March 2009: After more than 20 years of widespread adoption of computer technology in business offices, it comes as a shock to learn that employees in many firms and organisations continue to use paper forms for basic transactions from purchase requisition to request for quotations and shipment information.

Handwritten form-filling is not only time-consuming and a waste of paper, it is also error-prone, and forms are liable to be misplaced or simply ignored by the harassed executive who doesn’t have the energy or inclination to even look at them.

The solution is business process management (BPM), using software tools to integrate the various tasks and requests. Traditionally, BPM tools are expensive take time to deploy on the client’s site, and require extensive hand-holding.

Local software vendor Bizmann offers its Pro’ses Lite, which according to Chief Executive Officer Ken Loke, takes only three hours to install and deploy, and is affordable to small and midsized companies. It is also ideal for MNCs to use at the departmental level.

Once Pro’ses Lite is installed and running, a secretary can easily set up the required fields for a Web form, and have the form available for the rest of the staff to use, says Mr Loke.

One happy customer of Bizmann is Shofu Inc., Singapore, a regional branch office of Shofu Inc., Japan. It handles the marketing, sales and coordination of Shofu products (dental equipment and supplies) in Asia-Pacific, says its Office Manager Susan Wong.

Bizmann’s CEO Ken Loke (left) with Shofu’s General Manager Patrick and Office Manager Susan Wong.

Although there were many processes crying out for automation at Shofu, the first priority was its Sales Orders and Shipment Status process.

In pre-automation days, the administrative department provided support to the marketing team by filling quotations, sales orders and shipment information. However, more often than not, such information was not readily available as employees had to shift through various correspondences, documents and files to provide the latest details.

The administrative staff also needed to constantly update all documents and disseminate them to the relevant people. Needless to say, response to customers was often delayed if the key person (the so-called information “gate-keeper”) was not available to provide the requisite information.

With automation using Pro’ses Lite, the manual task of form-filling was immediately reduced by 50 percent. In addition, the product manager is now able to retrieve Sales Order and Shipment data online to update customers as and when needed. Hunting for files and documents are a thing of the past, as all information from Sales Pricing to actions taken by various users can be tracked from a single monitoring system.

Besides improved staff morale and customer satisfaction, immediate ROI was also realised.

“Bizmann Pro’ses Lite has helped us manage our business processes and documents better,” says Ms Wong. “In fact, we don’t have to bother with filing now. We just complete our task and attach all the necessary documents. The system handles the filing! Best of all, everyone in the office can easily retrieve the information and document without troubling anyone else.”

According to Bizmann’s Ken Loke, he has more than 200 customers, including Schott Glass, Ademco Security, Keppel Club and Jackspeed. Bizmann is also constantly improving on its software offering which his company first developed in 2002.

Benefits of Pro’ses Lite:

• Inexpensive, at S$16,800 for unlimited user licence
• Deployment in just 3 hours
• No programming needed, users can create Web forms in minutes
• Real-time monitoring of transaction and task
• Audit trail to check who did what
• Audit trail facilitates corporate compliance
• Automatic e-filing for document management
• Quick retrieval of documents using simple key word search
• Faster response to customers' request.

More on Bizmann at www.bizmann.com, e-mail: enquiry@bizmann.com