Skillfluence are not a typical ArtifaxEvent client, but they are a fantastic example of how it can be customized to suit different needs. Instead of managing rooms or venues, Skillfluence needed to manage a group of trainers who deliver training courses for them across the UK and Europe.
Some of the issues they were facing were difficulty in easily identifying trainer availability and resource heavy trainer booking paperwork.
They needed a system that would manage the availability of the trainers and hold all of the booking information for each training course so they could easily create and send ‘Trainer briefs’ to their staff.
When Rachel joined Skillfluence the company was in its infancy and able to use one dimensional record keeping such as a Word document to keep track of bookings. With swift migration to Excel to manage this process to have slightly more capability, a review of systems was undertaken. Rachel used her knowledge of both Learning Management Systems and Venue Management Systems to look for the capability she needed and was recommended to include Artifax in the final assessment.
The biggest selling point of ArtifaxEvent for Rachel was its ability to be manipulated in-house to suit their needs using the configuration and management menu to adapt the event types, reports and even user views.
Another fantastic bonus compared to the Excel and Word system was the financial reporting. Being able to generate reports on event statistics and trainer usage are just two examples of the reports that have created great business intelligence for Skillfluence. The reports also make this data available to non-Artifax users so it can be shared within the business.
Three other standard reports are regularly used to monitor activity. The first is the Sales Process Stage report that is used in the weekly sales pipeline meeting to discuss and plan the upcoming bookings. The second is the Brochure List by Arrangement, which is used by the Operations team to summarise initial outputs from Event Activities to the management team. Skillfluence have also had custom report work done to further turn the data in ArtifaxEvent into business intelligence for them. There has been a custom confirmation document that is sent to clients and exported as a word document, which also includes the terms and conditions of the booking. Before this was a double entry task as the documents would have to be separately created so this has saved hours in administration time.
The second custom report was the ‘Trainer Brief’ created for each booking. They pull fields out of ArtifaxEvent to create a custom document for the trainers that not only holds their booking details, but also the financial information such as their fee for the booking. It includes any delivery specific information such as venue (online link or in-person address) and the evaluation survey links in just a couple of clicks. Rachel estimates the creation of these two custom reports saves approximately one hour for every booking they have!
The third report is a What’s on List by Date. This report is used so the Operations team can look at a three week period from a given date and ensure they have everything on track for that timeframe. This is an ideal way to have a focus on not only immediate bookings but also to start planning for bookings further out.
Another special mention must go to the use of task set templates and event templates which Sharon has worked hard to create to improve efficiencies and which Rachel actually describes as a ‘present from heaven’!
It’s fair to say although Skillfluence aren’t the ‘typical’ ArtifaxEvent client, they are definitely reaping the benefits of the customization and reporting offered by the solution and even describe the system as ‘transformational’. We are thrilled they are so happy with the system and that is has brought such a change to their organization. That’s exactly why we developed ArtifaxEvent to create efficiency in your venue and event management that releases time typically spend on administration for you to spend on business improvement or creative endeavors.
