SaaS – A boon to the Consulting Space

Hosted software, or software-as-a-service (SaaS), has been around for about a decade. It's software delivered via the Web rather than residing on a company's own servers. Companies pay a monthly fee instead of buying the software outright, and don't have to worry about software licenses, server maintenance, or IT staff to manage complex programs.

People may think the data residing in the external server is unsecured but the truth is the other way. SaaS providers consult the industry experts and have better security than other software. This leverages the advantage of using the technology that acts as a back bone for the leaders in the industry at lowest investment.

Today everyone wants to improve their efficiency with less investment. Then SaaS is the best way for that. Also today SaaS provider gives you the solution in pay as you go option. So the people who want to try and improve and if not leave the system can go out of the system at any time with their data in their hand.

Today SaaS serves various industries to improve the performance in the current economy. Some of the industries where SaaS is being used extensively are

•              Web conferencing / collaboration

•              Human resources / payroll

•              CRM

•              Supply chain and spend management

•              Web content management / Ecommerce / Email and email marketing

•              Financials and business admin

 As I am familiar with the Human Resources Industry I will discuss on how people use SaaS in this industry.

Advantages of SaaS in the Consultancies:

Access Information Anytime, Anywhere

Manage recruiters in all the locations. SaaS allows us to share information with resource managers and recruiters without sending files back and forth. We can have a bird’s eye view of all the activities of recruiters/resource managers at anytime and anywhere.

Manage Candidates/Consultants (Pre-Deployment)

SaaS helps in finding the right candidates/consultants through accurate multilevel search. It can help in sending interest mails, submit resumes and arrange interviews against open jobs and allows us to enter feedbacks and track activities against candidates/consultants.

Maintain Customers via CRM modules

We can maintain customers and contacts using the CRM module and schedule/assign telephone calls, appointments, To Dos to remind you/others of follow-up activities. Some Saas models has tight integration with email client enables you to easily pull information from your customer emails to the SaaS systems / database

Organize Jobs

People use systems right from posting jobs, assigning to recruiters (across locations), resume submissions to arranging interviews, and this helps informed about what is happening to the jobs. Search and match the most qualified and right candidates to the jobs that we have.

Deploy our Consultants (Post Deployment)

The system helps to deploy consultants in one or more projects. SaaS system helps to track their pay rate and billing amount, payrolls, timesheets, etc. We can keep track of consultants who are coming out of projects to market them and eliminate “bench time”.

Track Timesheets/Expenses/Invoices

Any full fetched SaaS solution for the consultancies will allow employees to file timesheets/expenses online with configurable multi-level approval paths to fit the business. Help us to view all timesheets waiting for approval and approve / reject them with just a click of the button. It will alert us to view all pending timesheets and generate invoices (automatic) for on-time payments. It will also have integration with accounting package. The system will support workflow based approval and verification of timesheets/expenses and schedule, generate and view invoices based on projects, timesheet types, invoice types, etc.

Manage Payrolls

A SaaS system will help us to generate payroll for the employees based on the timesheet they filed. It will avoid redundant payment to the same employee by locking their payroll. Payroll will be generated for ‘N’ number of employees at a time. It will allows you to send payroll to the employee from the system itself, thereby avoids the data-conversion process to excel sheet.

Generate Reports

Customized report has to be generated at a click of the button with all the major metrics involved.

www.zonaic.com

Remapping keyboard keys in vista

I had some technical problem with my keyboard in my laptop. The space bar in the keyboard is not working fine and so had to look alternatives for that. Getting the keyboard repaired will take time as i couldn't move anywhere for next one week due my busy schedule.

So i thought of remapping the application key in keyboard to space bar. Searched in site and found various options but nothing worked fine as I couldn't map the application key. At last by various iterations of search I found that registry editing is the best way to do that. 

First came through the site that says how to edit the registry 

Remap the Keyboard in Windows XP

but it did not work for me as I don't know the registry value of the application key(as i never knew that they call this key as so)

So went to research still more and got the details as

Windows 2003 Resource Kit has a handy utility called "Remapkey.exe", which will make the Registry changes for you and this works for Vista also.

We can download it from Microsoft website itself.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9D467A69-57FF-4AE7-96EE-B18C4790CFFD&displaylang=en

Now my problem solved and i am using my application key as my space bar temporarily

Digging out email IDs

Hi, 

One of the day to day activity for any business development is the lead generation. Here is the ways to get the information about how we do the information search for the contacts for the prospect.

1.Get a the name of the prospect first from the google search from the niche needed.

2.You can find the contact information about the decision maker of the company from  the site itself in most cases.

3.If not search for the news and updates from the search engine for these companies so that you will atleast find the name of some major decision makers. 

4.Use the name and find their email ID and other details from the search engines.

5.If you could not find the emailId find any other emailID of the comapny say XYZ@WXY.com use this pattern to  find how the first name and last name of the person used for the company mail ID.

6.Use  http://www.mailtester.com and use the same pattern to find if the mail ID exists or  not and if not change the pattern reasonably.

7.If the server allows email ID verification then you are lucky. You got the email ID other wise you need to go the other way like calling those people and getting their emailID

8.We can also use some the Service providers to get the information of the admin like (use WHOIS search link in these links)

http://www.whois.ws/

http://www.networksolutions.com/

http://www.godaddy.com/

9.Or become a part of some professional socialisation sites like LinkedIn or FaceBook to know the details from the contacts. 

These are some of the simple ways to get the information on the prospects and there are so many other ways also.If you know some addtional ways then you can comment on  it.

Thanks for listening

Ganesh Mohan

Exploring gives Knowledge

My First Blog

Hi, 

This is my first blog. Happy to be a blogger and share the information I know. I am an active web surfer and I will share the interesting information I get. 

Thanks for listening me.... 

Ganesh Mohan