Your Software for Home Office and Teamwork

Many employees are currently working from home. This frequently leads to difficulties in communicating with colleagues. Companies then face the challenge of meeting these challenges and ensuring the best possible communication between employees. There are many different programmes and applications that enable and improve teamwork.

The ERP system projectfacts for SMEs offers its users many of the usual functions in a single system. projectfacts is more than just project management, time tracking, or a ticket system – it also offers efficient tools that allow employees to communicate quickly and easily and complete tasks cooperatively. You can find out which functions are available and what advantages they offer in projectfacts in this article.

”How can I quickly exchange ideas with my colleagues even in the home office?”

Our solution: Team chat

The team chat in projectfacts works like many well-known applications – you can create chats with colleagues or groups. You can use it for a quick exchange, for clarifying questions, or for other conversations. The chat is integrated directly into the system, so no additional application needs to be launched. Thanks to the integration, the chat can also show you – if you have the appropriate permissions – information about a colleague’s availability status. This means you can see before sending a message whether a colleague is in the office, working from home, or out of the office.

The most practical aspect of the integration is that you and your colleagues can easily discuss tasks, projects, customers, and much more via the chat. This means that when you have questions for colleagues, you don’t have to explain which document you are referring to – you can simply forward it directly. This makes work considerably more efficient.

”How can I manage my tasks and those of my team without losing track?”

First solution: Open items for task distribution

To distribute tasks within the team, there is, among other things, the “Open Items” tool. Here an employee can create to-dos for themselves as well as for their colleagues. In addition, relevant information such as priority, status, due date, or a description can be added to the tasks. This allows you to prevent tasks from being forgotten and makes it easier for your employees to work through open items by priority. Open items in projectfacts can also be linked to projects or individual work packages and displayed in the project overview.

Second solution: Boards

The boards in projectfacts enable agile working. Here you can use a shared board with your team to create, distribute, and complete tasks. Employees can also set up their own individual boards, which can be automatically populated with tasks. Benefit from the other functions of pf and, for example, automatically collect your tickets, open items, and projects on a single board or separately – however you prefer to manage your tasks.

In addition to the well-known Scrum and Kanban boards, projectfacts offers you further customisation options through the configuration of your own board. The drag & drop function makes operating and distributing tasks quick and easy. Thanks to the boards, you always keep an overview of your tasks and those of your team.

”How do I stay up to date even when working from home?”

The solution: Internal forum

The forum is ideal for sharing important information about customers or internal company topics. Posts can be linked to the relevant customers or projects. This means your employees not only have quick access to information about the discussion, but can also see in a contact record when an exchange is available for that contact. You also have the option of maintaining your own news channel via the forum. Posts created here are visible to employees on the home page under News. This allows you to highlight information and successes and keep colleagues up to date. In the internal forum you can also launch surveys among your employees – for example, to find a common date for company events.

”How can I coordinate appointments with colleagues in the home office?”

The solution: Team calendar

The team calendar not only serves to manage your own appointments, but also provides an overview of when each colleague is busy. You also benefit from the wide-ranging functions of projectfacts when working with the calendar. You can not only add colleagues as participants to an appointment, but also contacts from your CRM.

Thanks to the contact details stored there, you can also send an appointment invitation by email. Links between an appointment and a project or ticket are also possible. This way you can find all the important information you need for your appointments with just a few clicks.

”How can I access important information while working from home?”

The solution: Internal wiki

The internal wiki is your company’s knowledge base – here you can store all important information so that your employees have access to this data. Anyone can create a wiki article on important information or processes and share that knowledge with all colleagues, specific groups, or individuals. This ensures that all employees have access to the information they need. The great advantage of this function is that you benefit from the internal links – for example, you can link customers to the corresponding wiki page.

”How can I have quick discussions about customer enquiries in the home office?”

The solution: Ticket system

As is common with ticket systems, you can use them to handle customer enquiries while simultaneously communicating with colleagues about the tasks and coordinating with them. Use the internal processes to coordinate with colleagues on the ticket topic. These are not visible to the customer by default, enabling a traceable exchange among colleagues directly in the relevant ticket.

For handling internal tasks, the internal ticket function is also available. These can be used to manage work that is not based on customer enquiries. In this way, you benefit from a quick exchange for enquiries and internal processes, without losing track of a customer enquiry.

”How can I access important files while working from home?”

The solution: File management

The Files module is a storage location for important files that are accessible from anywhere at any time. You not only manage important files together with your team, but you can access them from anywhere thanks to the web-based software. Files can be managed not only through directories, but also linked directly to elements within the system. Important contracts can, for example, be stored directly with a customer or contact. Information required for the execution of a project can be linked to a project, or directly to the relevant work package where it is needed. For mobile uploading of documents, there is the pfScan app, so you can upload important documents even when you are on the go. Using the permissions system in projectfacts, you can additionally control access to files.