CONSULTING SERVICES
Contact Management Systems offers a variety of consulting services to help you maximize your software investment:


Evaluation Services – Knowing where you want to go is half the battle. You need the right tools to get you there. Because we monitor trends with sales, service and configurations solutions, we can help you quickly determine your selection criteria and expedite a product evaluation, so that you can advance the implementation cause, not just think about it!


Planning & Analysis Services - We can help you know where you are today, where you want to go, and how to get there. The reality of today’s business environment is that there are no simple "off-the-shelf" solutions that work for everyone. We can help you determine how to create a sales and service capability to differentiate you from your competitors, gain control of your sales forecasts and deliver the highest level of customer satisfaction.


Implementation Analysis Services – What can be worse than putting off the decision to implement? A botched implementation altogether. We know that the reason many CRM implementations fail is because they were poorly implemented to begin with. We can provide services structured so that the system is fully functional upon completion, including installation of software on the server, setting up tables, importing and converting relevant data from other systems and creating key management hands on user training.


Systems Integration Services – Once you know where you are going, you’ll need to get there quickly. Time is of the essence to install, implement and integrate before major changes in the marketplace make your strategy stale. Customization will ensure that the off-the-shelf product you have selected changes to match your organization, not the other way around. Our design and development processes consistently deliver complex deployments on time, within budget and with the quality sales and service organizations demand. Further, integration of a synchronizing application is even more challenging than most integration projects. We have integrated customer interaction solutions with order entry, manufacturing, financial and other legacy applications. We have also integrated sales and service applications with product configurations, enabling our customer to enjoy a true "best of breed" solution.


Training
Without the proper training, it is nearly impossible for new users to understand how to use the system in a way beneficial to both the user and the company. Professional, targeted training in a cost-effective delivery method helps develop the product skills needed to seize the value out of the new technology. We know that nothing really matters is no one is using your new toolkit. Our trainers are professional instructors with an expertise not found in technicians and consultants who train when needed. Our training sessions teach end users how to accomplish real tasks, not just navigate windows. Our deployment strategies ensure your tools are reliable—so your end users do not have any reason not to use what they have learned.

Support
The software is installed, implementation is done, and training has ended, but your users still need help. We are just a phone call or email away from providing you the help you need to be successful. We can provide you with product maintenance and update releases as well as telephone-based support for both technical questions and problem resolution.

 

Expert Systems

Overview: Knowledge-based expert systems, or simply expert systems, use human knowledge to solve problems that normally would require human intelligence. These expert systems represent the expertise knowledge as data or rules within the computer. These rules and data can be called upon when needed to solve problems. Books and manuals have a tremendous amount of knowledge but a human has to read and interpret the knowledge for it to be used. Conventional computer programs perform tasks using conventional decision-making logic -- containing little knowledge other than the basic algorithm for solving that specific problem and the necessary boundary conditions. This program knowledge is often embedded as part of the programming code, so that as the knowledge changes, the program has to be changed and then rebuilt. Knowledge-based systems collect the small fragments of human know-how into a knowledge-base which is used to reason through a problem, using the knowledge that is appropriate. A different problem, within the domain of the knowledge-base, can be solved using the same program without reprogramming. The ability of these systems to explain the reasoning process through back-traces and to handle levels of confidence and uncertainty provides an additional feature that conventional programming don't handle.

Most expert systems are developed via specialized software tools called shells. These shells come equipped with an inference mechanism (backward chaining, forward chaining, or both), and require knowledge to be entered according to a specified format (all of which might lead some to categorize OPS5 as a shell). They typically come with a number of other features, such as tools for writing hypertext, for constructing friendly user interfaces, for manipulating lists, strings, and objects, and for interfacing with external programs and databases. These shells qualify as languages, although certainly with a narrower range of application than most programming languages. For more detailed information on expert system shells, see the "Expert System Shells at Work" series by Schmuller PC AI, (1991, 1992).