No compensating on IT

Warren said the implementation was very quick compared to previous solutions where they were forced to buy a server and upgrades.

“The hosted facility enabled us to launch in weeks instead of months with minimal training and reduced the amount of support needed from IT departments with the use of a hosted environment and provides obvious cost advantages,” Warren said.

“The other part is that we rolled the system out in stages and now we have it across the whole enterprise. Having it hosted allowed us to implement the CRM package in chunks, with JayThom providing support in our own
timeframe and process,” he said.

Warren said the return on investment of the system happened quickly, with the facility to forecast and integrate the sales pipeline to save 50 percent on administration.

“We have spent a few thousand dollars, which wasn’t a lot compared to the alternative of buying servers, but the environment and startup costs were relatively inexpensive and our sales guys can now spend less time on admin and more in field following up sales opportunities more quickly. We have recouped our investment in a matter of weeks.

“The system has helped us to simply respond more quickly to market, track leads and further improve customer service, while offering the opportunity to integrate more modules of CRM and SharePoint in the future.”

Brett Yorgey, director at JayThom, said through the latest release of Microsoft Dynamics, business solutions for ERP and CRM in a hosted environment are moving more inline with the trend of providing Software as a Service.

“We were one of the first to be offering the hosted service starting about two years ago and Software as a Service is now becoming a big focus of Microsoft and will continue well into the future,” Yorgey said.

“What it allows us to do as an on premise deployer of solutions is to give our clients the option of having a fully hosted system with all technical area looked after by us. We have found that companies such as Cambridge can trial the system before getting on premises.

“Many businesses find it difficult to justify the upfront investment in a new CRM system. For these organisations, deploying a hosted service represents
a cost-effective alternative.

“Also when looking at spending big dollars for a roll out, companies like to be able to suck it and see by using a core group of users and deploying the software in a hosted environment before moving to implementing the full system or with companies such as Cambridge they want to use the package as the need occurs.”

Yorgey said Cambridge is similar to a lot of companies – its information resides on disparate systems such as Excel spreadsheets and Outlook running a combination of workstations and laptops and with all data in
separate applications.

“You couldn’t get an overview from one central spot,” said Yorgey. “So you need to centralise information and allow the customer to understand conversion rates and have their leads put into a CRM module and be able to source those leads and quantify them, while also seeing who are converting those leads.

Once qualified and converted they can then go through a sales process for pipeline reporting and forecasting sales in a centralised system.

“Microsoft Dynamics CRM and SharePoint look after the document management area of deployment, what we have done is written an integration facility between those two applications, but centralised from one record,” Yorgey said.

According to Yorgey, choices in the hosted CRM market are limited at best. “For the most part, hosted CRM is only offered as a one-size-fits-all solution without the functionality to easily support unique sales and business process requirements,” he said.

“For the small business or at the enterprise level, right across the board, we are able to host the Software as a Service, provide it to every level of business and can be paid for per month on the applications used,” he said. “So the size of business is irrelevant. We have anything from three users to hundreds or thousands of users, which we can cater for in one deployment.

“We can provide the benefits of a CRM deployment in about an hour or two, with the user able to log in and start configuring with a template specific to their business. We have built up a number of templates from past implementations which users can configure themselves after that.”

Office SharePoint allows teams to create websites for information sharing and document collaboration, benefits that help increase individual and team productivity.

It also serves as a platform for application development. Including such IT resources as portals, team workspaces, email, presence awareness and web-based conferencing, Windows SharePoint Services enables users to locate distributed information quickly and efficiently.