in it. Or wait through the 15 page month-end report just to find the three items that concern you. With Knowledge Sync, the system tells you when the event of interest has happened.

It tells you on the schedule you choose. Sometimes you want to know right away when something happens. For other situations, a monthly notice is good enough. One of our clients has an alert that they get on the first of the month, that tells them, which are their numerous employees will be eligible for participation in their 401k at the beginning of the next month. Let’s look at how an alert is defined.

Here we see the Knowledge Sync navigator. In our system, we have a number of Knowledge Packs that are installed. Knowledge Packs are predefined alerts that come with the system, and are specially designed to connect to your database. In, Sage 500, we have our alert that went to our CFO for vouchers in excess of $10,000. And this is the definition screen we give that we get the alert, a description. We make sure that it’s active. We choose the query that matches what the information that we’re going to want to send. Here we define the email with a subject and the body text, and these place holders are replaced with values from the query. You tell it who you want the alert to go to. And the schedule.

Lastly, I’d like to make sure that you understand there’s more to alerts than just emails, you can receive notification by checking a web page that’s being updated by Knowledge Sync. You can receive texts, instant messages or tweets. You can get reports or PDFs email to you. And the reports can be generated only when certain conditions are met. You can also have the system create an up to date Excel file and email it to you.

Well, that’s it, I hope that you’ve seen some of the power and potential, the knowledge that can provide. And the kind of information that you can receive from a powerful alerting system."

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