Contact Relationship Management
Background
Contacts are critical for both the front and back-office. With ORE, contacts can be either institutions or individuals. In addition to the general aspects of contacts including multiple address, emails, and phone numbers, ORE has sophisticated mechanisms for tracking how a contact interacts with other contacts. Moreover, ORE's activities capability makes it possible to capture interactions, schedule meetings, pull in emails from Outlook, and set up specific tasks. These activities can also link in with the alert system providing email notification and alert notification on the user's home page.
Main Profile Information
Related information for individuals or institutions is captured, including an unlimited number of mailing addresses, emails, and phone numbers. Changes in names are also instantly tracked and fully searchable. Using EPoint, contacts can be exported to Microsoft Outlook by clicking on a single link. These contacts can then be synched with a Blackberry or other PDA, directly from Outlook.
Communications
Contacts have preferred methods of communication. These methods include e-mail, fax, or hardcopy via post. ORE allows for contact preferences by explicit type of communication, using Microsoft Word, ORE generates the appropriate type of communication for any contact. Hence, limited partners can have a capital call sent via e-mail, or fax, or both. In addition, the content of the actual fax, e-mail or hardcopy is recorded as an activity (described below).
Activities
Activities are tracked with rich detail and include participants, roles, follow-ups, and full text capture. Examples of activities include e-mail, fax, phone call, an appointment, or any other interaction. All activities synchronize with Microsoft Office. Examples include: (1) Scheduling appointments in ORE, which then sends Outlook invitations, (2) Drag and drop email (with attachments) from Outlook to ORE, (3) Sending task invitations to Outlook based upon participants identified when tasks are created in ORE.
Business Relationships
Business relationships can be created between legal entities of any sort, or individuals, or both. Relationships for any institution or individual have the option of creating a reciprocal business relationship from the perspective of the other entity. For employer --> employee relationships, address updates are fully automated with the ability to link employee address blocks with designated employer address blocks.
Incremental Attributes
Any type of attribute can be created for any type of entity in ORE. These incremental attributes cover the myriad of information beyond core contact information. Further, these attributes can be created in a structured fashion resulting in a superior level of organization. Unlimited incremental attributes are possible throughout the system.
Notes
In addition to incremental attributes, notes regarding an asset, a fund, an investor, or any institution or individual, can be tracked in ORE. The notes contain built-in version control that provides an invaluable audit trail by maintaining a copy of each previous revision, who revised it, and the date every time a note is saved.
Documents
Any type of document can be captured and related to legal entities. The document capture ability in ORE organizes documents into structured classifications or 'buckets' for fast and easy cataloging and retrieval. Unlimited check-in and check-outs are possible with full retention of previous versions. The document home page includes a powerful search mechanism that can perform free-form text searches and browsing by document classification.
Categorization
One of the most powerful features of ORE is its ability to categorize legal entities into meaningful hierarchies. Any contact can be organized into a categorization hierarchy in which entities can then be browsed by those categorization schemes. This is the ideal way to create persistent reporting on assets, funds, and investors and to cut up performance IRRs with ORE's slice/dice analytics.
