Product Description

PRONTO-Xi Alert Intelligence informs the people who need to know about something that has happened in their business immediately.

Alert Intelligence fully automates the notification of any person or group regarding events from their Enterprise Resource Planning system (ERP) based on criteria that you define, and issues business alerts in real time.

Using Alert Intelligence, you can establish sophisticated rules for conditions or occurrences you want to be notified about and the system continually checks these rules to assess whether it should trigger an alert. An alert can take the form of any combination of:

• Displaying an on-screen pop-up message box to the user responsible for the data entry;

• Sending an email to entities described in the ERP or anyone else in the world;

• Sending a mobile phone Short Message Service (SMS) alert to entities described in the ERP or anyone else in the world; or

• Sending a fax to entities described in the ERP or anyone else in the world.

In addition, you can use the Alert Intelligence rules to do more than just send alerts. Alert Intelligence can also:

• Activate a workflow process;

• Launch a customised application, or

• Log occurrences of a particular condition or incident.

Alert Intelligence includes wizards and templates to make it easy to create rules and nominate recipients. Over 20 templates have been developed to cover common business events such as:

• An unusually high transaction has been put through Accounts Payable;

• A Manufacturing work order is overdue;

• A lead has been converted to an opportunity in CRM; or

• Inventory levels have dropped below minimum.

A self service subscription facility is included with Alert Intelligence allowing administrators to publish events and for staff to select which events they would like to be notified about. This subscription facility only displays alerts that are appropriate to the security level of each staff member.

Innovation

Competitive Advantage

Alert Intelligence provides a level of business agility unmet by established ERP systems without the need for extensive customisation.

By having alerts sent about business incidents, users receive the information they need, wherever in the world they are - and in a timely way. ERPs are traditionally good at presenting information that users are seeking out about events or transactions that you know have occurred. With Alert Intelligence, however, the ERP comes to you with information it knows you need.

Alert Intelligence delivers timeliness and efficiency to users who rely on this information to make business decisions and can gain a competitive advantage by acting quickly.

Improved User Interaction

Typical business systems demand that users approach them for any information they might need. Alert Intelligence turns this concept around: the system can now approach the user when relevant information is available.

With Alert Intelligence, we envisage that more users will become comfortable engaging with their ERP system and, at the same time, fewer users will feel the need to log into the system unless prompted by an event. The arrival of Generation Y - who expect higher levels of interactivity from systems - into the workforce makes this innovation particularly timely.

Technological Innovation

The ability for a business system to send messages typically requires sophisticated programming skills and even DBA competencies. The implementation of this kind of capability is by necessity also database specific as it makes use of database triggers. This makes delivering this capability prohibitively expensive in many cases.

PRONTO-Xi Alert Intelligence uses the PRONTO-Xi Foundation layer, which is aware of every insertion, update and delete of records to the database, no matter which database the system is using. Furthermore, there is an easy to use, wizard-driven interface to make setting up an Alert fast and simple – no programming required.

Hyperlinks embedded in e-mail alerts link directly to screens in the ERP so that users can act on these alerts without having to navigate through the system.

Performance

Enterprise Quality

Alert Intelligence has been designed from the ground up to complement the PRONTO-Xi Enterprise Management System, and as such is robust and feature rich. Examples of its enterprise level capabilities are:

• Full logging of all alerts and recipients of alerts.

• Administration tools for monitoring who is being sent alerts.

• Testing interfaces for quality assurance of the logic that will trigger alerts.

• Ability to collect, display and use data from multiple joined tables.

• Integration with SMS gateway, incorporating public-key security.

• Conforms to existing enterprise security structures.

• Built using componentised architecture so can be easily enhanced.

• Can be used as a starting point for launching sophisticated custom applications.

User Benefits

Management by exception – staff have the issues they need to resolve delivered to them rather than having to seek them out.

Immediate notification – the time between an event occurring in the system and receiving an SMS alert is typically less than 8 seconds.

Relevant information – alerts are rich in content and can contain any data deemed important to the user.

Links to the Enterprise Business System – email alerts can include hyperlinks that take the user directly to the relevant screen in the ERP, reducing the chance of error and improving efficiency.

Communication with Anyone – alerts are not limited to users in the organisation. For instance: alerts could be sent by SMS to retail customers to tell them that their lay-bys are due or to suppliers to notify them that important raw materials are running low.

Ease of Implementation

The barriers in place for businesses wanting to automatically send alerts to customers are traditionally high. Alert Intelligence lowers these barriers by:

• Removing the need for programming skills.

• Including an interface that makes setting up alerts quick and simple.

• Building this capability into the ERP system with no implementation required.

Potential

PRONTO-Xi Alert Intelligence demonstrates huge potential for take-up in the small-to-medium enterprise (SME) space because of business trends it supports as well as its pedigree.

Compliance and Auditing

Never before has a focus on corporate governance and compliance been more evident. Gartner predicts that “Through 2008, investigation of new technologies will slow as discretionary budgets divert to regulatory compliance.” Alert Intelligence allows for greater monitoring of system events for regulatory purposes without the need for significant investment in new technologies.

Alert Intelligence can easily be harnessed to log events in the system that require extra vigilance and can be used to send messages to multiple senior staff members should any extraordinary or unusual transactions or balances occur in the business system.

Business Event Management (BEM)

Minimising the cost of business exceptions is increasingly recognised as a potential area of competitive advantage. To this end, Forrester Research has identified Business Event Management, "the process of capturing real-time business events from multiple sources and assigning them to the appropriate decision-maker for resolution", as an important emerging component of business systems.

Service Oriented Architecture

Enterprise System vendors (including Pronto Software) are constantly looking at ways to deliver improved customisation capabilities with reduced implementation costs. SOA techniques are increasingly seen as the way to achieve this goal with Gartner predicting that “By 2008, SOA will provide the basis for 80 percent of development projects.” 

Alert Intelligence adopts an SOA philosophy to application building where components can be plugged in easily to further customise the facility. Even in itself though, Alert Intelligence allows businesses to develop their own advanced notification “applications” without having to write a single line of application code.

Operating System and Database Agnostic

Alert Intelligence is not limited to any specific platform configuration. This makes its capabilities available to a wide variety of organisations. Windows, Unix and Linux servers are supported as are Oracle, SQL Server and C-ISAM databases.

Developed by Pronto Software

Pronto Software has been developing software for the business community for over 30 years and its flagship Enterprise Management System, PRONTO-Xi, has more implementations in Australia than any other ERP system.

At the same time, Pronto Software continues to be a dynamic business making international in-roads, with companies in the UK, USA, and Asia turning to PRONTO-Xi to run their businesses.

In recognition of the potential of the company, Pronto Software won the Dun and Bradstreet ‘Victorian Business of the Year’ award in 2006, lauded for “outstanding business achievement and financial performance”.

Other information the judges should know

Alert Intelligence Web Page 
http://www.pronto.com.au/technology/ai.php

The Age/D&B Victorian Business Awards Page: 
http://www.dnb.com.au/general/theage_dnb_awards.asp?Link_Page=AUS

Pronto Software Corporate Overview: 
http://www.pronto.com.au/corporate/index.php

Information about the PRONTO-Xi technology base: 
http://www.pronto.com.au/technology/index.php 

Screen Captures of Alerts and the Alert Intelligence Interface

Figure 1: SMS Alert to let customers know that an order has arrived in store.

Figure 2: Warning to Product Manager that inventory levels are below minimum requirements.

Figure 3: E-mail warning to CFO about unusual account balances.

Figure 4: Display Message Alert resulting from a warehouse change.

Figure 5: Excerpt from the wizard displaying optional templates available.

Figure 6: Conditions can be set to look at old and new values of updated records and can incorporate data from joined tables or calculations.