Custom Programmable Fields

SMP allows you to customize how you would like to sort, label or categorize your customers and contacts giving you greater flexibility on how you manage your database. We do this through what we call “Programmable Fields.”

When you first launch SMP you will notice on the “Market Analysis” and the “Customer” forms items labeled Prgrm 1, Prgrm 2 etc. with a field box containing a drop down arrow. These are fully customizable fields specific to your company's needs.  The field criterion is set by your Administrator.  Each customer and contact can be flagged with this criterion either in the top portion, which relates entirely to the customer or the bottom portion, which is specific to the selected contact allowing for even greater flexibility when filtering for analytical or marketing purposes. 

We suggest that you work with SMP a little before deciding how to implement these tools. How you set them up will be determined on how you want to use SMP and what information and sorting features are important to you. Some examples are as follows.

Examples:  

Customer Type
Commercial
Contractor
Government
MRO
OEM
System Integrator

Industry
Pulp and Paper
Food Processing
Industrial Machinery
Transportation
Construction      		Department
Administration
Engineering
Information Systems
Maintenance
Management
Planning
Purchasing
Safety

These fields give you even greater control over your filter criteria and can be very useful for marketing purposes as well as honing in on your most productive industry. For example, you may want to hold a seminar that will only be useful to Engineers. If you were able to assign every contact a “Job Description” you could easily pull up all the engineers and be more focused in your marketing efforts. You could rely on the “title” entered by the user but an engineer can be called by many different titles. Using Programmable fields allows you to place your contacts and customers into “buckets” that you define.  

By using Programmable fields with customers you can later perform very specific searches.  

In the examples below we have implemented 3 programmable fields on the customer level (Customer Type, Target Programs and Z1, Z2 etc) and 2 programmable fields at the contact level (Job description and Department)

 

Tip: Target Account Planning

You could use the programmable fields to create target accounts with your top manufacturers and then easily search and track how you are doing with those target accounts.

Searching and filtering by the programmable fields

You can search and filter by the various programmable fields through out the different modules in SMP