2 page Case Study - Posted 10/28/2008
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Expanding Technology Integrator Grows with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Solution
Business Needs
Defining the relationship between business, technology, and operations was critical to NCA’s continuing success. NCA required more visibility into key business performance indicators, internal operations optimization, application supportability, and user interface “ease of use” to enhance employee morale. The technology solution needed to be practical, solve immediate problems, and establish a foundation for growth.
While the expansion of the company is positive, NCA did experience some growing pains along the way. Its existing CRM solution was not meeting the needs of the company, leading to operational inefficiencies and increased costs. Interactions and efforts across the sales, back-office, and professional-service delivery teams were often duplicated, especially around order processing.
NCA’s existing CRM system had very limited customization features, security capabilities, and suffered from performance issues. Employee productivity and morale was breaking down and the company suffered from “CRM decay”, as users became frustrated with the poor performance and reporting of the CRM system. Employees had difficulty tracking marketing-campaign leads and investments and generating ROI reports for the partners that invested in NCA marketing efforts. Furthermore, there was a lack of visibility into the sales pipeline, lead generation, and the profitability of different services.
Solution
NCA’s goal was to find a solution that could sustain revenue growth, decrease operational costs, assist sales and marketing, and most importantly enable the organization to continue to provide excellent service to customers.
NCA investigated several vendors, with the primary concern on partnering with the right service organization. The company matching NCA’s criteria was Microsoft Gold Certified partner Madrona Solutions Group, Inc. “What really set Madrona apart from the competition was their ability to propose an architecture that led to a design that met NCA requirements,” said NCA’s CTO Don Flynn.
Madrona engaged with NCA in the summer of 2007 via an envisioning exercise, gathering all of NCA’s requirements regarding customer relationships, sales-force automation, integration, and reporting. This exercise incorporated detailed discussions with NCA members from across the company.
The envisioning process provided a document to help clearly define for Madrona the extent to which duplication of efforts was occurring and which alternative processes had been implemented to overcome this. What they discovered was a lack of consistency in reporting; often different teams that needed to rely on one another weren’t able to communicate as effectively as required.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 was chosen as the right solution for NCA’s needs based on the technology’s integration capabilities with Microsoft Outlook, which was being used across the company. Dynamics CRM gave staff without a technical background the ability to make customizations to the tool without additional partner services. The solution is also highly adaptable, with an ability to be configured to meet NCA’s rigorous security requirements.
Based on the architecture solution map created by Madrona, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 was deployed company-wide. Every division – management teams, back-office, inside sales, outside sales, marketing, and professional-services delivery teams – now has the operational insight and reporting functionality to do their jobs effectively and efficiently.
Lastly, the Madrona Connection Manager tool was utilized to integrate Dynamics CRM with NCA’s existing Dynamics GP implementation in order to reduce duplicate entry of customer and order information between systems.
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Our goal was to find a solution that could sustain growth, decrease operational costs, and assist sales and marketing efforts, while providing excellent customer service. Microsoft Dynamics CRM fit the bill. |
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Don Flynn
Chief Technology Officer
Network Computing Architects, Inc. |
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Benefits
In the short time since going live with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, NCA has reported significant progress in reducing or removing the pain points that were caused by its former system. Morale among employees and management has increased, because they now have greater visibility into the business. Within one day of deployment, back-office staff began reporting hours of time available to them that they did not have before. NCA management now has the ability to standardize its reporting, and the system’s functionality and ease of use have given NCA the flexibility to create new analyses of data without depending on external report developers. The ability to integrate this solution gave NCA valuable in-house visibility into this new market space that it could take directly to the customer.
- The flexibility of the system, with its ability to adapt to existing and future-looking Microsoft solutions, along with adaptability to open-interface products, gave NCA confidence in this solution’s long-term viability.
- NCA gained increased business intelligence and increased customer service, in addition to lower costs and enhanced productivity.
- Hours of time were saved by staff, improving operational efficiency and the effectiveness of employees.
- Workflow rules within Microsoft Dynamics CRM – including a revised sales process – increased collaboration among the sales, back-office, and professional-services delivery teams has minimized duplicate efforts.
- Increased visibility into the sales pipeline and improved, accurate reporting has elevated management’s confidence in revenue forecasting.
- Ease of customization has allowed NCA to meet the special requirements of various teams.
- Out-of-the-box tools have allowed for the development of standardized processes, such as NCA-specific workflows and alerts.
- NCA now is able to customize leads management, which was not possible with the former system.
