RYSA Technologies and Services - Blog by Praveen Kumar J

Managing PDF documents Using Zoho Creator

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 16:07:18 +0530

“There’s no shortage of remarkable ideas, what’s missing is the will to execute them.” – Seth Godin

Introduction

In today's digital age, PDF documents have become a ubiquitous file format for sharing information. However, it's not uncommon to find yourself with multiple PDF files that need to be merged into one for easier organization or sharing. That's where PDF merge applications come in handy.So, whether you're a student, professional, or anyone who works with PDF documents regularly, this blog will provide you with valuable insights on how to merge PDF files quickly and easily.

Use Case

Let's say you have a company where you send life insurance quotation to client based on the need and also merge a catalogue along with all the other product details for reference to the client.

Here's how it could work:

The life insurance agent or broker gathers multiple life insurance quotes from various insurance providers.

Each quote is saved as a separate PDF file.

Using a PDF merge tool, the agent can combine all of the PDF files into a single document.

The agent can then add a cover letter or introduction to the merged PDF document that explains the various options and highlights any particular benefits of each plan.

The merged PDF document can then be sent to the client's business via email or a secure file-sharing platform.

By using a PDF merge tool, agent can save time and effort by combining all of the necessary information into a single document. This can make it easier for the client's business to review and compare the various life insurance options, and can help to streamline the overall process of selecting and purchasing life insurance coverage.

How Zoho Suite Helps in Automating this?

Zoho offers a suite of productivity tools that can be used to create and manage PDF files, including PDF merge.By using the Zoho suite of products in conjunction with the PDF merge, you can create, manage, and merge PDF files with ease, all from one platform namely a Zoho Creator Application which covers both your business process workflow and digitalized documents share/sign/email.

Conclusion

So if you find yourself struggling to manage multiple PDF files, consider using a PDF merge Integration with your existing application to simplify the process and streamline your workflow. In addition, you can leverage the digital signing platforms viz Zoho Sign to get the documents signed digitally as part of compliance.

Simplify Business Data Monitoring with Zoho Creator

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 12:12:13 +0530

“Data really powers everything that we do.” — Jeff Weiner

Introduction

Zoho Creator Applications can be made powerful data monitoring tools which allow businesses to monitor their real time data and give business insights. It provides users with the ability to track and analyse their data, allowing them to make informed decisions quickly and accurately. With Zoho Creator Applications, small and medium businesses can stay on top of their data by monitoring changes in customer behaviour, sales trends, leads pipelines, sources and more. Additionally, they can set up automated alerts to be notified when certain conditions are met or exceeded. This makes it easy for businesses to stay informed and make decisions based on the most up-to-date information.

Use Case

Let us say you own a distribution company of certain manufactured products. You supply these goods/products to different show rooms in multiple cities and also deliver them directly to selective customers. By collecting the data of which distributors are selling more products, which products are overall popular demand, who are the repeated customers, delivery status of the orders, distributors PO request status, pending payments, different warehouses stock status, etc., you can make informed decisions easily.

Using Zoho Creator you can develop applications which can help in managing the back end data and also business insights dashboards to monitor without going to every report for validation. Although, there are multiple products like Zoho Analytics provide comprehensive dashboard, the use case here is selective to Small and Medium enterprises who would want to have a concise dashboard with lightweight requirements to capture data.

Below sample screenshot will give an idea to senior management to measure the day to day progress of the orders, sales to shop/customers, stock details, etc., without waiting for any manual help or assistance to them.

Why Zoho Creator ?

Zoho Creator is a low-code platform that allows users to create custom web and mobile applications with limited/no coding. One of the features of Zoho Creator is the ability to create dashboards that display data from your application in a visual format.It's worth noting that Zoho Creator also has pre-built dashboards templates that you can customize to suit your needs and you can also integrate with other Zoho services to make the Dashboard more powerful and interactive.

Notification support and integration with Zoho Creator will also help in making pre-emptive decisions to run the business in a smooth manner.

Conclusion

Data monitoring is a crucial aspect of any business or organization. It allows businesses to track performance, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions. By leveraging the right tools and techniques, businesses can gain a competitive edge and improve their bottom line.Besides the technical aspect, it's also important to have a clear data governance policy and to establish a data-driven culture within the organization. This ensures that data is being collected, stored, and analysed in a consistent and ethical manner.

Overall, data monitoring is essential for any business looking to stay competitive in today's data-driven world. By implementing the right solution and fostering a data-driven culture, businesses can improve their performance and make better decisions.

Facial recognition using Zoho Creator App

Wed, 28 Dec 2022 13:02:05 +0530

“Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.”

– Leo Burnett

Introduction

Facial recognition is a technique that has been around for some time now, but recent advancements have made it more accessible and accurate. It’s not just used by government or law enforcement agencies anymore - it has found its way into the lives of regular people too. In this article you can find how facial recognition be used/implemented in Zoho Creator

Use Case

Facial recognition technology is used in various industries like Manufacturing, Retail, Hotel, Events and Entertainment, Health, Banking and Education.

Imagine if you run a factory and like to track the attendance of the employees who are working in the plant currently in their shift.

The employee master is already uploaded into the application with their photos/images.

You can use a Smart Phone/Tablet at the entry gate to take a photo of the employee during entry at the gate. Once the photo is clicked, the application will recognize the employee's face and will update the status of the relevant employee's record. Based on the successful recognition, you can configure your workflow to mark attendance, record his Time-In, alert if needed to Department Head, etc. using Zoho Deluge scripts. Likewise, when the employee leaves the factory a photo can be taken. This can even be made self-service just by hanging the Tab at exist gate or with a concierge/security desk. Upon taking the snap, the application recognizes the face of your employee/visitor and updates the employee data/visitor register. Using this system you will have full data log/audit log of the employee's activities inside the factory.

Using Zoho Creator Solution

Zoho creator Mobile App with the camera support of the Tablet/Phone devices will enhance the image capture of the face and validate at the backend of the supported third party vendor image repository. With the developed workflow and data available in Zoho Creator backend, you can easily scan through the database of people and provide a valid responses. For this specific use case, the data collected upon Time In and Time Out helps attendance tracking and also ensure a valid/allowed personnel to visit the premises. In addition, the geo fencing features will also help in handling the application use within the stipulated area.

Conclusion

Given the need of technological adoption to smoothen the registration processes and repeat customer data collection, tracking of attendance and reporting common across different businesses, the Low Code Platform of Zoho Creator with the integration of Facial Scan software will help enterprises to manage their business efficiently with less investment on technology and quick deploy solutions.

If you want to integrate or plan to use such features in your existing app or new app, feel free to contact us on our chat or Contact Us Form.

Enhancing Customer Services with Zoho Suite

Mon, 12 Sep 2022 13:55:38 +0530

"Don't dwell on what went wrong. Instead, focus on what to do next. Spend your energies on moving forward toward finding the answer."

– Denis Waitley

Introduction

The way businesses are run today has changed drastically due to the introduction of new technologies and the digital space.There was a time when customers and businesses had limited interactions but in the digital age customers are given the option to interact with the businesses.

Zoho suite of products will help businesses move on to the digital space they are looking for.Zoho will act as a one-stop shop for any function across your business.

Use Case

Let us say you are an Insurance service provider. You let customers login to your customer portal and register themselves.

Once the customer is registered they will be able to select the policy and pay for it. During the process, if the customer is stuck or has difficulty in the process they will need assistance.

This is where technologies like Live chat, Raise a ticket or calling directly to a customer support executive will be needed.

Imagine the customer has certain doubts about the policy and would like to chat with an agent using the live chat option.The live chat can be made available at the bottom right corner of the page so that the customer will be able to chat with an agent.This chat can also be done using a chatbot when the agent is not available or busy with another client.

If the customer wants to raise an issue via email they will be able to do it via a self-service form with the details of the issue and submit. The submitted data will be generated as a ticket which is either assigned to an agent who works with the customer until the issue is solved.

If the customer wants to speak to a support person directly, there is an option in the live chat to make an online call directly with a support person to make it interactive and help in speedy resolution.

Solutions Using Zoho Products

The digital process of on-boarding a customer via the customer portal and letting them choose a service and giving them the best customer service and support can be done using a suite of products which expose their API for integration.

For the specific use case here, below Zoho products are considered:

1.Zoho Creator can take care of the front end of the app interaction with the customer as well as the onboarding of the customer to the application. The app is also mobile/tab/web friendly so that the user can work on the move without any issues.

2.Zoho SalesIQ can take care of the live chat option through with the customer will also be able to call the support person directly. The ChatBot option enables the customer to submit queries which will be answered by a bot when the agents are offline or busy.

3.Zoho Desk will take care of generating tickets raised by the customer which are either submitted in a form or sent by email.

Conclusion

By adopting digital solutions, businesses can seamlessly integrate their services with high productivity and accountability too. Happy Customers will be able to rate your services and also give you repeat business and references too.

Supply Chain Automation and Microservices with Zoho Platform

Thu, 17 Mar 2022 16:05:13 +0530

“When services are loosely coupled, a change to one service should not require a change to another.”

― Sam Newman

Introduction

Microservices architecture enables an organization to evolve its technology stack.The goal is that teams can bring their services to live independent of each other. Microservices reduces all types of dependencies and the complexities around it.

Zoho Creator, a low code platform for custom application development leverages the microservices architecture which allows you to prepare independently deployable components owned by a small team. Any issues in the services can be easy to identify/fix and easy to redeploy as the processes can be very agile.

Use Case

Let us say you have a SME dealing with confectionery. In your business you will have to deal with different services like Shipping items between Multiple warehouses, Inventory management, Accounts/Books Keeping.

Let's assume you have a centralized/primary warehouse where all the stock will be received which acts as a hub for all the other warehouses. The items will be moved from the main warehouse to other warehouses according to the stock availability and the needs of the other warehouses. This will be managed by the logistics team.

Once the items are transferred to the respective warehouses, the stock in each warehouse has to be managed using an inventory management team. This team keeps track of the stock in each warehouse and makes sure that the inventory is always ready for supply and also notifies if the stock is less for a particular item and helps in configuring reorder.

After the inventory is accurately captured, relevant staff can manage the inventory management effectively. Next, the Accounts/Books keeping of the finance team comes into action. This team does all the accounting work like generating invoice, keeping track of the invoice payments, tax filing, and due payments.

All the above teams are separate microservices which work independent of each other. The data can be shared between each team if required. This makes each team independent and makes sure the dependencies are reduced between the services.

Solution Using Zoho Products

This entire process of shipping items from/to the warehouse, Stock keeping/Management, Accounting and Financing can be done by using a simple integration via APIs of supported products. For the specific use case here, below Zoho products are considered:

1.Zoho Creator can take care of the front end of the app interaction with the customer as well as the workflow of the production line in the back end of the application. The app is also mobile/tab/web friendly so that the user can work on the move without any issues.

2.Zoho Inventory takes care of all the materials that are kept in the inventory. This also enables you to manage the stocks in the multiple warehouses, shifting of goods from one warehouse to other, etc.

3.Zoho Books takes care of all the accounting part of the application such as Invoice processing, sale order management, vendor/customers data capture, Tax filing and reports of Balance Sheets/Cash Flow and others.

By combining/integrating these three products together, you will be able to build a microservice that can take care of the business in an efficient and productive way.

The data can also be organized and maintained securely.

Conclusion

Microservice architecture improves productivity by breaking down the application into smaller autonomous fragments. Thus it is making it easier to build and maintain. Continuous integration and continuous delivery are key which gives an agile approach that allows cross-functional teams to work together.Based on the needs of each component, customization will be simple and quick which helps you to improve business operations as well.

Building Business Centric Microservices Using Zoho Creator

Fri, 25 Feb 2022 16:13:50 +0530

“The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.”
― J. Krishnamurti

Introduction

Microservices provide both a business centric and technology/architecture centric approach for developing software applications. They allow you to decouple or loosely couple the components/services connected using API services framework.

Zoho Creator a low code platform for custom application development leverages the microservices architecture which makes you to prepare independently deployable components owned by a small team. Any issues in the services can be easy to identify/fix and easy to redeploy as the processes can be very agile.

Use Case

Let us say you have to process the Insurance claims submitted by the customer which require to be screened, validated and finally processed by the teams of different skill set.

A customer portal for the customers to login and submit the claims, the operations team to validate the submitted claims and pass them to the Finance Team for processing and finally settlement of the claim amount to the customer. At the high level, we have UI component/Login Page in the portal, Zoho Creator workflows/business logic code, the e-Signing of documents where needed, the invoice generation and payment gateway to settle the claimed amount online.

Taking the specific use case here, the suite of products in the flow are, Zoho Creator customer portal (self service portal), Zoho Creator App for processing, Zoho Sign for e-Signature, Zoho Books for generating invoice, a third party payment gateway integration like PayPal, Razorpay etc. All these products can be integrated via API with proper security access tokens/API Keys. Also, you can make the supplementary components like Invoicing, E-Sign, Payment gateway integration as independent reusable components. This helps in reusability across multiple business processes or applications as well. This reduces the cost of developing again separately for different requirements.

Advantages of Zoho Creator

Zoho Creator helps in preparing the relevant forms/reports/workflows for the application to interact with customers and internal staff. In addition, with the OAUTH based authentication between the other Zoho suite of products via API help in smooth integration. In this case, you can completely prepare the relevant set of forms for Zoho Invoice to generate an invoice, prepare the templates or documents to be used for electronic Signature in Zoho Sign, the in built payment workflow helps in configuring the payment gateway like PayPal or Razorpay (India). In case of any other third party API to be used for any of these operations can be integrated to Zoho Creator via API with limited coding and in a highly secured manner.

Conclusion

Microservices a framework or architecture will help any business to make applications as loosely coupled components. This helps them in a long term to maintain and enhance the features quite easily with very little turnaround time. The choice of the Integration via API helps in choosing different products to evaluate and manage your cost/productivity in an efficient manner.

Business Insights and Analytics Using Zoho Creator

Thu, 03 Feb 2022 11:53:38 +0530

“The best vision is insight.” – Malcolm Forbes

Introduction

Business insight combines data and analysis to increase the understanding of a situation, resulting in a competitive advantage for your business.

Zoho Creator as a low-code platform can be used to collect data and help in analyzing the data to create an insight of your business.

Use Case

Let us say you have a furniture manufacturing plant and a chain of distributors across your country. These distributors have their own showrooms to sell/display the produced furniture.

Assuming a customer visits a showroom and orders furniture. The showroom which acts as a distributor makes an order to your manufacturing plant for the relevant furniture. Upon receiving the order, the furniture will be manufactured and delivered either to the distributor or to the customer as per the requirements.

The data points involved here are the distributors master data, products data, customers data, warehouse data, logistics data, invoicing and shipment.

Insights

As you can see, there are multiple levels of data to be analyzed in the flow of business. This will be used for low-level understanding of an issue and taking the right action for competitive advantage.

Following are some of the data that can be collected as insights

Number of orders from each distributor.
Highest/lowest orders received for distributor.
Product models which have very high/low bookings.
Showroom with high/low sales volumes.
Defaulters - Those who either have long pending invoice payment due or exceeding the credit limit

Advantages of Zoho Creator

Zoho Creator as a custom application development platform can be used for creating the business operation database requirements along with analytics driven dashboards for getting the overall business insight.

Leveraging the customer portal features of Zoho Creator along with the integration facilities with multiple suite of Zoho products like Zoho Books, Zoho Inventory and other payment gateway providers like PayPal, Razorpay will help the overall supply chain process easier. Below picture shows clearly the same.

With dashboard and analytics, the senior management/Business Decision makers can leverage the Zoho Creator built application as a suitable platform for making great insights and improving the productivity.

Conclusion

Overall the business insight is a tool that will help you in taking better business decisions, Improves operational efficiency and reduce the process cost and increases the revenue of your business.

Custom UI with Zoho Creator Widgets

Thu, 09 Sep 2021 11:21:13 +0530

“Good design is the most important way to differentiate ourselves from our competitors.”

-Yun Jong Yong

Introduction

The Human mind is programmed to get attracted to the colors and ambience it perceives. Therefore apart from the app development, the app design also plays a vital role in keeping the user engaged and active in the application.

For creating a fascinating and pleasing effect to its design in the application, Zoho Creator has a tool called Widget. This will let you with additional features to enhance the front-end capabilities of your app.

Widget capabilities

Widgets enable you to:

Create and customize features that are specific to your app
Redefine the way your application interacts with your customers
Take complete control of the front-end design
Incorporate third party apps that cater to your Creator app

Use Case

Let us take a sample use case of the tourism industry.

Assuming you have a company which provides tourism packages to the customers and charge them according to the package they choose.

Before the customer decides to go for the package, they would like to see the details of the services that are provided in that particular package. It will help them in deciding on the package they would like to opt for from you.

For showing the different available packages, you would need to create a UI that is modern and looks more of your company's standard as well as for the good look and feel for the customers. See the sample shown below.

In this sample widget, the customer will be able to see the packages offered and click on the button to see the details of the relevant package. In addition, the widget can be enhanced to provide multiple UI Options like showing the relevant data in Card Formats, redirected to any pages,etc along with Payment Gateway integration too.

The widget option in Zoho Creator application will give you the flexibility to create a UI which is not only dynamic but also rich in look and feel.

How Widgets work in Zoho Creator?

Step 1:

The widget can be created from scratch by using HTML, CSS and Java Scripts with the required custom look and feel features, standards, logos, any organization's specific standard UI representations as well.

Step 2:

Using the Zoho Creator CLI (Command Line Interface), a project is created with all the supporting libraries. The created widget is placed inside the project folder.

The successfully created project is then packed as a zip file using the CLI.

Please note that any minor change you have to do requires the repetition of building and packaging the Widget. Hence, once you are done with all changes, you can deploy. Else, it would take a considerable amount of time to do and redo of the widget creation process.

Step 3:

Once the zip file is ready, it will be deployed into the Zoho Creator application.From there on, the widget will be hosted inside the Zoho Creator cloud.

You can deploy more than one widget as well for your application depending upon your Zoho Subscription plans.

Conclusion

Thus widget is one feature in Zoho Creator that will give you the freedom to attain the usability you are looking for without compromising on the UI look and feel of the application.

Minimalism of Business Application Development

Tue, 16 Feb 2021 17:45:36 +0530

“Make things as simple as possible but no simpler.”

-Albert Einstein

Introduction

For a custom business application development of an organization, the architecture may be simple or complex depending upon the size of the organization. The complexity of introducing multiple forms, pages and associated functions is also a factor in designing these applications.

However, with the low code platform products like Zoho Creator, these complexities can be addressed without much difficulties. Moreover, those applications developed are very much user-friendly with simple drag and drop. This ensures the minimalistic way of business application development. Hence the business user does not face many difficulties in developing, designing or using an application built in such low code platform products.

Use Case

Let say you own a restaurant for which you would like to build an online food order application.

Your customers will be able to visit the website or download your application and book the orders depending upon their convenience.

Flow of the application

1) Customer fills up a form online with their order either in the app or in the website.

2) Customer chooses the delivery location or choose pick up.

3) Mode of payment as either cash on delivery or card/UPI payment

4) The order is confirmed and placed.

5) Notification by email, SMS and Mobile Push alerts (if the app is installed in the customer's mobile) is sent

6) Order tracking with relevant status update of the orders real time will be available for customer.

Following are the data that will be required for creating an online Food order application.

1.List of all the menu items that are present in the restaurant.

2.Cost for each item sold.

3.GST/Tax for each item for calculation of the total cost.

Following are some of the Dashboard data and Analytics that you will get out of the application.

1.Total no of orders per day.

2.Highest and lowest ordered items.

3.Graph showing peak order time using the application.

4.Status of each order and their payment methods.

5.Money paid and due in a day.

6.Average time taken for an order to be delivered.

7.Reports with accurate data that can be used for auditing.

8. On demand reports to check past monthly/quarterly sales/orders and others.

Conclusion

The use case covered here is a sample of creating a minimalistic application for an online food order application. With Zoho Creator, we can easily create a custom application which can be scalable, mobile/tab/web friendly and highly secure along with customer portal features. This not only helps internal users but also to external customers via portals with specific roles and access levels.

Making Small Business Apps in Cloud with Data Centralization

Fri, 27 Nov 2020 16:52:35 +0530

“The future depends on what you do today.”

Mahatma Gandhi

Introduction

Any data collected by the organization is a key performance indicator that helps to accelerate productivity and accuracy. Every industry depends upon its size has its ways of storing their data. The ways of getting data and storing them mainly depends on the type of industry like Small business , SME's and Enterprise level.

The data stored might be a ledger note written by hand or an excel sheet with data filled in it or a huge ERP software.

There are quite a few problems in these ways of storing the data

Having a written ledger note means the data present in it is scattered and searching for specific information has to be done by going through hundreds of pages. Also, storing and preserving the ledgers are some of the disadvantages of this method.
Using an excel sheet is an upgrade compared to the written ledger notes, but this also has multiple disadvantages when it comes to data privacy, hardware dependency and sharing of data.
Having an ERP system will help in eliminating most of the disadvantages when using the above two methods. However, the main disadvantage in having a system like this for Small business/SMEs is
1.Cost of the software.
2.A dedicated IT team to maintain the system.
3.Lack of user friendliness of the application/limited customization of the software.

These are only a few of the hurdles faced by an organization when they want to store and use the data.

Solution

To solve the above mentioned problems, one of the suggested ways for you/your organization will be creating a custom application on a cloud platform. The term custom application means.

Creating an application that is tailored according to your business which should also allow you to support customization on a need basis (for both planned and dynamic needs).
Eliminating the need to change your business procedures to fit a pre-developed software product.
Save money on hardware acquisition costs since the solution is designed in cloud.
Any issues that arise can be resolved quickly and efficiently by a dedicated vendor support.

Use Case

As mentioned above if you are using any of the methods like writing or using excel or getting a huge software, you will be faced with the same challenges.

Let us take a sample use case here.

Assuming you have a small manufacturing unit which manufactures parts of machinery, engines, wheels, etc.

The manufacturing unit has to take care of

Production
1.Tracking raw materials.
2.Tracking the end product.
3.Quality check.
Inventory
1.Tracking inward stock.
2.Tracking warehouse stocks.
3.Tracking outward stock.

Invoice
1.Tracking sales.
2.Generating Invoice.
3.Tracking Invoice.

So, the manufacturing unit creates a custom cloud application comprises of Production module, Inventory Module, Finance Module.

All the production related data will be entered and stored in the production module. The inventory module helps in storing and tracking real time inventory data. The finance module allows you to track the sales, invoicing and payment receipts/dues from the customers.

Few other industries that can benefit from the Cloud with the similar business needs are :

1.Healthcare

2.Automotive

3.Finance

4.Education

5.Insurance

6.Real Estate

7.Farming

8.Non profit

9.Hospitality

10.Logistics

Conclusion

Having a Custom cloud application built for an organization will not only help you in storing the data in a centralized way, but also ensure the flow of data in organized manner. This helps to manage the data efficiently to analyze and also increase the productivity with full fledged automation. More importantly, the applications built using low code technologies will be accessed from mobile/tab/web from anywhere.

Zoho Creator, one of the low code cloud platforms enables the organizations to have a smooth transfer of centralizing the data and also efficiently manage them without much difficulties.