Going Zoho – Part 2

Welcome to part two of our ‘Going Zoho’ journey at Ardento. In Part 1 of our blog series (which you can read here), we covered off how we at Ardento, began our Zoho journey with Zoho CRM. Something which most organisations would typically begin with. Having a reliable and modern CRM is essential for all businesses.

After we had gotten settled into Zoho CRM, we leveraged Zoho Campaigns to strengthen our outbound marketing capabilities. You may very well be reading this article as part of one our our email communications sent using Zoho Campaigns.

The next application was Zoho Desk, which empowered our growing team to proactively manage client support requests.

Initiate Phase Two

Now onto the second phase of Zoho applications that we had implemented. I feel it’s important to highlight the time frame that covered part 1 at this point. It’s important to understand that implementing business applications takes time. Rarely do multiple application implementations occur in a short time span. It takes time to embed, adopt and perfect these software solutions and rushing implementations nearly always leads to heart ache. So with that in mind, I estimate it took our team approximately 18 months to successfully implement the Zoho apps highlighted in part 1 of this blog series, making them a part of our day-to-day routine.

Custom Software With Zoho Creator

Next Zoho application we utilised was Zoho Creator. Zoho Creator is a little different from other applications in the Zoho suite in that it is a rapid application development platform rather than a prebuilt application with pre-existing functionality. But here lies within awesome flexibility to quickly create cloud applications that are tailored to your business process. The development team at Ardento built a custom timesheet management tool that integrates seamlessly with our Zoho CRM and our Zoho Analytics. This allows our consulting team to easily track time worked on client systems and allows insightful monthly reports to be generated and shared with our clients.

Zoho Creator was also used to build out a departmental budgeting tool where our department managers can easily record expenses incurred and monitor the expenses against their department budgets.

Project Management Made Easy

As Ardento is a software implementation partner for a number of cloud software systems, including Zoho, our team is constantly managing client projects of all shapes and sizes. Enter Zoho Projects. A modern take on traditional project management. 

We have setup a number of project templates which contain standard milestones and task lists for common client projects. When a new project kicks off we can select a template, update the project delivery dates and quickly provide the project team with a timeline of required tasks and deadlines.

Projects can be as simple or as complex as your organisation requires. Features such as time and expense tracking and task dependencies really make Zoho Projects a well rounded project management tool. 

Data Heaven

Zoho Analytics (formerly Zoho Reports) is a Zoho application that keeps paying dividends every day at Ardento. This is also one application in the Zoho suite that has matured a lot in the past couple of years. 

Zoho Analytics is a business intelligence, reporting and analytical tool. It connects seamlessly to most Zoho applications and allows for beautiful dashboards to be created quickly. At Ardento, we rely on Zoho Analytics for reporting across our sales pipeline, directly from Zoho CRM data. All client timesheet reports are also produced from Zoho Analytics which feeds from our custom Zoho Creator applications. We even connect it to our Xero system for better financial reporting!

Having a great reporting and analytical tool is an absolute necessity in business today and Zoho Analytics gives us the reporting power in a similar and intuitive platform. 

This article originally appeared on the Ardento blog and can be viewed here