Workbench — "Always on the Job!"
Bluedog's Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) for community, collaboration, project/team management, and more. This on-demand e-business platform provides content and document management, contacts and customer relationship management, workflow automation, in-system and group messaging in a secure environment, knowledge base and much more. Workbench will help anyone with a small business or in a workgroup who needs a simple way to collaborate on projects, manage web-based content and more. With Bluedog's SAAS, you create and share web content, documents, schedules, to-do lists, and more. Download the PDF brochure...
Gain a Real-Time 360° View and Drill-Down Insight into Projects, Activities and Teams It's a web-based project and activity management tool that gives departments or organizations a dashboard view of work in progress. It also tracks and manages issues, contacts, timesheets, and documents in a knowledge base.
Professional services automation, without the expensive IT department! Bluedog's solution provides an affordable and complete environment that simplifies file sharing, group scheduling and project management with a web-based interface that can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection. Demo available!
The "Balanced Scorecard" strategic approach to performance management uses four perspectives to help organizations achieve management's vision. Workbench automatically collects, summarizes and disseminates team- and project-related data, so you can easily apply the Balanced Scorecard method, visualize metrics, and measure progress. Users see vital information in a "dashboard" format. Combined with other tools like its Help Desk and Knowledge Base, Workbench can yield end-to-end process management, helping organizations become continuous-improvement leaders. "Earned value" measures work accomplished, regardless of effort expended or time elapsed. By default, Workbench renders this metric in dollars, but other views are optionally available.
Earned Value Management lets you monitor your portfolio of projects with an eye on accrued costs. Assign risks, and get real-time reporting on progress with visual depictions of risk, activities accomplished, even cost versus profit (for commercial) or budgetted hours versus allocated (for government/not-for-profit).
With its built-in document management and knowledge base, Workbench enables you to upload and share documents, with assignable privileges and versioning. Documents can be associated with projects and activities, or can be part of your knowledge base library or other collections. With the optional content management system, you can push documents and articles out to your public web site or your secure portal. Document management is also subject to the workflow capabilities in Workbench - get notified when a document is revised or when new content is contributed and needs review.
...
Workbench delivers notifications to the appropriate activity or document owners or others associated with the tagged elements - in the workspace dashboard, via email or SMS. Notifications are one way workflow can be tracked in real time - when your document version is revised, you are alerted. By sending, storing and retrieving messages within Workbench, you get a secure means to have users read them. You also get an audit trail and archiving of all messages (for compliance). And, if so designated, messages can become part of your knowledge base. Coordinate events via an iCal/Outlook calendar subscription web service.
Manager your staff, customer, lead, and vendor contacts. Automatic workflows notify customers when activities close so they can complete a Customer Satisfaction Survey, which contributes to the Balanced Scorecard.
Events are automatically scheduled when a meeting is set up, or a project or activity approaches a milestone, or when you need to work on a document or web content asset. Notifications can be sent, as well.
Staff reporting is facilitated with the Weekly Activity Report, a roll-up of each staff person's narrative on his or her accomplishments for the preceding week. When combined with objective measures (percent accomplished on an activity, workflow steps completed, etc.), managers and other decision makers gain directly relevant and real-time insights into what their people are working on. Optional (at no extra cost) timesheet reporting gives activity-based accounting and invoicing detail on a per-person or per-project basis. The timesheet module is DCAA compliant for tracking and reporting on billable time.
Projects and activities in Workbench enable you to more effectively deploy your teams based resource utilization, project status and hours utilized. Create projects from project templates. Manage activity (task) assignments, resource availability, roles and rates. Monitor due dates, track performance versus estimate and time off and available hours per staff to maximize resource utilization. Find and assign resources by skill and availability, both current staff and from your pool of subcontractors. Dashboard and project portfolio management tools provide roll-up summary information and comprehensive planning and performance analysis, including cross team reporting, project performance, project earned value and cost analysis, and real-time project status for all the engagements in your portfolio.
A client, contractor and vendor portal can be integrated with your existing web presence (or we can supply one), Workbench provides secure access to your customers, vendors, subcontractors and other stakeholders so they can avail themselves of self-service help desk ticket submissions, knowledge base searches, and automatically generated FAQs. Don't have a web presence? Our optional Content Management System (CMS) lets you integrate public web content with Workbench's workflow and publishing tools.
With issues resolution, Workbench's customer relationship management (CRM) tools let your staff deliver faster and better service, with a full audit trail, when processing customer service requests arriving by phone, email or your web portal. Handle more complex issues while online users help themselves via FAQs and a searchable knowledge base. Workbench gives you a real-time 360-degree view of contact information. No more double entry of customer/stakeholder/member data, or hunting through multiple databases for content related to a contact. Workbench tracks activities and records time dependencies, so you can monitor deliverables. Dashboard views show important metrics to help you analyze efficiency. As an integrated Help Desk, our solution links key metrics, VIP issue response and the self-building knowledge base. And when an activity or help desk ticket closes, the customer is sent a link to a Customer Satisfaction Survey -- useful to help gauge how well your organization is doing. Connect to enterprise solutions like Remedy via web services.
With reporting and tracking, view to-do items, compile list views of activities, add documents and other artifacts, assign responsibility, and check them off when an assigned user is done. Private lists are for your eyes only (filter between private and open anytime), or assign who sees which activities based on groups and roles. A cool data visualizer lets you see all your projects, activities, contacts and documents in a relationship node view, with easy drill down to details. Workbench enables you to gather pertinent information from your staff, subcontractors, vendors and other stakeholders. The web application makes use of that information by rendering a wide selection of reports, dashboard views and print-ready output. Of course, accurate data means real-time reporting to help you make relevant decisions and mitigate risks to project performance.
All your content, in one place , with out-of-box workflow or customized processes for authoring, editing and publishing content. Include Word documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, images and even video/podcasts. Using XMP/Sidecar XML data, your content is freely re-usable in any portal or thrid party CMS.
Manage qualfications, positions, staff skills inventory. Post open positions, record candidate C.V.s and résumés, automatically track progress through your interview/hiring process. Maintain a database of staff, contractor and possible hires so you can fill those difficult positions or complete RFPs with the right staffing.
For staff, track expenses, control software licenses, equipment such as desktops and laptops, and manage resources like conference room scheduling. Maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) for your equipment.
Pricing, Hosting, and the Turn-Key Appliance option Bluedog has been hosting applications and software-as-service since 1998. Workbench provides a secure connection for sensitive data (via encrypted SSL connection). In our tier 3 data center, we provide nightly backups of your private database. You always own your own data, and can take it with you when you are finished. Sensitive information is encrypted before it is written to the database. Hosted solution: Per user cost, with annual contract, $75 per user per month with discounts for more than 10 users. Turn-key appliance server: $95,000 delivered, with annual maintenance agreement, supports thousands of users at a fixed cost. Want a quote? Contact us at info[at]bluedog.net or using our online contact form, below.
The demo login is for a manager user (“Sue”), and that user gets to see almost all views. Staff, vendors and others have limited access to information, based on privileges you assign.
Contact Us for More Info