Imagine my surprise when I found out that there are tools designed and developed to do idea management! Idea Management? The goal of tools like this is to process ideas for innovation, for improvement, for change, ... in a structured way. Typically these tools support the following process.

1. Everybody can enter ideas.
2. Ideas are compared, evaluated, discussed and eventually approved for realization.
3. Ideas are realized through actions, work groups, projects.
4. Management measures the amount of new ideas, the amount of realized ideas, the benefits, status of the actions, …

It’s a pity you are supposed to do this in a isolated software application. Not with TenForce. A very powerful and generic concept underlies the TenForce application. This simple concept allows to manage all kinds of work and to relate one work concept to another. For example: it can manage risks and their mitigating actions, audits and their findings, ideas and their activities for implementation…

Next to managing the idea process the TenForce application is able capture all idea related information (estimated costs, estimated benefits, impact on other processes or machines, approvers, evaluators,…). At the same time it is also able to dispatch and follow up the ideas and their related activities to everybody involved. This means that you can see what ideas/activities have been assigned to you. And it is self evident that all this information can be visualized through dashboards and indicators.