This article discusses Accounting/ERP integration strategies.
It is intended for system admins at large companies.
TonicDM provides a way to automatically create and update projects in TonicDM when they are added or changed in your Accounting/ERP system.
See this article for details.
The system is intended to have maximum flexibility, allowing you to create and update projects in TonicDM in the way that best suits you, and to use the system to achieve a variety of busines goals.
For this reason, TonicDM chose email as the way to transport the new and changed project data from you to us. Because email is ubiquitous almost any system can be made to work, and because it is simple it can be made to do almost anything.
As described in the article, the email:
must be sent to a special email address that you can get from TonicDM Support
the subject of the email must begin with a particular phrase (eg. "New Project")
the body of the email must include the data in the specified format.
Beyond that, TonicDM will ignore any content in the email that it doesn't recognize. This allows you to use the email for multiple purposes:
Notifying staff that the project has been created
Start the email body with "Please note the following project has been set up by accounting:" and configure the email to also go to the principal and PM (or other people listed in the project record of the ERP system). You could also add other data to the email that might be relevant to people knowing that Tonic will ignore that too.You can also add text after the "New Project" in the subject, eg.
New project created: <project name>
One of the side benefits of adding the principal and PM to the To of the email is that Tonic will add anyone in the To as project executives which can save some administration. Note that anyone in the CC gets added as a project team member. So if you (as the admin) want to get a copy, it's best to add yourself in the BCC so you don't end up on every team.
Another way to add project executives and project team members is to include lines:
Executives: person1@company.com person2@company.com
This allows you to add people to the team without them getting the "New Project" email (ie. they don't have to be in the To or CC).
However note that Deltek® cannot put people's email addresses in the email body (just their names) so this function is not available to Deltek® users.