Benefit from the Wisdom of 1,000 Customers

Automating the export, distribution scheduling, and delivery of your business critical information regardless of time, destination, or recipient.

The "B Words"
One thousand customers-from IBM, to Cessna Aircraft, to Farmers Insurance, to FedEx, to Deutsche Bank-use ChristianSteven Software to automate the exportation, scheduling, and distribution of business critical reports created by SAP's Crystal Reports, Microsoft SQL Server, and Microsoft Access.

If your organization uses any of these solutions to create reports then you should ask yourself:  What compelling reason was there for these 1,000 businesses to plunk down good money to have ChristianSteven Software distribute those reports?  Surely there must be more to it than just moving a report from one point to another!

Well, there is more. Actually, there is a lot more. Simply put, it's the 'B' words, or more precisely the "B phrases". The first phrase is Business Process Automation and the second is...

Business Intelligence
Every successful organization is always on the lookout for the best way to get what it knows-its business intelligence-into the hands of the people who need the information the most.  When these companies get it right they position themselves to capitalize on emerging opportunities while simultaneously mitigating business risk.

Business Process Automation
To move this precious business intelligence to one, one hundred, or one thousand people, spread across the globe, in different departments, even in different companies, and customize it on the fly, requires a whole lot of IT people-resources; or just one very capable solution that automates information movement, based on preset distribution parameters.

To help you better understand the breadth of benefits that ChristianSteven Software can bring to your enterprise it would be good if you took a few moments to . . . . .

Meet Tom, Alice, and Steve - They Look A Lot Like You!
Tom Butler, Alice Dixon, and Steve Moon all work for the same global manufacturing company.  One thing they have in common are problems related to getting business critical information, business intelligence, to the right people, at the right time, regardless of location or communication device.

Sound familiar?

Helping Sales Sell
Tom is the sales VP.  He manages an information hungry team of in-house sales people and independent sales reps.  Both groups use several similar reports - price sheets, product upgrade bulletins, shipping schedules, and the like.  Alternately both groups, and even individuals in each group, require specific reports about their particular market, product subset, discount schedules, and more.

How does Tom deliver the information these folks need:  accurately, in a timely manner, individually customized, to numerous global addresses, and to many different types of communication devices?  And, how does he do all this without placing additional burdens on an already over-extended IT department?

Keeping the Kinks Out of the Supply Chain
Alice is the supply chain manager with oversight of plants in four countries and suppliers in nine.  Obviously there are numerous information channels that must be properly managed to ensure an uninterrupted flow of product. 

Alice struggles to make sure her plant managers have the latest data on incoming raw materials and product components; and that her suppliers have the usage data they need to keep her plants humming along, receiving just-in-time deliveries from these suppliers.  When delays, shortages, a strike, a weather event, or some other kink affects the supply chain, her managers need to know about it.  On the flip side, when sales increase, or slow, the suppliers need to know so they can adjust their production to match the consumption of Alice's manufacturing facilities.

How does she keep everyone on the same page?  In such a dynamic atmosphere, how can she ensure that all stake holders are armed with the most up-to-date information?  And how can she tag that information so that the right people get the right information at the right time?

The Chief Information Officer's challenge-What's the best way to move my chief information?
Steve Moon is the company's CIO and even though his department has just twelve people the pressure to keep everything running smoothly is just as real as in a Fortune 500 giant.  Every day the demands on his people grow, yet there is no leeway to hire additional IT pros.  One person spends almost 100% of their time just servicing Tom and Alice.  And both Tom and Alice are demanding more information, wanting it faster, and wanting it to be more targetable; all so they can do their jobs in an ever more competitive business landscape.

How can Steve get the job done without adding more people?  Can he find an automated solution that works with his current computing environment?  And at a price point that makes sense?

ChristianSteven Software to the Rescue
The answer to Tom, Alice, and Steve's questions are all found in ChristianSteven Software's report scheduling and distribution solution.  Let's breakdown the questions and answers and see how this solution satisfies the needs of these diverse departments.

Both Tom and Alice have information that needs to move between internal and external groups and individuals, including customers and suppliers.  Once the recipients are defined, policies are established as to which group gets which report(s).  The Christian Steven solution can even batch multiple reports together, to be sent at one time, with each report in the batch being keyed to which group or groups, or even which individual, should receive it.

For instance, Alice runs Raw Material Usage Reports every Friday.  Those reports could be batched together and sent out to her suppliers.  Individual reports may only be relevant to one supplier, but they could also be relevant to two, three, or four suppliers.  Based on various presets the reports would be distributed according to need.

Another scenario, one that really highlights the business process automation capabilities of the solution, is that one of Alice's suppliers notifies Alice by email that they won't be able to deliver new product for at least a week.  The information in the vendor's email acts as an "event trigger" to generate new reports that are sent to Alice's plant, or plants, that consume this vendor's products.  Now the plant managers have the business intelligence they need, without a time lag, to put contingency plans in place so they don't have a supply interruption.

You can see how those same automation capabilities would work for Tom over in sales.  He can deliver single or multiple reports to everyone, or just the in-house sales team, or just the reps, or a mix.  Some sales people may receive the reports on their laptops, others on their cell phones, and still others on their home office desktop.

And while Tom "pushes" out reports the sales people, again through alerts and event based triggers, could "pull" data driven reports out to themselves, or their team, or colleagues in other countries working on a multi-national sales project, or . . . . . well as you can see, the options and flexibility are robust enough to satisfy most any situation; all with no need for ongoing IT intervention.

Speaking of IT intervention, what about Steve?  We didn't forget him.

The first thing Steve appreciates about the ChristianSteven solution is that it provides all that functionality, flexibility, and scalability without him having to make any changes to his current computing infrastructure.  It is easy for Steve to install, manage, and maintain.  The person that was spending 100% of her time seeing to Tom and Alice's needs just freed-up 80% of her time.  Steve loves that because he's got priority projects on the back burner that can now move to the front without running up overtime hours on the payroll.

Do you know what Steve knows?
Of course, before Steve recommended the purchase of the ChristianSteven solution he wanted to know about software requirements, licensing, report destinations, and output formats.

Here's what he found out:

Operating system:
ChristianSteven Software (CSS) runs on most all supported Windows business platforms from Windows NT4 SP6a all the way through to Windows Vista.

License:
CSS licenses its software per server, not per person.  So however many users the server can support, that's how many people the license serves.

Report Options:
CSS can create all kinds of report distribution schedules - single report and packaged report schedules; automation schedules; dynamic schedules; event based schedules, bursting schedules, and data driven schedules (visit www.christiansteven.com to get a full understanding of all the report distribution schedules available to you).

Report Destinations:
CSS can send reports to email destinations, printers, fax machines, virtual faxes, cell phones, ZIP files and more.

Output Formats:
CSS can output reports in multiple formats:  PDF, CSV, Word, Excel, RTF, Tiff, RPT, DIF, TXT, HTML, DBF, XML.

Steve also learned about CSS scalability and how the solution can grow with his business.

He found out that with CSS' custom tasks option that he could further automate and enhance the software's scheduling and distribution functionality.

Digging deeper the IT head got more information on CSS' event based triggers which help his customers-Tom, Alice, and others-to respond instantly to the business's and client's needs.

And Steve assured himself that even with everyone running on different schedules, in different time zones, in different parts of the world, that CSS provided more than enough flexibility to reach every contact point in his organization wherever they were, whenever they were available.

Skepticism takes a holiday
Steve has heard a lot of hype about software that can solve all your problems while it ties your shoes, cooks your breakfast, and starts your car.  So he took the ChristianSteven Software 30 day test drive.  It was easy since there was no tricky integration or modifications necessary to his existing computing infrastructure.  He downloaded the fully functioning software and his team was up and running in short order.

Shortly after that he started receiving kudos from Tom, kudos from Alice, and kudos from every other department with report distribution requirements.  And his IT team thanked him because they weren't having to run and distribute all the reports themselves.

The final word, as Steve's company joined 1,000 other ChristianSteven Software customers was, "We decided the smartest thing to do was to let our reporting software do what it does best-aggregate data and manipulate it into the several hundred different reports all the departments I support require.  From there we hand those reports off to the ChristianSteven solution and let it do what it does best-deliver reports to anyone, anywhere, anytime.

"Since we have so many just-in-time processes we have really benefitted from the software's dynamic event based scheduling capabilities.  An event occurs, say a value changes in a database, commodity prices on aluminum increase for instance; or an email comes in with certain data parameters.  These events trigger a report that is instantly fired off to all the folks who need this information.  We don't have to touch anything.  No fire drills.  No missed opportunities.  It's great and has saved our bacon more than a few times, I can tell you!"

Your Simple Decision
You've got a lot of reports flying around your business-that's a given.  There is a good chance someone is spending a lot of time running and distributing those reports.  And there is a good chance you have little to no automation capabilities when it comes to scheduling and distributing all those reports.

With that said, why don't you take ChristianSteven Software's 30 day test drive yourself.  Installing the solution isn't going to impact your current computing environment so there is no problematic "unwinding" process if you decide it's not for you.

And it is highly likely that just like 1,000 other businesses out there, in all sizes, spread across almost all industries, that you too will find that Steve was right:  let your reporting software report and let ChristianSteven Software deliver those reports wherever they need to go, on time and on target.

Call ChristianSteven Software today or contact them through their website (www.christiansteven.com).  Do so and you can start experiencing the power of business process automation as it delivers your critical business intelligence wherever you want, whenever you need it.