| Purchase Orders - a major international motor manufacturer |
 | Lotus Notes provides an excellent basis for the implementation of workflow automation and purchase order processing is a common usage.
A major international motor manufacturer based in Europe uses such an application which incorporates Domino Workflow and Lotus Enterprise Integrator. Ultimately however a purchase order needs to be produced, recorded in the database and sent electronically to the supplier, but Notes' printing capabilities are somewhat lacking. | Integra for Notes was used to take the required data from the Lotus Notes documents as well as from the Oracle back-end database and to create the final purchase order in Microsoft Word. This document is then stored back in the Notes database as an attachment and e-mailed out to the client in a fully automated manner.
Business Benefit: improved presentation, streamlined workflow, reduction in touch costs. |
| Form Generation - Financial Services Organisation |
| A Lotus Notes database is used to record details of registered companies complete with the details of the directors, registered offices, year end information etc.
Annual returns of this information need to be submitted to the registration authorities in the companies' jurisdiction. This information needs to be submitted onto precise forms with exact positioning of the information.
While a Notes form was initially used to prepare the layout, the reliability of the positioning of the information was effected based on which printer was being used for the job. In addition, changes to the layout and the inclusion of new jurisdiction result in high touch costs by the Notes Developers. | Integra for Notes was used to create profiles for each of the jurisdictions and the annual returns were produced by taking the data from the Notes databases and pushing them to MS-Word.
The MS-Word documents were produced according to a monthly schedule, printed and saved in the companies documentation database.
Business Benefit: consistency of output in accordance with corporate standards, streamlined workflow, reduction in touch costs. |
| Help Desk Application - white goods product distributor |
| A Lotus Notes Help Desk application records details of support calls and generates statistics as to which calls are still open and which are completed and, in the case of completed calls maintains statistics of call closure time by operator, by product, by product category, by month etc.
While this data is displayed in collapsible Notes views, not all the data is available as the data is stored in various Notes databases and this data cannot be collated into a view due to limitations of Lotus Notes. | Integra for Notes is used to gather data over a specific time period only for completed jobs and to collate this data from various databases pushing the data to MS-Excel where it is displayed, able to be sorted using on-the-fly sorting macros connected to graphics on the report and where the data is charted graphically in Excel.
Business Benefit: improved statistics provided in a usable manner to enable improved management decisions. |
| Quotations - hi-fi equipment sales |
| Sales staff create quotations for customers whose details are maintained within a Lotus Notes based CRM application. These quotations involve collecting data from Lotus Notes and ODBC databases and calculating selling prices based on client pricing levels etc.
Once a quotation is created, it needs to be e-mailed to the client and recorded in the CRM application from where it is followed up. | Integra for Notes was used to collect the information about the client from the CRM application and the details of the inventory items required from the inventory database. Once selected, this data is pushed to Excel where the complex pricing calculations are effected and the quotation presented in accordance with the company's quotation style guide.
The quotation is then e-mailed to the customer (having picked the e-mail address from the CRM application) and a copy of the quotation stored in the CRM below the customer for follow up.
Business Benefit: ease of quotation production combined with excellence of layout results in rapid quotation delivery to the client, thus reducing time to order. |
| Analysis of Service Time Sheets - IT Services organisation |
| Technical staff record support provided to customers in a Lotus Notes database where views analyse the data by client, by job, by technician etc.
A requirement arose to generate a report of support calls by customer to be sent to the customer's IT Manager so as to ensure he was aware of the volume of support calls being fielded by the supporting service centre.
The quality of the presentation was important and Notes views would not cut it. In addition, the process needed not to take a lot administrative resources. | Integra for Notes was used to collect the details of all support calls for each customer and to push them to a Word document. This Word document would be stored back in the Time Sheets database as a record of the reports submitted and e-mailed out to the IT managers.
All this was able to be done according to a schedule and with no user intervention.
Business Benefit: high quality presentation reinforces quality perception of the organisation to clients as well as reducing the time and effort required to produce the documentation |
| Jobs Analysis - Quality Inspection Company |
| A Lotus Notes workflow application enables a Quality Inspection Company to undertake inspection jobs for its clients, monitor current jobs, generate statistics. However the printing of invoices and inspection certificates was not presentable enough. | Integra for Notes is today used to generate the inspection certificates as well as invoices exactly in accordance with corporate requirements. Once created these certificates are stored back in the Notes database for future reference.
Business Benefit: high quality presentation reinforces quality perception of the organisation to clients as well as reducing the time and effort required to produce the documentation |
| Importing Quality Documentation to Lotus Notes - manufacturer |
| A company implementing a Lotus Notes based quality management system had hundreds of policy, procedures and work instructions documents stored in MS-Word on a file server.
These documents needed to be imported into a Lotus Notes database. | An Integra for Notes profile was created to import the Word documents from the file server and to create a Lotus Notes document for each imported Word document. Integra read the Meta data properties of the Word document and updated the relevant fields in the Notes database.
Business Benefit: This resulted in a huge reduction in the effort required for the migration (resulting in lower costs) as well as in a more rapid and accurate implementation process. |
| Notes Mail Environment Reporting - standard Integra profile |
| For a Domino administrator, keeping track of the settings of a mail system takes effort. Tracing the size of user mail files and the settings associated with these files is not straight forward because this information is not well displayed in views within the Domino Directory and some of the information is not even in the directory (such as the size of the file and the number of documents). | A standard profile that ships with Integra for Domino Administrators was used as an example to generate a custom made Excel spreadsheet of all users showing all the details of the users, the settings of their mail files, forwarding addresses etc as well as the size of their files. This spreadsheet is then stored in a Notes reporting database and e-mailed out to the administrator. This report was generated in an automated manner on a weekly basis.
Business Benefit: improved and more accessible information relating to the mail environment which allows and encourages improved management of this critical corporate resource. |
| Mail shots of Customer Data - service organisation |
| A CRM application holds a wealth of information about customers within this business and the objective is to maximise the use of this information maintaining a high level of communication with customers while maintaining the overhead involved.
Previously the company either maintained separate mailing lists of customer data or resorted to exporting data to Lotus 1-2-3 from which it was read into Microsoft Excel for mail merging with Word.
A difficulty faced was that clients were categorised as to the services they were interested in using Lotus Notes' multi-value fields which fail in exporting. | Whenever a mailshot was required, an Integra for Notes profile was created with the text required in Word and links to the fields from the Notes database. Because typically each mailshot used the same set of fields, in practice end users were able to copy and paste a profile for each mail shot changing just the text in the Word template contained within that profile.
Business Benefit: easier and quicker mail shot creation resulted in obvious productivity gains but also because the process was so straight forward and the company did not need to relay on their Notes administrators to generate the data into the required format. As a result, more mail shots were sent out and each was more carefully targeted, thus increasing their effectiveness. |
| Domino Administration Profile Pack - SME corporate |
| While Domino administration is renowned for being less intensive than many competing environments with Domino catering for a significant amount of tasks automatically, Domino also holds valuable information in a range of administrative type databases which if exposed better make administration easier.
For instance, the Domino Directory contains a lot of valuable information but not all is available in the correct views.
This customer utilised Integra for Notes for the generation of reports itemising data to enhance the efficiency of the administration process. Many of these Integra reports were supplied as standard with Integra (see Samples) while others were created by the Domino administrators themselves. | The Domino Directory Mail Analysis profile was used to generate a weekly report of all users' mail files, their settings, sizes and access. This report was run on a scheduled basis every Monday morning and mailed to the Admin team.
An database which benefited from such analysis was the Catalog database which contains statistics related to access rights, number and size of documents within a database, number of times a database is used etc. This information was also reported back to administrators weekly.
Business Benefit: administrators were notified of the status of their environment on a weekly basis and were able to obtain a valuable insight into evolving situations enabling them to act preventively. |