Contact Relationship Management


Background

Contacts are critical for both the front and back-office. With ONW, a contact can either be an institution or an individual. In addition, the general aspects of contacts include multiple addresses, emails, and phone numbers. ONW has sophisticated mechanisms for tracking how a contact interacts with other contacts in a family-office universe. For example, ONW's activities make it possible to capture interactions, schedule meetings, pull in emails from Outlook, and set up specific tasks. These activities can also be linked with the alert system which provides email and alert notifications 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. Name changes are also instantly tracked and fully searchable. With the use of 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 email, fax, or hardcopy via post. ONW tracks contact communication preferences then uses Microsoft Word to generate the preferred type of communication for each contact. The content of the actual communication, whether it's faxed, emailed, or printed, 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 an e-mail, fax, phone call, an appointment, or any other interaction.  All activities synchronize with Microsoft Office. Examples include: (1) Scheduling appointments in ONW, which then sends Outlook invitations, (2) Drag and drop email (with attachments) from Outlook to ONW, (3) Sending task invitations to Outlook based upon participants identified when tasks are created in ONW.

Business Relationships

Business relationships can be created between legal entities, 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. Employees that are related to their employer's contact record will automatically be updated with any address changes made to the main employer record.

Incremental Attributes

Any type of attribute can be created for any type of entity in ONW. These incremental attributes cover the myriad of information beyond core contact information and can be created in a structured fashion for 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 ONW. The notes contain built-in version control, which provides an invaluable audit trail by keeping 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 ONW organizes documents into structured classifications or 'buckets' for fast, 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 in ONW is its ability to categorize legal entities into meaningful hierarchies. Any contact can be organized into a categorization hierarchy. Entities can then be browsed by those categorization schemes. This is the ideal way to create persistent reporting on assets, funds, and investors. It is also the best method for slicing performance IRRs with ONW's slice/dice analytics.