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Unique package:
Ensemble comprises of several
components, which work in concert.
These components belong to diverse
disciplines - Process/Project
management, HR management, Knowledge
and Media assets management, Workflow
and intelligent
communications. It aims
to integrate and anchor all media
objects in a business model that
is created and managed by the CEO/top
management - coupled with this it
provides an intelligent & enriched
messaging system for everyone. There
is no comparable tool in the market
today.
Salient features:
Business Model:
Senior management can create, modify
and maintain the Business model
with the help of Ensemble. The first
step is to define the high-level
process
model that depicts the purpose
of the organisation and the major
processes that are needed to support
it. The second step is to define
the logical organisation model in
which the business units are named
according to the “major functions”
they are meant to perform (e.g.
production, finance, research, market
etc). The physical organisation
is mapped into another physical
organisation model – this
helps to know about all the offices
and facilities in different geographical
addresses. The third step is to
create an employee
repository and map the employees
into the organisation model. The
fourth step is to create an interaction
model in which all processes
are assigned to employees with
roles and responsibilities. The
business model is thus built in
several iterations and it could
be done over several months and
refined over even longer periods.
The shareability of information
in the model is controllable and
it tremendously enhances the understanding
of the business among the employees.
The business model being a shareable
resource helps to unify the views
of employees regardless of their
number. The power of the simple
tool comes from the fact that it
is easy to manage and share despite
its large size – even mid-size
companies with few products or services
can have thousands of processes,
dozens of business units and thousands
of employees. The same information
when maintained in word documents
becomes useless within months, as
has been the experience of many
organisations that often engage
expensive consultants to produce
them – this is because of
difficulties of maintenance and
sharebaility.
Repositories:
Virtually all objects of interest
to a business are organised in structured
repositories. These comprise –
products, services, people and organisations
(customers, suppliers, regulatory
authorities, resource persons),
forms (every single form is numbered
for unique identification and mapped
to processes it is designed to support),
problems, ideas and issues. For
e.g. Product
specifications could include
drawings or pictures in addition
to text. All objects in these repositories
are populated through security and
authorisation.
Workflow: The
routine procedures are converted
to workflows by connecting processes
from the process model with additional
information of events that trigger
a workflow, decision trees and outcomes.
Each person assigned workflows can
view the pending, ongoing
or completed workflows.
Tasks and calendar:
Users can maintain a list of personal
tasks – either one time
or recurring type. These are the
tasks that people have to remember
do besides the routine workflow
tasks. Ensemble will then remind
the users about all pending tasks.
Communications enriched
with media assets and pointers to
business objects: Users
can write-memos
to one or more recipients that are
action oriented, unlike emails that
do not elicit any action. Each user
finds a dashboard
that shows the messages received
and the pending tasks. Sender can
specify the time by which a response
is expected or if the memo is just
for information. Sender can even
define follow up rules and write
terminal remarks. The memos can
have attached objects – documents,
worksheets, pictures or audio or
video clips. The memos can point
to any number of objects in the
repository. This capability together
with threading of memos that point
to each other gives a tremendous
productivity boost. One could even
use the tool to build media assets
library (books, journals, news clippings,
contracts, legal documents etc,
can all be organised and retrieved
in seconds). Memos and all attached
objects are maintained in a central
database with only one copy, which
can be managed and backed up as
per the corporate policy. Housekeeping
functions and explicit command of
authors can trim the database by
deleting messages and attachments
after a specified period. One could
even write a memo that will get
deleted after the recipient has
read it once. All “reference
memos” that point to business
objects like processes, product
specifications etc. could be marked
permanent as they constitute the
knowledge base. Over a period of
time this becomes the single biggest
asset of the organisation as it
embodies the collective wisdom of
all workers, anecdotes, the lessons
learnt and as it is a common shared
reference, new employees learn quickly
and mistakes are not repeated.
Prerequisites:
Apart from the hardware, operating
system and database platform, which
are the customer’s responsibility,
deliverables include software, training,
installation and AMC. The current
version of Ensemble requires a SQL
Server 2000/2005 and clients require
the run time .NET component (royalty
free). Versions could be created
for ODBC compliant RDBMS.
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