¶ PVYbusiness-OS | Getting started
The Business OS covers the process oriented management of any Business Informations which a freelancer, a small business up to mid-sized companies requires nowadays to manage their daily operations.
¶ Why yet another Business Software ?
It is true, that there are hundreds Business Software out there, both fully open-source and closed source, but they share all a few thing in common:
Elderly used Technology Stack, which they are based on and they grew and added over the years a lot of features and modules to stay in competition.
Features which are kind of Module oriented, so you have in average 35-50 Modules to install to get your Operations semi-valuable covered, but not taylored to your needs in terms of Data Fields, workflows and processes.
¶ What differs PVYbusiness-OS from other CRM/ERP CMS and eCommerce Solutions?
A lot.
Let’s start with the three most fundamental differences:
- Latest Technology Stack, matured in the past 3 years
- Designed & built from CRM/ERP Veterans and Business Analysts
- Groundbreaking different but tremendous flexible architecture
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¶ Philosphic - User centric Design patterns
We don’t list other vendors here, but just take you with us for a recent journey we had our self in a different project in previous roles in a different company, before we started the PVYbusiness OS. We where involved in an implementation of a well known Player in the ERP/CRM & BPM Industrie, which is “Commercial Open-Source”, based on Java, which requires to run:
- Tomcat Server (12 CPU Cores, 32 GB RAM)
- Postgres Database Server (4 CPU Cores, 8 GB RAM)
- Application Server as WAR (compiled) deployed over Tomcat
- SDK Server, additional Framework and Rest-API
The Vendor advertise ton’s of features and Modules, you can install from their handy built-in Module store, which is now called Appstore. The Project was made for SMB with 11 Users, and to cover all their operations, they installed around 42 Modules, to enhance the System with given Datasets and Option to maintain their data and worklfow. The main issue on such solutions, beside the fact that their code base is over 15 years old, with thousands of orphanced lines of codes, is, that each additional module you installed either broke existing workflows, where it was adverised, that you need this module to install, to utilise all features from the Master Module.
Second Problem was their Release Cycle of Updates and missing Qualility Management. A Minor Release update, marked as “Bugfixing” Release, introduced in average 132 new Bugs, where ove r 35% where Show Blockers, means, it harmed the entire Operation of the whole CRM-ERP-BPM OS and affected customers could not invoice their clients for 3 months.
When our Team Developers told their Indian Developers, that they have made this and this Error, the acknowledged this issues, but on the same hand, the european management of that particular Software tried to sell “Support Packages” to the customer, to fix their own bugs. And that’s not the way Software, especially “Commercial Open-source” where you pay user licenses, shall work and operate.
So, when we assisted in that projects, and also checked many alternatives on the Market, we decided to look up for a modern framework, and start something very flexible from scratch, which a Business Owner can operate, customize and enhance by him self. Because starting something from scratch, results in a top modern technology stack and source code, since its a fact, that 90% of all ERP/CRM Vendors out there have an aged and grown code stack up to 20 years old, being maintened based on Security Enhancements and adding features… After so much clash, we dediced to start something on our won. We don’t have the aim to become a global Market Leader with PVYbussiness-OS, just to deliver something, which is based on Open-source and works straight out of the box. Nothing is more frustrating, then to receive an mail or github issue answer like this:
Yeah, we know its broken, we likely gonna fix it on version 7, coming next year.
¶ PVYbusiness OS Technology Stack
We talked a few years ago on chat with Directus. They have an excellent modern and highly flexible Framework pushed out to the Open-source world and we stated: The Framework would be excellent for a CRM/ERP with a dedicated Customer Portal, but its a big task for a small team… But things and environment has evolved since then.
¶ We build on top of:
- Directus Application Framework (Backend = Business-OS)
- NUXT.js Frameework utilized as a headless Content Management System, tokenized and fully managed within the Business OS
Then we sat down to the Sketch Board and outlined must have features and functionality Roadmap, and also decided not to provide dozens of so called “Modules” or Extensions, and reduce the usual Business Software Clutter to the minimum.
We define the things in Collections. Collections can be utilized complementary, both as static or dynamic views or standalone to the System, and its field set can change dynamicly while on editing a record, based on its state, classification or driven by a Business Process Management Flow (BPM). Further any collection can be relational loaded in a form view and provide additional functionalities. A much smarter and more flexible way to enhance Data, then working with so called “Submodules”.
That short explained, it allows us to design and customize with little efforts, exactly that kind of input fields, where user has to fill or BPM does, which is on the given moment absolutely nessesary to operate the Business Task. Not more, not less.
And we use BPM in Benefit for the Users, since we all know, we are all lazy and forgetting from time to time a few things like:
Enter Completion Date and Time for Task, even we marked that as done.
So we believe, since we use the system we designed for our own operations, we made a really comprehensive Business OS, which gives all necessary tools, regardless how big you are to manage basic business operations the easy way, but enhance it with Automatisation, where needed. The PVYbusinesss OS fits for a Service oriented Agency, a eCommerce Seller and even for those who creates their own physical products. It’s all covered.
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¶ Feature Overview
¶ CRM
From Prospecting to Lead and Deal Management, regardless if you use it or not, is very efficient included along with ongoing and planned Activies, which not only offers 80’styled outbound and inbound calls, but integrates as well Webcall and Webmeetings.
Deal Management let you defne your own Status for Kanban Views within 30 Seconds and combine that to a BMP Flow. For the basic we include, that a Lead or Deal is then succesfully converted, when he accepted a proposal/quote. Everything else leads to false/positve and there many systems out there lacks.
¶ Inbox and Conversation Management
From the Contact Form on your Website straight into the Business OS, without any detour. You see even from which page and form the lead has contacted you, and the Source for your Contact or Organization is given into the correct Lead Source Field automatically.
¶ Organization & Contact Management
There the PVY Magic is in. Its basecly one Component who manage your Partners, Resellers (if any), Suppliers, Authorities, Customers and assigned contact to it, based on their Status, Business Relation and Classifications. We also took over a old good and simple A-D Organization Classification.
And our Lead Management is truly based on Conditions, same as for B2B and B2C Customers, or Suppliers.
This way, you have to maintain less “data pools” and increase your efficieny in your daily operations by same time avoid death/orphaned or not maintained data.
¶ Sales Management
The most important thing on any Company is its Sales Management. And here we put some PVYmagic too, but lets have a look how its structured:
Lead Capturing and Landing page with auto-deployment of Landing Pages, Marketing Module with Campaign Management (also a newsletter to your existing customer or prospects with PVYmailr is a Campaign) up to pre-qualified Leads turning into Customers:
- Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
- Product Qualified Lead (PQL)
- Marketing Qualified Lead (PQL)
- Service Qualified Lead (PQL)
- Non-Qualified Lead (PQL)
And the great thing is, you don’t need to have a Degree as “Master in Marketing” to understand these flows or managed them. But you also can disable with a few clicks such nice stuff built-in.
A ease of use Deal Management, both for new Leads or Existing Customer for new Projects or Upselling, sports not only Values for a one Time Deal Value Propositin with one Total Amount, it let you also manage Subcsriptions based Values or a mix of both. And because we like it sometime simple and some times a bit more detailed, you can define for each new possible Deals, which shall result with proper interaction from your sales, pre-sales into a Sale, how much details it shall cover.
(PLACEHOLDER=VIDEO How Simple it Works)
¶ Marketing - Campaigning - Acquisition
From Campaign Management, internal or with external Partners, to automated Landing Pages for your Lead Gathering up to automatic Lead Source Qualification is all built-in. Start using Prospects to generates Lead and convert them finally succesful into customer, is designed as a clutter free and easy understandable process. And yes, we have a few buttons in Detail Forms, but only useful and working ones:
Call, Email, Convert to Lead, New Deal, New Project, Log Activity. Because the System decides, when a Lead is being converted successfully into a customer, and not your Sales Guy, because he had promising call.
¶ Useful automatisation
In our case, we utilize for certain customizable “Deal-Types” a little automatisation. One our example we have Deal Stage called “Online-Demo”. So when the Sales Guy managed to bring this Lead on the way to buy our stuff, he can suggest him an Online Demo. With just a little efforts using the “Flow” Manager as Business Process Modeler, this Leads/Contacts landing in this Deal Stage, receives a personalized, but automated E-Mail in the name of the Sales Guy, based on our built-in E-Mail Templates, which invites the Contact to an personalized Online Demo, where he just needs to confirm his wish Date and Time, using PVYcal.
This little Flow increases the Performance and Speed of Lead Processing drasticly, where our Onboarding Team is taking care about this, the Sales Guy can work on others. Once passed, the system checks for its attendence and check that on the Deal record automatically, and inform the Sales Guy about that Milestone. It’s also a kind of quality assurance, so that nothing is forgotten.
All things mentioned here, are fully customizable, without hiring a Software Developer for it. But if your process, maybe in a one man show is much simpler, then you want to go straight to the Quote and Billing Section.
It takes you less than a Minute, to add a new “Conditional Field for Input or Computed Data”, if the Status of a given Record is changing.
¶ ERP
PVYbusiness-OS sports a fully fledged Project Management Suite, which let companies and their team let manage different types of Projects and Project-tasks, beside of single tasks and activities. We also take care about correct and realistic Human Resource Utilization, since many Project Management Solutions, both as standalone or as part of an ERP Solution, always expect, that the allocated Resource can be utilized to 100% of its time to handle Tasks and Issues all day long. A kind of an utopia.
¶ Introducing Project Classification
Projects are same but different. And often each time. Each company has on top of that not only different requirements on Project Management, but also need to handle different types of Projects. And often many different Project Types together.
That’s why we introduce with PVYbusiness-OS Project Classifications, where we utilize each of them with different Fieldsets, Input, Selection and Drop Downs, to get the things proper done:
- Standard
- Fulfilment
- Development
- Documentation
- Marketing
- Business Development
- DevOps
- Legal
These Classifications we also take to the Tasks itself, but within a Project you can have different task classifications, because it is a real life requirement. On Task Level we have in addition Type of Tasks beside of Priorities:
- Tasks
- Milestone
- Meeting
- Deliverable
Customers can be interactively involved in a project, or tasks to be completed by them, with just one click. If you have an Project with an Organization classified as Partner or Reseller, you can also share the entire Project over the Customer Portal with them, and define what details they see and can interact. Very simple. You can also push a form to a certain Customer or Serialized to bunch of Customers based on Queries, Type or Relation, to gather additional informations among other neat stuff.
¶ Financials
Billing your Invoices, automate overdue Invoices with Reminders (optional with surcharge based on Reminder Level) both on Sales and Purchase Side, completed with Subscription Management for both sides. Complemented with Service Level Agreements you can allocate smart to Subscription Contract, Managing Expenses for your Employees, qualify them as reimbursable or billable to customer or a specific project, up to Payment Terms, different Payment Methods, such as Credit/Debit Cards, Wire Transfers or Bitcoin, the System offers everything to start with little effort to activate what you really need.
¶ But there is more:
- Proposals, with Templates,
- Project Management, with templates, covers standar Project Tasks and its Management up to DevOPs and Developer ones, as well Product, Service or Marketing related Project Management for its fulfilment.
- Invoices, Expenses, with Tax Management, billable to Customers or not
- Payment Gateway for Credit/Debit Card Payments and ApplePay, Samsumg Pay, with Stripe, automatically mark Invoices as paid (Stripe Integration) but also Postpaid with QR-Code on PDF Invoices
- A headless CMS, for your Website with or without eCommerce and A.I Support for SEO and ALT Image Tags, you have forgotten (affects your search index scoring)
- A built-in Customer Portal with Password-less Login for your Clients, for Task delivery and Secure Information Exchange
- Help & F.A.Q Management, with anonymous interactions with Website Visitors
- Issue Tracker with Product Issues, Project Issues and Customer Claims
- Warehousing & Fulfilment Automatisation
and on Top of that, you can link PVYtimer to your Business-OS, and use one of the best and ease of use Mobile and Desktop App to track your time to Project Tasks, Support Tickets or simple in Backoffice.
(PLACEHOLDER=VIDEO GETTING-STARTED_ADMIN)
We did not only enhanced the Project Management for different kind of Projects, such as Standard for Internal, to Documentation, Development, DevOps, Deliveries, we also integrated a Product Management Tool, regardless if its Software or Physical Products, connected to Release and Version Management, but also linked to your Sales Item as Products, which can be Standard Items, Subscription Items, Service Items, Subscription Bundle Plans, up to Physical Products with Waste Managemnet and API’s for Warehouse and Logistic fulfilment. Therefore, Swiss Customers can fully automate it with the Leading Fulfillment Partner in Switzerland, and EU Customers can enable as well one of the biggest one for the EU Market, being said, that we can also enhance this integration upon your needs for another partner.
And not forgotten to say, that our PVYbusiness-OS creates out of a Flow on this PVYwiki its Documentation, and this on Several Levels, such as:
- Quickstart
- User Guide
- Admin Guide
- DevOPs Guide
Automated from any new Product creation, its also pushing the Base Content Structure as Wiki Content in it.
For sure you can disable such things or tweak it. But if you are a Web Developer, Product Engineer or Software Developer, you gonna love such little neat things, because it saves you valuable time. To understand the scope, here some related Links and its Base Content on Wiki is being generated:
As said initially, you can start small and use what you need for your own Business. But the Things are here, and when you need’em, they work straight of the box. Not seen anywhere else. And I also remember the days on Industrial Design. Documentation was king, but automatisation lacked.
¶ The headless Content Management System
PVYbusiness-OS delivers you in addition a Frontend for your Website, which includes either UI Core, Material Design or Awesome Font. Its based on NUXT.JS a comprehensive modern Framework for creating stunning good locking and user friendly websites. We believe, that a company website shall have a tight integration with its Business Software the company use, for various reasons. But we also know, that traditional Content Management Systems are hard to manage in terms of Cyber Security since most of them does not only host the Customer Data straight into the Frontend in their Admin Section, but also become very vulnarable, since they are in its MVC Architecture also based and equiped with third party Extensions, Components, Modules and Plugins from a certain Extension Directory (to name a few: WordPress, Joomla) which are not being maintained by the initial developer, which provided this for free as open source. The danger comses with the aging of these code and the lack of many Web Designer Agencies, who are not capable to maintain such Code internally by their own, since they are primarly focused to deliver a CMS the customer can add/edit the content by him self, they focus mostly on Templating, Boostrap the Design over CSS.
It is no coincidence that websites such as Wordpress or Joomla are being regulary hacked, customer data being exposed and stolen.
A headless CMS Systen does not have this potential points of attack. No Customer Data is hosted in a “Backend” called Admin Section of the same Webroot, (/admininstrator) which is content management component. Everything you serve over that Website, we call “Frontend” is purely API driven. Secondly such sites scales up much easier than traditional CMS Website and use less I/O resources.
PVYbusiness OS delivers you two Website Templates, all supports eCommerce, Blogging, Portfolio and Case Studie Management and you can utilise what ever needs you have. Dark / Light Mode is also being supported, which nowadays is being expected from Web Users, since its built into their Mobile and Desktop Operation System.
Since you manage all of your website content from your Backend (PVYbusiness-OS), which is physically a different Server than your Website as Frontend, you have also more options in terms of Data being handled, displayed and integrated into your workflows. A typical PVYcustomer has his PVYbusiness-OS only reachable behind PVYvpn (p2p) and only the Frontend as your Website is exposed to the internet. But for sure, they can communicate to each other, in almost native way.
¶ Advantages of a headless CMS
- Higly secure against attacks
- Lightweight and scaling
- Pure API Communication instead of PHP/JSON Soap Interface as Intpreter
- Data Management can be connected to Workflows with Conditional Checks
¶ Features of PVY headless CMS
- Static and Dynamic Content
- Blogging, Any Video or Embedded Content
- eCommerce built-in the elegant way (story telling)
- Easy Form Management and Lead Source Classfication
- Help Collection with real time engagement to PVYbusiness-OS
- F.A.Q Collection
- Re-usable Content Blocks
- Responsive by Design
- Dark & Light Mode support by Design
- can be utilized with automated landing page deployments
- Customer Portal integrated for tokenized Secure Data Exchange between Customer, Partners and your Business-OS (Invoices, Payments, Tasks, Subscription Management, Issues, Help)
- A.I driven SEO Meta Data generation
- A.I driven “Alt” Tag completion, because we are lazy
- Stripe Payment Gateway Integration with support for Apple/Samsung Pay
¶ Payment Gateways
PVYbusiness-OS let customers pay online, either on the eCommerce on the Website, or within the Customer Portal, for received Quotes, Invoices or Subscriptions. We offer two built-in Payment Gateway Processors, both requires an Account on their Website to enable it withing the API and Secrets inside PVYbusiness-OS:
¶ Stripe.com
Stripe.com is one of the Dinosaurier in terms of user friendly payment methods, operated by the Morgan Chase Bank, USA.
You need to open an Stripe Account, get verified and approved and you need to file your real bank account where the money is being transfered, either 1x or 2x a Week.
¶ Accepted Payment methods
Any Debit / Credit Card such as Amex, Visa, Mastercard, Apple Pay, Samsung Pay.
¶ One more thing
PVYbusiness-OS has a fully fledged Issue Tracker, both for Bugs, Customer Claims, Feature suggestion or Project Issue Management built-in.
In our case, any Customer Feedback is triggered either from any PVYapp built-in Feedback form, or from Customer Portal. But always from a PVY-ID User. And we use our own GitLab Enterprise Server, behind P2P VPN with PVY-ID Login and additional 2FA for the UI.
If you are a Software Developer or System Architect, you know that GitLab does not offer in their Open Source Edition comprehensive Analytics for Issue Management, its only Repo based, which cause extra load for developers hoping between dozens of Repors to work on Issues where may be connected to each other. To get that Feature from GitLab itsels, for 10 User on their annual Ultimate Subscription, you gonna pay over 16K USD annually.
Secondly we would like to use the built-in Issue Tracker within PVYbusiness-OS as Master Destination, to Pre-Qualify the reported Issues landed in the queue, provide more clear informations in terms how to reproduce it, and from the moment, the Issue is set as “confirmmed” the BPM flow pushed that as new Issue to our GitLab Server in the related Product Project Repository automatically.
This increases not only the Quality Management on our Level, it also reduce Clutter for the Developers and they don’t need to waiste their time in poorly documented issues. The Middleware we use between Apps, PVYbusiness-OS and GitLab Server is called PVYbugtracker. <-- Learn there how that works. You will also find a simple UML Diagram for it.
Coming back to the thing, how we saved 16K Anually for the first 10 GitLab Users, and how we solved the Issue with the missing GitLab Repo Analytic.
We utilize the PVYmeta for it. We connected the Database of GitLab to PVYmeta in a secure tunneled manner in the local private cloud environement. And then we run our questions against GitLab, joined data from different tables, grouped and sumarized it well, and this was done with a total spent time on it of 25 minutes. And after that is done, the Machine Learning Core will tell us more about our Issue Envolvment that any GitLab Ultimate Analytics can do. Pretty smart.
¶ Read the docs
and dive into the details and learn what PVYbusiness-OS can do for you.
Explore the PVYbusiness-OS User Manual
If you are a Customer of PVY.swiss or one of our Customers, who already using PVYbusiness-OS, then check out our Customer Portal Documentation.
Explore the Automatisation Documentation, which covers built-in Flow Manager for BPM flows, tokenized API calls to retrieve, publish, query and update records, Webhooks and of course PVYautomat.
For Notification Management, such as the built-in Notification Panel, E-Mail Notification or customizable Webhooks into your PVYmessenger Account, please check the default user guide above. And because you survived reading until here, there is also a Bottom Line:
¶ F.A.Q
Q: Can I use PVYbusiness OS also with my existing Website, instead to re-design a new website over it?
A: Yes you can. You can use also features such as Contact Forms for Lead Capturing or extend it with PVYforms to route it to the PVYbusiness OS.
For Shopify Users, we have made an API to integrate it, so you have finally an CH/EU conform CRM/ERP connected to it, with options for Automated Warehouse Fulfillment over SVZ AG or EMCO in the EU. Product Catalog and existing Contact Database can be imported into PVYbusiness OS.
¶ Industries where PVYbusiness-OS fits in:
¶ Any
except Shops with PoS and Cashier System. We don’t have PoS integrated yet, because we think, when we do that, it requires for each Country like on HR, Payroll and Accounting, to much customizations. Something a mutual Partner Network may can accomplish in near future. But, if you are fully on Crypto, let’s talk about.