Cincom Acquire enterprise sales portal employs sales and product configuration to provide sales team collaboration and product quality for manufacturers selling complex custom-engineered products.
 
  • Overview
  • Easy to Use
  • Framework
  • Modules
  • Benefits

A Simple, Familiar and Flexible Collaboration Framework

Lean front office requires collaboration between PEOPLE, PROCESSES, and SYSTEMS: specifically those responsible for selling and delivering your products to customers. In a time of competitive challenge, responsiveness and speed are the underpinning to win business. Collaboration is essential! Traditional transaction oriented systems do not support the unstructured, knowledge-driven processes that sell complex products and services. Cincom Acquire provides a web-based platform that integrates and automates these collaborative activities to win more profitable business.

Cincom Acquire Enables Easy to Use Collaboration

Cincom Acquire is built on the Microsoft SharePoint Server collaboration technology (MOSS), one of the most widely adopted collaboration platforms in the market.

Everything about using Cincom Acquire will feel familiar to you because most business managers already use Microsoft Office technologies ... SharePoint, Word, Excel, Project, Outlook and. Cincom Acquire was built so that just about anyone using these tools can use and administer product and sales configurator, project and bid management, quote and proposal management and contract and order management.

Server Side

Cincom Acquire is a Microsoft Office Business Application (OBA) that extends SharePoint with ENVIRON - Cincom's collaboration application suite with a broad set of functions:

  • Integrated Portal Administration
  • Forms Management for automated document workflow
  • Integration & Automation with line of business applications
  • Reports & Analytics to support business intelligence
  • Worflow automation to automate collaborative processes
  • Business Rules to automate complex, expert dependent processes

The Cincom Acquire 3-Layered Collaboration Technology Stack

The Portal Collaboration Layer — This layer addresses the collaboration needs of complex manufacturers with integration of MOSS and Cincom Environ technology to connect internal teams who have specialized knowledge and skills required to rapidly respond to customer requirements.

The Office Business Applications Layer — This layer contains the business applications for complex manufacturers: contract and order management, project bidding and estimating, quotation and proposal management and guided selling and product configurator.

The Server Layer — This is the Microsoft technology layer, including the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) plus various integrated services.

Collaboration Framework Modules

Portal Administration - This channel collaboration functionality includes intuitive administration tools from managing the Acquire metadata driven menus, actions, privileges, hyperlinks and page layouts to decrease the total time and cost to implement and a quicker Return on your Investment. The ability to tailor the system by user/user role enables the right people to see the right data when and how they need to see it. Read more on Portal Administration.

Acquire Opportunity Management - This channel collaboration functionality helps your team to close profitable business faster by sharing information, tracking progress, and recording interactions. Multi-channel and team selling supported by revision control uniquely meet the needs of companies who deliver complex solutions. Read more on Opportunity Management.

Acquire Product & Service Management - This channel collaboration functionality provides a central repository of product and service information. In addition, it provides centralized adminisration of product attributes, related content, sales policies, pricing, catalogs, and organization policies related to products and services. Read more on Product and Service Management.

Acquire Organization Management - This channel collaboration functionality provides a central definition of all organizations, contacts, and roles relating the sale and delivery of products including Customers, Partners, Employees, and Suppliers. Read more on Organization Management.

Acquire Shared Services - This channel collaboration supports, Attachments, Alerts, Contacts, Correspondence, and Text that can be linked to any entity in the entire Cincom Acquire solution.

Cincom Business Rules - This channel collaboration functionality empowers business users to create expert applications using drag-and-drop graphical modeling tools. Based on a centrally managed knowledge-base, business users can automate complex, expert driven processes such as providing recommendations, diagnosing problems, complex decision making, and product / process configuration. Much more than a "rule-based system," the Cincom Business Rules facilitates KNOWLEDGE CAPTURE with unique graphical knowledge representation, structuring, and acquisition methods that allow you to maintain and change rules easily and quickly, without the need for IT experts. Read more on Cincom Business Rules.

Workflow Management - This channel collaboration functionality provides an easy to use design experience to create workflows that connect people, processes, and systems. Read more on Workflow Management.

Integration & Automation - This channel collaboration functionality provides an event management facility to easily integrate seamlessly multiple systems of record and to automate your business processes which will eliminate manual non-value-added activities and the potential for errors across multiple systems of record. Read more on Integration & Automation.

Forms Management - This channel collaboration functionality supports the ability to create and deploy electronic forms solutions for interactive documents, capturing user input, printing documents, or responding to workflow requests. Read more on Forms Management.

Reporting and Analytics - This channel collaboration functionality provides a robust business intelligence environment for general reporting, scorecards, dashboards, key performance indicators, and dimensional analysis. Read more on Reporting and Analytics.

Top 10 Benefits of Cincom Acquire with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

1. Connect people with information and expertise to accelerate channel collaboration.

Enterprise Search in the Cincom-MOSS system incorporates business data along with information about documents, people, and Web pages to produce comprehensive, relevant results. Features like duplicate collapsing, spelling correction, and alerts improve the relevance of the results, so you can easily find what you need.

2. Accelerate shared selling and customer acquisition processes across organizational boundaries.

Without coding any custom applications, Cincom Acquire uses smart, electronic forms–driven solutions to collect critical business information from customers, partners and suppliers through a Web browser. Built-in data validation rules help you gather accurate and consistent data that can be directly integrated front-office and back-office collaboration between selling, engineering, production and financial systems to avoid redundancy and errors that result from manual data re-entry.

3. Collaboration without divulging sensitive information.

Cincom Acquire gives your employees access to real-time, interactive Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheets from a Web browser through Excel Services running on Office SharePoint Server 2007. Use these spreadsheets to maintain and efficiently share one central and up-to-date version while helping to protect any proprietary information embedded in the documents (such as financial models).

4. Enable better-informed channel collaboration decisions by presenting business-critical information in one central location.

Cincom Acquire makes it easy to create live, interactive business intelligence (BI) portals that assemble and display business-critical information from disparate sources, using integrated BI capabilities such as dashboards, Web Parts, scorecards, key performance indicators (KPIs), and business data collaboration technologies. Centralized Report Center sites give users a single place for locating the latest reports, spreadsheets, or KPIs.

5. Provide a single, integrated collaboration platform to manage intranet, extranet, and Internet applications across the enterprise.

Cincom Acquire is built on an open, scalable MOSS architecture, with support for Web services and interoperability standards including XML and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). The server has rich, open application programming interfaces (APIs) and event handlers for lists and documents. These features provide integration with existing systems and the flexibility to incorporate new non-Microsoft IT investments to improve channel collaboration.

6. Provide a simple, familiar, and consistent user experience for improved channel collaboration management.

Cincom Acquire and MOSS are tightly integrated with familiar client desktop applications, e-mail, and Web browsers to provide a consistent user experience that simplifies how people collaborate with content, processes, and business data. This tight integration, coupled with robust out-of-the-box functionality, helps you accelerate channel collaboration.

7. Boost employee productivity by simplifying everyday business activities.

Take advantage of out-of-the-box collaboration workflows for initiating, tracking, and reporting common business activities such as document review, approval, issue tracking, and signature collection. You can complete these activities without any coding. Tight integration with familiar client applications, e-mail, and Web browsers provide you with a simple, consistent experience. Modifying and extending these out-of-the-box workflow processes enables a deeper, easier collaboration process with sales, sales channels, engineering and production.

8. Help meet regulatory requirements through comprehensive control over content.

By specifying security settings, storage policies, auditing policies, and expiration actions for business records in accordance with compliance regulations, you can help ensure your sensitive business information can be controlled and managed effectively. This reduces litigation risk for your organization. Tight integration of Cincom Acquire with Office SharePoint Server 2007 and familiar desktop applications means that policy settings are rendered onto client applications in the Microsoft Office system, making it simpler for employees to be aware of and comply with regulatory requirements.

9. Effectively manage and repurpose content for improved channel collaboration management.

Business users and content authors can create and submit content for approval and scheduled deployment to intranet or Internet sites. Managing multilingual content is simplified through new document library templates that are specifically designed to maintain a relationship between the original version and different translations of a document.

10. Simplify organization-wide channel collaboration access to both structured and unstructured information across disparate systems.

Give your users access to business data found in common line-of-business systems like SAP, salesforce.com, Cincom ERP and Microsoft Dynamics through Cincom-MOSS server technology. Users can also create personalized views and interactions with business systems through a browser by dragging configurable back-end connections. Enterprise-wide Managed Document Repositories help your organizations store and organize business documents in one central location.