In nearly all industries companies have been progressively moving towards a highly integrated “Digital Environment” i.e. not just that information is stored electronically, but processed, updated and distributed using digital systems in a fully automated & integrated manner.
Many companies have made significant progress, but are often still using multiple stand-alone systems inside business processes and there is still a surprisingly high degree of manual activity to keep things synchronized.
This is particularly true in the field of Event Management. Events scale from smaller courses & meetings to large congresses with thousands of attendees, but irrespective of size, running a successful event is a complex process with the need to manage many parallel and sequential tasks.
Events carry significant costs but contribute great value for the business either directly e.g. sales events with customers or indirectly e.g. knowledge transfer at team meetings. Yet here we often see a standalone event request & initiation process, web site and registration (in-house or commercial), separate or no project management, another tool for surveys, information exchange by email (e.g. deliverables from external agencies) and of course the ubiquitous Excel sheets. CRM integration is often done using copy/paste and financial/cost tracking using an independent accounting system.
As anyone who runs events will recognise, the effort of bridging these diverse systems is considerable and costly. And the risk of information errors and slow response at critical stages of the event, is high. Plus, if you have other entities accessing the data (internal and 3rd party), is it really feasible to manage accounts and security across multiple systems properly? As for Excel sheets, how good is control of these in scattered filing systems, local copies, exchange sites and with usually no security worth speaking of? And if they contain company-confidential or personal data then the risks are amplified by potential damage and legal action.
It is against this background that we developed Pulselinks. Working with a professional Event and Congress management team in a regulated industry, our focus is to have all data and processes managed through one system which provides for & supports integration with other specialised applications that are part of the full process life cycle. Using one system allows information items to be managed once, but reused anywhere in the event context, reducing errors and increasing speed to make changes.
Pulselinks uses event templates to ensure that for any type of event the right items are available in an easily replicated way. Business process specific workflows, access control, project plans, web site, registration forms, automated email content and a unique content library offers information integration from the main data system directly into office documents. This library also provides controlled access to gather materials such as brochures, graphics etc. keeping everything in one event-related place.
The use of a “document architecture” with a configurable workflow system speeds and controls the stages of items such as budget approvals, abstracts submissions & reviews, registration and event request forms. This supports a consistent approach and facilitates automation of processes, leading to higher efficiency, lower costs and improved compliance. This architecture also promotes significantly higher data security & control by providing tighter data access combined with automated access authorisation mechanisms allowing users to be in control of their own data.
We believe that Pulselinks is a major step forward to delivering the full benefits of a Digital Environment by improving event process automation, leverage integration with existing systems while retaining flexibility and ease of use.