For those of you following along from my last blog post, first stop on the Spring ’09 salesforce.com Cloudforce Tour is Atlanta, GA. It’s interesting to see the difference a year makes in the attitude and awareness of the people attending. Last year Informatica On Demand sponsored the Salesforce.com conference, then called Tour de Force.
While the ’08 audience was curious, they seemed more interested in socializing with their fellow attendees and colleagues. This year the tone was much more business focused and attendance was up nearly 50% over ’08. SaaS and Cloud Computing are now top of mind for businesses looking to reduce and manage costs, and integration of back office systems and databases with Salesforce CRM is a pressing topic for all who we spoke with.
We sponsored a CRM Integration Roundtable breakfast with local prospects, and our customer Atlanta Dental Supply (ADS) presented a case study on how they’ve integrated their Salesforce CRM system with their MS SQL Server-based order management system. It’s an interesting example of how a relatively straight forward ‘out of the box’ (or should I say ‘out of the cloud’) integration can significantly streamline sales and operations for a rapidly growing mid-size business.
ADS, provides dental supplies to dental offices and clinics throughout the greater Atlanta area. Previously customers would call in orders to agents who would manually enter orders into a PC-based order tracking system. The process was manual, labor intensive, and somewhat error prone. As the business grew the demand for more agents to process orders and more sales reps to manage the accounts meant increased overhead.
Recently ADS converted their order processing system, called Breeze, to a new MS SQL Server-based system that is able to directly receive orders from a client application that they provide to their customers. They then implemented Salesforce CRM for their sales reps to manage the now hundreds of accounts that their business had grown to. The problem was that the order processing system and the Salesforce CRM system were separate; one on premise and one in the cloud.
In researching options, Alan Carter at ADS learned of the new Informatica On Demand Data Integration Service while searching on AppExchange, the Salesforce partner applications portal. They registered for a free trial and in a matter of a few days they were able to integrate MS SQL Server with Salesforce. Using the included SQL Server connector they used the Data Integration Service to integrate the order and shipping data into Salesforce. Using the automated scheduling feature Alan set the integration job to run automatically so no manual effort was required to import the data. The Data Integration Service provides timely updates of customer product orders and shipment data directly into their account records in Salesforce. Now the reps have current, accurate information at their fingertips right within Salesforce. This helps them in two ways; first they can answer customer questions in real time without needing to research and get back to them later. And second, with this new data and using Salesforce reporting and dashboards, they are able to see trends and changes in business with specific customers, enabling the reps to spot opportunities, address competitive erosion, or upsell new products. Overall ADS is now able to provide better customer service without needing to hire more sales staff or invest in costly on-premise equipment and software.
You’ll find a brief overview of the Atlanta Dental Supply case study on the Informatica On Demand website.
In case you’re interested in attending a future Cloudforce conference you’ll find a schedule of upcoming Cloudforce events on the Informatica On Demand website. I encourage you to attend one to learn for yourself.
Next stop on the tour is New York City. Please check back to see what we learn from the people working in the center of the Financial Services industry.
