Workbench by Bluedog    Workbench is a 100% web based platform that encompasses a range of powerful business applications for collaborating on projects, managing teams, sharing information and selling your services. Workbench is Bluedog's team collaborative web application, designed to support knowledge workers as they manage projects and activities. Real-time reporting enables project management with a focus on earned value, balanced scorecard reporting, and sophisticated workflow.

Gain a Real-Time 360° View and Drill-Down Insight into Projects, Activities and Teams
It's a web-based project and activity management tool that gives departments or organizations a dashboard view of work in progress. It also tracks and manages issues, contacts, timesheets, and documents in a knowledge base.

Professional services automation, without the expensive IT department!
Bluedog's solution provides an affordable and complete environment that simplifies file sharing, group scheduling and project management with a web-based interface that can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection.
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The "Balanced Scorecard" strategic approach to performance management uses four perspectives to help organizations achieve management's vision. Workbench automatically collects, summarizes and disseminates team- and project-related data, so you can easily apply the Balanced Scorecard method, visualize metrics, and measure progress. Users see vital information in a "dashboard" format. Combined with other tools like its Help Desk and Knowledge Base, Workbench can yield end-to-end process management, helping organizations become continuous-improvement leaders. "Earned value" measures work accomplished, regardless of effort expended or time elapsed. By default, Workbench renders this metric in dollars, but other views are optionally available.

Earned Value Management lets you monitor your portfolio of projects with an eye on accrued costs. Assign risks, and get real-time reporting on progress with visual depictions of risk, activities accomplished, even cost versus profit (for commercial) or budgetted hours versus allocated (for government/not-for-profit).

• Balanced scorecard meets or exceeds U.S. and E.U. governance and oversight requirements.
  EVM’s single management control system that provides reliable data.
  Integrates work, schedule, and cost using a work breakdown structure.
• Historical database of completed projects is useful for comparative analysis.
• Cumulative cost performance index (CPI) provides early warning signals for obstacles to success.
• Schedule performance index provides an early warning signal.
  Accdurate predictor for the final cost of the project.
• Performance metrics allows evaluation of the forecasted final cost.
• A management by exception principle can reduce information overload.
• Reduce risk by quantifying and tracking in real-time.
  

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With its built-in document management and knowledge base, Workbench enables you to upload and share documents, with assignable privileges and versioning. Documents can be associated with projects and activities, or can be part of your knowledge base library or other collections. With the optional content management system, you can push documents and articles out to your public web site or your secure portal. Document management is also subject to the workflow capabilities in Workbench - get notified when a document is revised or when new content is contributed and needs review.

• Cost savings by maintaining version control and central respository.
• Security with centralized control of documents, distribution to controlled lists in an encrypted environment.
• Disaster recovery by maintaining electronic versions that are continually backed up and archived.
• Access by providing remote and in-office access.
• Consistency of process yields uniformity and not reinventing the wheel.
  

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Workbench delivers notifications to the appropriate activity or document owners or others associated with the tagged elements - in the workspace dashboard, via email or SMS. Notifications are one way workflow can be tracked in real time - when your document version is revised, you are alerted. By sending, storing and retrieving messages within Workbench, you get a secure means to have users read them. You also get an audit trail and archiving of all messages (for compliance). And, if so designated, messages can become part of your knowledge base. Coordinate events via an iCal/Outlook calendar subscription web service.

Manager your staff, customer, lead, and vendor contacts. Automatic workflows notify customers when activities close so they can complete a Customer Satisfaction Survey, which contributes to the Balanced Scorecard.

Events are automatically scheduled when a meeting is set up, or a project or activity approaches a milestone, or when you need to work on a document or web content asset. Notifications can be sent, as well.

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Staff reporting is facilitated with the Weekly Activity Report, a roll-up of each staff person's narrative on his or her accomplishments for the preceding week. When combined with objective measures (percent accomplished on an activity, workflow steps completed, etc.), managers and other decision makers gain directly relevant and real-time insights into what their people are working on. Optional (at no extra cost) timesheet reporting gives activity-based accounting and invoicing detail on a per-person or per-project basis. The timesheet module is DCAA compliant for tracking and reporting on billable time.

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Projects and activities in Workbench enable you to more effectively deploy your teams based resource utilization, project status and hours utilized. Create projects from project templates. Manage activity (task) assignments, resource availability, roles and rates. Monitor due dates, track performance versus estimate and time off and available hours per staff to maximize resource utilization. Find and assign resources by skill and availability, both current staff and from your pool of subcontractors. Dashboard and project portfolio management tools provide roll-up summary information and comprehensive planning and performance analysis, including cross team reporting, project performance, project earned value and cost analysis, and real-time project status for all the engagements in your portfolio.

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A client and vendor portal can be integrated with your existing web presence (or we can supply one), Workbench provides secure access to your customers, vendors, subcontractors and other stakeholders so they can avail themselves of self-service help desk ticket submissions, knowledge base searches, and automatically generated FAQs.
Don't have a web presence? Our optional Content Management System (CMS) lets you integrate public web content with Workbench's workflow and publishing tools.

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With issues resolution, Workbench's customer relationship management (CRM) tools let your staff deliver faster and better service, with a full audit trail, when processing customer service requests arriving by phone, email or your web portal. Handle more complex issues while online users help themselves via FAQs and a searchable knowledge base. Workbench gives you a real-time 360-degree view of contact information. No more double entry of customer/stakeholder/member data, or hunting through multiple databases for content related to a contact.

Workbench tracks activities and records time dependencies, so you can monitor deliverables. Dashboard views show important metrics to help you analyze efficiency.

As an integrated Help Desk, our solution links key metrics, VIP issue response and the self-building knowledge base. And when an activity or help desk ticket closes, the customer is sent a link to a Customer Satisfaction Survey -- useful to help gauge how well your organization is doing. Connect to enterprise solutions like Remedy via web services.

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With reporting and tracking, view to-do items, compile list views of activities, add documents and other artifacts, assign responsibility, and check them off when an assigned user is done.
Private lists are for your eyes only (filter between private and open anytime), or assign who sees which activities based on groups and roles.
A cool data visualizer lets you see all your projects, activities, contacts and documents in a relationship node view, with easy drill down to details.
Workbench enables you to gather pertinent information from your staff, subcontractors, vendors and other stakeholders. The web application makes use of that information by rendering a wide selection of reports, dashboard views and print-ready output. Of course, accurate data means real-time reporting to help you make relevant decisions and mitigate risks to project performance.

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All your content, in one place , with out-of-box workflow or customized processes for authoring, editing and publishing content. Include Word documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, images and even video/podcasts. Using XMP/Sidecar XML data, your content is freely re-usable in any portal or thrid party CMS.

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Manage qualfications, positions, staff skills inventory. Post open positions, record candidate C.V.s and résumés, automatically track progress through your interview/hiring process. Maintain a database of staff, contractor and possible hires so you can fill those difficult positions or complete RFPs with the right staffing.

For staff, track expenses, control software licenses, equipment such as desktops and laptops, and manage resources like conference room scheduling. Maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) for your equipment.