Release of Astea Alliance 11.0 Continues Tradition of Delivering Innovation that Sets the Standard for Service Management and Mobile Workforce Solutions

HORSHAM, Pa., Sept. 18, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Astea International Inc. (NASDAQ:ATEA), a global provider of service lifecycle management and mobility solutions, has introduced a new release of the industry's most robust solution to meet the evolving needs of global service organizations. The significant investment in development has resulted in an unprecedented release that creates a paradigm shift away from the traditional service management solutions in the market today. With this release, Astea has introduced an abundance of new features and enhancements that were developed on the premise of three main underlying concepts; optimizing and streamlining processes, enabling proactive service insight and intelligence at every level, and significantly increasing ease of use and customizations without technical skills. Accelerated revenue growth, proactive intelligence, productivity and process optimization, enriched employee interaction experience, and increased customer satisfaction are just a few of the advantages organizations will be able to achieve with this new release.

The majority of service organizations already recognize that service management and mobile workforce solutions are mission-critical components to their overall strategy in order to fuel growth, derive competitive differentiation, and ultimately achieve the highest levels of customer satisfaction. Now, forward-thinking organizations are looking at how they can deliver more predictive and proactive service to adapt to the ever changing and increasing demands of their customers. With Astea Alliance 11.0, companies can do just that, deploy in the cloud or on premise, from a single solution provider. For more than 34 years, Astea has been developing and implementing global solutions solely focused on providing service organizations with technology innovations that will further optimize and accelerate their business, and this release continues that tradition.

Below are just a fraction of the features and enhancements in Astea Alliance 11.0 that accelerates innovation to transform the way companies provide exemplary service:

• Productivity and Process Optimization –When it comes to workforce management, having too many or too few resources can dramatically impact a service organization's ability to provide superior service. With Astea's new Workforce Planning module, organizations will be able to ensure that they have the right amount of resources, with the right skill sets, at the right time, in the right geography to meet demand while optimizing resources and costs. Service organizations will be able to create, monitor and proactively adjust plans, in real-time, to ensure optimal resource utilization across the organization. When it comes to empowering the technician in the field and improving productivity, Astea has consistently delivered. Now, Astea has shifted the focus on enabling the technician to become a source of new revenue generation by enabling the technician to identify, quote, and sell products and services while on site at the customer. Additionally, Astea has developed extensive process optimization facilities pervasive throughout their entire solution suite. By adding more workflow wizards, increasing "one click" updates, and further compressing processes, service organizations will be able to increase efficiencies and provide faster service to their customers.

• Proactive Service Insight and Intelligence at Every Level – Astea has developed Smart Checklist functionality that will enable organizations with the ability to create unlimited, conditional branching checklists and learning guides that can assist the back office or technician in the field to accurately diagnose, troubleshoot, record key information, follow instructions based on specific responses, and ultimately resolve the issue the first time. When it comes to enabling intelligence, Astea has a long history of providing embedded dashboards and contextual reports throughout the application. With this latest release, Astea is extending its powerful reporting and business intelligence framework. Delivering easy-to-use report creation and end-user personalization capabilities, without needing any technical or programming skills, will provide even more meaningful and relevant metrics and key performance indicators at every level. Astea has also introduced innovative Operational Heatmaps that combine geographic data with business and demographic data for highly interactive dashboard visualizations that enrich understanding and lead towards rapid identification of key insights for better decision making across the service enterprise. 

• Ease of Use, Customizations without Code, and Connecting with the Enterprise – By leveraging Astea's intuitive, point and click interface, non-programmers can easily customize without code to quickly adapt the solution to the dynamic needs of their business. Additionally, Astea's HTML5 mobile platform users can leverage the groundbreaking Mobile Options Editor tool to modify the mobile application without needing technical skills or learning a separate development application. When it comes to sharing information with existing ERP, CRM or other solutions, Astea provides an extensible platform that is designed to easily integrate with existing systems within a company's infrastructure. Astea has added numerous plug-and-play connectors to ensure that relevant information is shared and exchanged across the enterprise. The newest connectors that have been added to their existing portfolio of integrations are: Salesforce.com, Oracle JDEdwards, Microsoft Dynamics (CRM, AX, NAV, GP), and Quickbooks.

"Building on our extensive history and expertise in the service management industry, Astea Alliance 11.0 has achieved a new standard of delivering a powerful, feature-rich, forward-thinking solution that offers greater ease of use, unmatched configurability, accelerates and optimizes productivity, and provides unique ways to deliver knowledge throughout the organization to ensure user adoption that ultimately ends with elated customers," said Zack Bergreen, CEO of Astea International. "We intimately understand that companies are under constant pressure to do more work with fewer resources. Simultaneously, service organizations are being tasked with increasing service revenues and creating competitive differentiation to offset product commoditization. This new release has a heightened focus on delivering functionality and flexibility that will enable organizations to accomplish those challenges without complexity."

Astea is the only solution provider that offers all cornerstones of service lifecycle management: customer management; service management; asset management; forward and reverse logistics management; and mobile workforce management with enhanced scheduling optimization. Astea's solutions are seamlessly orchestrated to share and leverage information throughout the service lifecycle – removing the traditional barriers between the field and back office. With Astea Alliance's modularity, companies can introduce one module at a time or deploy a seamless information backbone across the entire service lifecycle continuum, thereby eliminating the patchwork of disparate systems that can hamper a company's ability to provide best-in-class.

About Astea International
Astea International (NASDAQ: ATEA) is a global provider of software solutions that offer all the cornerstones of service lifecycle management, including customer management, service management, asset management, forward and reverse logistics management and mobile workforce management and optimization. Astea's solutions link processes, people, parts, and data to empower companies and provide the agility they need to achieve sustainable value in less time, and successfully compete in a global economy. Since 1979, Astea has been helping more than 600 companies drive even higher levels of customer satisfaction with faster response times and proactive communication, creating a seamless, consistent and highly personalized experience at every customer relationship touch point.

www.astea.com.   Service Smart.  Enterprise Proven.

© 2013 Astea International Inc. Astea and Astea Alliance are trademarks of Astea International Inc. All other company and product names contained herein are trademarks of the respective holders.

SOURCE Astea International Inc.