SalesDoc Architect’s Flexible Levels of Automation
In the beginning, SalesDoc Architect was an all-or-nothing proposition that required a substantial up-front investment of time to set up and customize the application. The trade-off was between two extremes: don’t automate anything, or spend a substantial amount of time adding the content and customizing the application to obtain a high degree of automation.
Over the past several months, we have added numerous features to SalesDoc Architect that enable our clients to fine-tune how much time they wish to spend on setup and customization to achieve various levels of automation. These features also allow our clients to fine-tune their approach by vendor, so that they can more fully automate SalesDoc Architect for their major vendors while providing a lower level of automation (thus reducing the time spent on customization and maintenance) for their lesser vendors.
Now, our clients have a “smoother curve” of customization effort vs. automation options from which to choose.
We have written a series of articles on The Productivity Edge to delve into each level of automation. We recommend starting with the ideas mentioned in the article entitled “Customizing SalesDoc Architect with Basic Automation” so that you can get SalesDoc Architect up and running as quickly as possible, enabling you to immediately realize SalesDoc Architect’s benefits to your organization and differentiate your company from the competition.
Once you’re up and running, you can increase the level of automation within SalesDoc Architect at your own pace. We’ve found that once our clients start to use SalesDoc Architect, they are better able to assess desired additional automation. They may also discover new areas to automate that weren’t originally envisioned. In addition, you can take a mixed approach with each of your vendors, tuning automation up or down based on your needs for each vendor.
When you’re ready for the next step, take a look at “Customizing SalesDoc Architect with Mid-Level Automation.” This article provides several ideas that further reduce required user inputs and keystrokes, and increase ease-of-use and configuration accuracy.
In the near future, we’ll also publish an article suggesting ideas for advanced automation that enable users to generate turnkey solution configurations (including labor and peripheral products), pricing and descriptive proposals with an even higher level of automation and ease-of-use.