Modelling the Business
The Office Automator System Builder Tools are used to build a model of your business as it functions today. Although each business is organized differently, there are many common organizational elements which are used to build the model of the business.
At the highest level are Groups or Departments, such as HR, Legal, and Finance. Depending on the nature of the business, these functions may be organized differently (for instance sales and marketing may be separate departments, or one department) or there may be certain functions added or deleted. A legal firm for instance probably does not have a purchasing department, whereas a construction company does.
Each Department will have Units within it, and each Unit will have Duties or tasks associated with its responsibilities, such as billing, expediting or recruitment. These Duties are typically made up of a collection of individual actions or transactions such as letter writing, memo creation or invoicing.
Project based organizations have additional elements to their business models, namely
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Projects which represent an entire body of work, such as building a mining camp.
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Packages (of work) which are groups of tasks executed in a particular order to produce a desired outcome.
Once the model of the business is built, the next step is to automate the transactions, tasks, packages and projects which are the day to day work of the business, so users who work within a particular department, have available to them all the (automated) tasks they need to do their job.
Projects and packages can be dynamically added and removed from the business model by the client once the model is implemented.
Automating Tasks
The fundamental building block for automating a business is the Automated Transaction Template (ATT). Automated Transaction Templates are a combination of a program and a document template which can:
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Accept data entered manually – either through forms or directly typed in.
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Search the OA-FS for content and insert it into the document.
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Search the central database for information and insert it into the document.
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Perform operations and/or calculations on any of the data and insert the result into the document
A task can be a single ATT or an automated process involving several ATT's and potentially other tasks.
ATT’s can automate practically any function, for example:
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Purchase orders.
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Conformal Contracts (pulling information from ITT's etc).
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Invoices.
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Billing Ratio Reports (through the Time Booking database).
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Project progress reports (gathering data from all aspects of a project in real time).
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Formal Letters.
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Meeting Agendas (automatically including minutes from the last meeting).
Office Automator ships with a comprehensive set of standard ATT's for most business functions. A large library of specialized ATT's has also been developed to speed up customization, including complete systems for:
• Engineering Project and Package Management.
• Compliance Auditing.
• Human Resource Management.
In a project based organization, tasks can be grouped together in sequences to form packages of work and packages grouped together to encompass an entire project.