Business applications
Technology To Drive Business Transformation
At Aspira, our Business Applications team focus on enabling clients to leverage a range of cloud and on-premise business tools to enable their business be more flexible, productive and responsive to their customer needs, internally and externally.
Our team draws its experience from a range of backgrounds ranging from supply chain, pharmaceutical and manufacturing to various services industries, ensuring that not only do we understand and implement Business Applications, but that we also have a deep understanding of clients needs with our industry domain knowledge.
Microsoft Project Portfolio Management
We enable our clients to make a step-change in their Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) maturity through our project management consultancy services. We ensure you benefit from our knowledge and experience through practical, cost-effective real-world advice, support and assistance.
Microsoft SharePoint is a practical solution for project management and brings together all of a project’s information and tasks into one central place. SharePoint can also be structured to match your project’s approach, which helps many users standardise delivery and improve visibility.
- A place to store documents;
- The option to add various lists, libraries, and apps;
- The ability to configure and brand the site
- SharePoint permissions allowing users to control who gets access to the site.
The two-way sync between SharePoint and Project enables you to easily manage your project schedule in Microsoft Project, and seamlessly communicate and collaborate around that plan with your team in SharePoint.
Microsoft SharePoint
SharePoint empowers teamwork with dynamic and productive team sites for every project team, department, and division. Share files, data, news, and resources. Customize your site to streamline your team’s work. Collaborate effortlessly and securely with team members inside and outside your organization, across PCs, Macs, and mobile devices.
Accelerate productivity by transforming processes—from simple tasks like notifications and approvals to complex operational workflows. With SharePoint lists and libraries, Power Automate, and Power Apps, you can create rich digital experiences with forms, workflows, and custom apps for every device.
Microsoft Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service is a module for customer service automation that streamlines case and knowledge management, enables personalised customer service with a 360-degree customer view, and provides visibility into customer service department performance with dashboards and reports.
Why use Dynamics 365 Customer Service?
- Automate self-service with virtual agents and rich knowledge base portals.
- Personalise customer interactions using connected experiences.
- Take the guesswork out of case resolution using AI-driven productivity tools that equip agents with the right information at the right time.
- Detect and correct problems before your customers even notice with embedded Internet of Things (IoT) signals and alerts.
- Use AI-driven insights and analytics to improve agent and customer experiences.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales enables salespeople to build strong relationships with their customers, take actions based on insights and close deals faster. Use Dynamics 365 Sales to keep track of your accounts and contacts, nurture your sales from lead to order, and create sales collateral. You can also create marketing lists and campaigns, and follow service cases associated with specific accounts or opportunities.
Why use Dynamics 365 Sales?
- Connect sellers with customers through their preferred communication channels with Microsoft Teams and Dynamics 365 Sales.
- Streamline sales cycles through suggested next best actions, focusing on the highest-priority activity with the best propensity to close.
- Predict revenue fluctuations and highlight areas of focus from top to bottom of the funnel.
- Get in-the-moment insights about customer emotion, competitive market, sentiment, and priorities in phone calls to enable guided selling.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Marketing is an advanced Marketing Automation solution that enables organisations to complete the buyer’s journey from Prospect to Customer through building a relationship. Dynamics 365 for Marketing is easy to use, tightly integrated with Dynamics 365 Sales and other modules, and has built-in analytics.
Why use Dynamics 365 Marketing?
- Design, predict, and deliver content through the right channels in the moment of interaction for personalised customer journeys.
- Orchestrate customer journeys across marketing, sales, commerce, and service to provide a holistic customer experience.
- Turn insights into relevant action using AI-driven recommendations for content, channels, customer segmentation, and analytics.
- Use built-in features to help with compliance requirements and protect customer data. Easily customise and connect with tools you already use.
Microsoft Power Platform
Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights. Your data may be an Excel spreadsheet, or a collection of cloud-based and on-premises hybrid data warehouses.
Why use Power BI?
- Interactive visualisations and easy integration with Microsoft tools
- Unlimited access to local data (on-premises) and data in the cloud
- Instant access to reports and dashboards for it’s data analysis
- Excellent data modeling capabilities in Power BI Data Modeling
- Secure sharing of reports and data analysis
PowerApps is a suite of apps, services, and connectors, as well as a data platform, that provides a rapid development environment to build custom apps for your business needs. Using Power Apps, you can quickly build custom business apps that connect to your data stored either in the underlying data platform (Microsoft Dataverse) or in various online and on-premises data sources (such as SharePoint, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 and SQL Server).
Why use PowerApps?
- Create solutions quickly with low-code tools accessible to everyone.
- Connect professional developers who understand your technology to business experts who know your business issues with low-code tools both can use successfully, enabling everyone to collaborate effectively for faster business results.
- Create custom apps or customise your existing business applications to meet the changing needs of your business. Then easily access those solutions within your Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 deployments.
Power Automate is a cloud-based solution that can be used to automate activities and operations to save time and effort on manual tasks. You can use the platform to automate workflows between your applications and services to get notifications, sync files, gather data and more.
Why use Power Automate?
- Automate business processes.
- Send automatic reminders for past due tasks.
- Move business data between systems on a schedule.
- Connect to more than 500 data sources or any publicly available API.
- Automate tasks on your local computer like computing data in Excel.
Power Virtual Agents lets you create powerful chatbots that can answer questions posed by your customers, other employees, or visitors to your website or service. These bots can be created easily without the need for data scientists or developers.
Why use Power Virtual Agents?
- Using a guided graphical interface to easily build a powerful chatbot.
- Integrating with Power Automate to allow chatbots to take prebuilt actions based upon user input.
- Monitor and measure performance to continually improve chatbot experience.
- Receive suggestions on new bot Q/A’s to build out based upon user activity.
Testimonials
Case Study
Advisory & Business Applications
Gas Networks Ireland
Gas Networks Ireland needed to improve their portfolio selection capabilities, including supporting its requirements for identifying and optimising the selection of projects in line with available funding and resources. Having worked on Business Resourcing, Advisory, and Software Development projects for over 10 years, Gas Networks Ireland turned to Aspira for advice.
We Listen, Advise And Support
Microsoft Business Applications, contact the Aspira Biz Apps team today.
Business Applications Enquiry
Business Applications FAQs
A project is a complex puzzle made up of many components. Each of these components must work in unison if the puzzle is to be solved and the project successfully completed.
This is what project management software provides.
Project management software is a framework that brings together and links all the components of a project into a cohesive unit. Teams that use project management software benefit from better communication, effective resource management, live analytics and status reports, structured data organisation, and much more.
Good project management software should be a “multi-tool” that replaces calendar apps, remote meeting tools, inventory and resource management tools, office applications, and of course, post-it notes.
There are many benefits of project management software. The ultimate benefit is that project management software facilitates the smooth running of a project and greatly assists the team in achieving a project’s goals.
It achieves these results by being something of a digital toolkit for project managers and teams. Each of the tools in the toolkit is designed to help project teams achieve their goals, and among the overall benefits that these tools make available are:
- Better resource management
- Real-time reporting and analytics
- Process standardisation
- Data Management
- Improved risk management and mitigation
- Better team collaboration and communication
- Improved budget management
The process of selecting the best project management software begins with understanding the needs and expectations of the organisation. Amongst the points that should be considered when selecting project management software are:
- The features and functionality that the organisation requires
- The usage of the program, e.g., is it for a single project? Or is it to be used on an ongoing basis?
- Involve the project team in the decision as ultimately, they are the end-users
- Budget considerations
- Ease of use
- Scalability – Will it scale up to meet possible future demands?
- Size of organisation – small firms are going to have radically different requirements than that of large enterprises
Many software management programs allow potential users to try a demo version. Trying demos when they are available can also be useful for determining whether the software is suitable.
It makes sense to invest in project management software as soon as a project moves from the concept stage. Failed projects are often down to mismanagement. The root cause of failures is invariably because maintaining control of complex projects is incredibly difficult without software to assist in the process.
Investing in project management software is often seen as an unnecessary overhead. In reality, the opposite is true. Investing in project management software can reduce costs by ensuring that projects run on time, within budget, use resources efficiently, and are of paramount importance in bringing projects to successful conclusions.
The cost of project management software varies depending on a large number of factors. Amongst the common criteria that can affect the cost of the software are:
- Features – Some packages are priced depending on the features that the user requires. This is why it is always essential to understand the organisation’s requirements before selecting the appropriate package.
- Number of users – Many project management software packages have subscription tiers that increase with higher user numbers
- Frequency of billing – Paying annually as opposed to monthly for project management software will often reduce the cost of the package
Because there are so many differing price structures that range from limited-functionality free versions to premium packages that can cost thousands of dollars, understanding what is required of the software is critical.
Project management software packages are usually crammed full of features, not all of which apply to all projects or organisations. However, in most cases, the key features to look for when selecting project management software include: –
- Collaboration and Communication Tools – The ability to facilitate easy communication and collaboration within a project team is one of the cornerstone features of any project management package.
- Planning and Scheduling features – Good project management software should simplify the planning and scheduling process of a project. It should include task assigning and prioritisation, shared calendars, agile management tools and many more.
- Reporting and Analytics – Having access to all the required data to monitor the progress of a project in real-time is essential. It is also important that the application presents the data in a format that is simple to understand. Many project management applications will provide the same data in different formats to help team members and project managers to understand the status of the project.
- Financials – Project management software can look after the financial aspect of the project. This includes monitoring the project budget, time-tracking, and billing & invoicing
- Ease of use – Intuitive and easy to learn interfaces that are simple to use are essential. Not every staff or team member is necessarily an IT whiz, so look for software that is easy to master and use.