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Revelation Software Enriches Riverside Cemetery with Deep Records Management
By Stephanie Simone
Planned in the style of Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central Park, Riverside Cemetery is a 100-acre facility that is more than a century old. Based in Saddlebrook, N.J., the company maintains public records for burials, private records on families, maintains billing, and oversees all the work done to burial plots in addition to taking care of monuments and records relating to them, and other tasks associated with running the business.
The company has a strong focus on customer service and continuously modernizes operations to keep up with changing requirements.
“Most people think a cemetery is two people with shovels, people digging holes and putting caskets in the ground but that’s really not all a cemetery is—there is a lot happening behind the scenes,” said Peter A. Blacksberg, president of Riverside Cemetery.
A cemetery is a combination of landscape work, record keeping, financial planning, accounting, and personnel management, as well as additional considerations such as maintenance vehicles, Blacksberg said.
At Riverside, all records are kept permanently and, until 25 years ago, all of it was stored on paper. The 1980s brought dramatic changes to Riverside. Office procedures that had been stranded in the 1950s were replaced by early personal computers for letter writing and record keeping. Standards for each aspect of cemetery maintenance were established, and the field crews were professionally trained in each task.
This technological transition in 1980 was aided by WinWin Solutions, parent company of Revelation Software. Initially using Revelation Software’s DOS-based Advanced Revelation, and then migrating to the Windows-based OpenInsight platform, Riverside has evolved technologically while remaining a traditional cemetery serving the community with warmth, compassion, and professionalism.
And today, Blacksberg believes Revelation’s platform is at the center of an operations-based organization that no one ever sees.
Keeping it Straight With OpenInsight
Riverside Cemetery worked with Mike Ruane, president of WinWin Solutions, to overhaul document storage and maintenance procedures.
Riverside runs its business on OpenInsight, which helps with everything from keeping track of phone calls from funeral directors, to printing and paying the bills, and tracking employee hours.
“Nearly everything is structured through a process control system that we custom designed with WinWin Solutions,” Blacksberg said. The entire work flow process is custom built to meet the needs of the cemetery, Blacksberg explained. “We have permanent relationships with families,” Blacksberg said. “That’s one of the many things that make our cemetery really different; we don’t purge the customer list.”
Using the database, the company records conversations with customers and can later pull up that data when customers call. The computer system provides a very rapid and essential first view of what’s going on, according to Blacksberg.
Transitioning Into the Future With Revelation Software
Changing from a paper environment to information automation is complex and not trivial, Blacksberg explained.
At first there was resistance to giving up doing work by hand. After 5–6 years of development and data entry, the cemetery was able to integrate more tools such as document merging, digital photography, and records based digital mapping.
“Each year we process over 2000 work orders on the cemetery grounds. With document merging we were able to print a map of the precise location where the work is to be done. It saves time and limits frustration. We were able to move away from one-off word processor-typed letters to dynamic database merging,” Blacksberg said.
Over time, the company has incorporated more tasks which have enabled them to use the staff in more effective ways.
Read on...
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OpenInsight 10 Beta Testing Program is Concluding
We at Revelation Software would like to thank everyone who has been contributing to the Beta Testing Program. Your diligent testing, issue reporting, suggestions and insights have made OpenInsight 10 a product we can all be proud of.
Documentation for OpenInsight 10 can be found HERE.
The official release date for OpenInsight 10 is April 16, 2018.
Arev32-CTO Indexed Fields Patch for OI 9.4 released
Some users may experience problems when using AREV32/CTO tables that contain indexed fields, where the field names use delimiters that are no longer acceptable in OpenInsight (such as periods – "."). In particular, this issue will generate an error (IDX_SETS or REDUCTION errors) under the following circumstances:
1. The table was created in AREV32 or CTO;
2. The table contains indexed fields;
3. The field(s) that are indexed have names that contain "invalid characters" (for example, "CUSTOMER.NAME");
To resolve this issue, AREV32, CTO, and OpenInsight routines have been updated to first resolve the field name(s) to their "acceptable", OpenInsight names before attempting to process them further.
Works members can download this patch from the Works Downloads section of the web site.
OpenInsight 10.0 / O4W 2.0 WYSIWYG Form Designer
OpenInsight for Web (O4W) is a flexible and powerful web development toolkit for OpenInsight.
Don’t limit your application to the desktop! OpenInsight for Web (O4W) is a rapid application development tool that lets you generate responsive forms, reports, and dashboards. Use our GUI drag-and-drop to lay out your forms and then test in both desktop and mobile browser mode. You can also use our full-function API to create the most sophisticated web pages.
Using our WYSIWYG Form Designer we have created a sample Mobile Pizza Order Entry application. Click HERE to run the application.
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