In my last blog, I discussed that there are lots of ways to use OnTime and that new users sometimes feel overwhelmed with the amount of freedom that they have while implementing the system.  So I asked people to write about the different ways they use OnTime in our new "General Discussions" forum.  The best way to get people started is to write up how I am using OnTime to track my day-to-day activities at Axosoft.

As a member of the User Education team, I spend much of my day giving demos and training sessions to our customers.  One of my early tasks at Axosoft was to set up a system for coordinating training and demo sessions in an organized manner.  What better way to do this than with OnTime? :-)

First, I needed to figure out what objects to track.  I originally needed to track three kinds of objects:

• Small Business Demos
• These are given once a week to a group of users
• PRO Demos
• These are scheduled individually with the individual customer
• Trainings
• These are individual training classes scheduled with the individual customer
• Axosoft University Classes
• The Axosoft University classes were added more recently and track our weekly scheduled classes
  

To set this up, I chose "features" as my type of object and created four directories underneath a parent directory called "Professional Services".

 

 I then began adding items underneath these directories.  Highlighted below are a series of "Pro Demo" items that I have given.  Each line entry represents a different demo that I have given to a client:

 

Next step is creating the field templates for these entries...what information do our trainers and salespeople need to access about demos and trainings?  These are things like:

• When is the presentation scheduled?
• Who is supposed to show up?
• What things am I supposed to be covering and are there any special circumstances? 

After the demo/training:

• How did it go? 
  
• Are there any action items I need to perform after the event?
• Is there any pertinent information that our salespeople need to know about after this event?

To properly capture and display this information I designed a series of field templates.  For demos, I designed three templates:

 

These represent the three views that a user will get about the item.  Different Workflow states will drive when these field templates are used to display the demo item.  Here is an example of how a demo looks as it moves through our process:

On this first screen, the salesperson enters the information about the demo itself.  Here information is passed to the presenter about what the demo should cover or any other important information.  Once the salesperson writes up the demo request, it is then sent over to the trainers:

 

You'll notice that the screen gets much larger here--this is because the presented who performs the demo/training needs to record a number of additional pieces of information.  To use these field templates, I designed  a few different OnTime Workflows to incorporate our different object types.  Here is the one we use for demos:

There are four main states that a demo can be in.  Workflows allow us to quickly search for items based on state and the state can also control how the item looks.    Here is a different example that we use for our Training Workflow:

The steps for a training object are different...trainings sometimes require some additional followup action from a salesperson or tech support representative.  Additionally,  the "Training in Limbo" state designates if a customer has paid for a training over multiple sessions, but only attended one session and wants to save their other session for another time later.  I hope this is a good example of how the trainers at Axosoft use OnTime to schedule our demos and trainings.  Development and Marketing have completely different ways that it is used--this is just a solid example of our process. 

 
So what processes are other people using to manage their flow of data?  How are you running things with OnTime?