Business life cycle
Broker Site Manager
Broker Site Manager (BSM) is designed to correspond to the life cycle approach to business operations. BSM is a browser-based cloud service, which means that it is independent of the operating system. If you need other applications to support your ERP system, we recommend that you check out Broker Site Manager.
Below is a description of the key activities in the life cycle of a company, as we see them.
Competence management
A prerequisite for a company's operations is to identify its own competences and, at the same time, to find customers on the market that can benefit from this expertise. The ultimate goal is to ensure the continuity of the company’s operations in an increasingly competitive environment.
Potential management
Where is the business potential? Once identified, opportunities are entered into Broker Site Manager and their financial potential is assessed. This lays the foundation for purposeful and systematic sales activities.
Customer acquisition and management
Your company must convince the prospective customer of your ability to meet their needs. If the customer is ready to test the level of your competence, they send you a request for quotation. At this stage, gaining a customer requires a determined sales effort. You are not yet selling a project or a service, but your credibility. The reward for a successful sales effort is a request for quotation.
Bidding management
When a customer sends you a request for quotation, it must be received, assigned to the right estimator and provided with appropriate data for future reporting. For each of these steps, your company can design a process in BSM that best suits you.
Bid calculation
Once a request for quotation has been received and assigned to a calculator, you must ensure that the solution to be offered to the customer meets their needs. The bid must be drafted in such a way that the customer understands what is being offered and how the offer is right for them. To achieve this, the bidding tool must provide a transparent solution and an unambiguous cost structure.
Sales management
What systematic measures are planned to ensure that after submitting the bid you receive an order? Who takes care of phone calls and meetings, how to respond to requests for clarification, how to manage the necessary documentation? All of this must be managed in a way that ensures that the customer believes in the solution proposed to them and makes the decision to purchase.
Moving an order to production
You have made your promises and received an order. It is time to move the order to production. If this step in the process is handled carelessly, it is still possible to fail to deliver on promises. Therefore, the process of moving to production must be so smooth, error-free and transparent that there will be no failures.
Project management
Everything should be ready for the work to begin. Before you start, however, you need to make sure that all the steps that are part of your company’s process are completed. Such steps can include setting up a project organisation, arranging material logistics, planning schedules and managing risks.
Procurement
How can you be sure that when the project starts all the materials needed for the project have been ordered and that they will also arrive on site on time? Intelligent procurement ensures that project work is not interrupted or that costs do not spiral out of control.
Task management
All work done during a project's life cycle is done as part of a task. Task management starts with identifying tasks: what actions are required for the delivery at hand. The next step is to determine what materials, competences and tools the identified tasks require. Only when you have confirmed the conditions for carrying out the work, can the actual work begin.
Resource management
The contract has been signed and your company has made its promises to the customer. With what resources will you deliver on the promises? Resources include the people doing the work, the authorities and the customer’s representatives. Tools are also resources. What tools does your company have and what is available from external partners? And when are the different resources available? All this requires careful planning and management.
Proactive management of servicing and maintenance
Once a contract has been completed and handed over to a satisfied customer, servicing and maintenance are a natural way to continue cooperation. For example, a company that has been responsible for the installation of specific equipment knows best what has been delivered to the customer and also how that equipment can be kept in working order. Therefore, the company has an advantage when the customer chooses a provider of servicing and maintenance.
Channelling costs to invoicing
Once the work is done, it’s time to invoice. What invoicing principles were agreed in the contract? Which items are invoiced in instalments, which ones by agreed unit prices or formulas? Large companies usually have their own system for financial administration. In such cases, BSM sends an invoicing request to that system, and the actual invoice is sent from the company’s ERP system.
Document management
Modern businesses produce piles of documentation: meeting minutes, instructions, plans, technical specifications and so on. Such files are easy to store in a document management system, but they can be difficult to find. BSM brings up project documents where they are needed, so you don’t have to spend extra time looking for them.
BSM in a nutshell
A standard CRM can include measures from identifying customer potential to closing a deal and after-sales marketing. BSM has all this and more.
BSM provides an efficient, browser-based environment for the entire bid calculation chain, and also takes care of transferring approved bids directly to project management.
BSM connects customer contacts and salespeople, supports potential calculation, helps decision making and provides powerful tools for closing deals.
The story of every business deserves to be told. BSM provides a platform for stories that is flexible, measurable and versatile, as well as a direct channel to key customer personnel.
A business is run by knowledge, not by intuition. Knowing what your customers think about your products and services is the cornerstone of smart business management.
BSM keeps your product information organised, ensuring that your bidding, marketing and project management staff has access to real-time information about your product range.
BSM keeps your service portfolio organised, ensuring that your bidding, marketing and project management staff has access to real-time information about what you have to offer.
A company’s success is based on a competent and capable network of partners, whose up-to-date details can be found in BSM, including all the necessary documents and contracts.
The accuracy and accessibility of product and service price lists are a key factor in forecasting, planning and managing a company’s business.
Contracts are concluded to ensure invoicing and the continuity of cooperation. It’s also good to know that contracts are easy to find if you ever need to go back to them.
The main task of BSM is to ensure that project managers always have the best possible picture of their project's schedule, its resources and the quality of its deliverables.
When employees leave for a job, they and their supervisors must have a tool that shows the site, schedule and content of the job, and can be used to record the time of completion.
Periodic servicing is the cornerstone of systematic property maintenance. BSM ensures that servicing and related records are completed on time.
Proactive maintenance preserves the value of property and prevents damage. BSM ensures that proactive measures and their reporting are always in order.
Plans, reports and completion records keep your projects in order. BSM ensures that documents are linked to the right project, site and task.
Sites in BSM can be properties or smaller entities. They are used to manage and monitor the tasks for a customer project.
Intelligent resource management and the planning of project work require that the system is aware of the competences of employees and subcontractors.
In most companies, human resources – training, experience and skills – are the most important assets, and their management must start with the information system used.
A company’s resources includes not only people but also tools, whose data BSM uses in bid calculation, scheduling and resource bookings.
Maintenance of inventory balances, data retrieval and logistics planning related to material flows are part of BSM’s intelligent and comprehensive features.
Controlled and systematic procurement ensures that the supplies and tools available to a project meet the needs of the project, both in terms of quality and quantity.
Real-time hour entry is a key part of BSM’s user experience and service design. An easy and simple way of recording time ensures that no hour goes unbilled.
Contract-based invoicing and transparent documentation ensure that money flows from customers to the company smoothly and on time.
For products and services delivered to customers, documentation and price information is always generated in BSM, so it is up to accounts receivable to direct this information to invoicing.
BSM's quality management features include outcome monitoring, incident reporting and customer feedback analysis, which empower you to continuously improve your company's performance.
Efficient accounts payable features support procurement and ensure that procurement and purchase invoicing are based on the price information and contracts entered in BSM.
Agreement-specific workloads that affect bid calculation, project management and resourcing and their application in practice are part of BSM’s intelligent features.
BSM produces all the data needed for payroll accounting: working hours, sick leave, travel allowances, shift supplements and other data that affects payroll.
For accounting, BSM provides accurate, project-specific information on resources used, purchases and sales, as well as other performance figures both during and after the project.
The quantitative and qualitative analysis of results after the end of a project guides the company’s entire operations, and especially project management, towards better results.
Questions? Contact us, we’ll get back to you!
