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"Business process management is about people, processes and integration," said Tavares. "Maximizer Enterprise brings a crucial dimension to the business process by facilitating improved customer interaction and intimacy and helping us differentiate our business."

The Challenge

Opalis Software was successful helping other companies manage their business processes, and by 2002 had signed on more than one thousand customers. As the Company increased in size, the executive management team realized they needed a way of managing maintenance expirations, serial numbers, and the increasing number of customer calls. Tavares recalls how their sales team used to spend hours completing and processing a single transaction.

"Our sales team used to make quick updates to their customer records using Excel and then walk that information over to the accounting department so they could start processing the order. We have thousands of customers now and there was no way Excel was going to cut it, in terms of tracking and sharing customer information between teams and with other departments. For a company that is built on helping organizations improve business processes, this was simply unacceptable, which is why we looked for a CRM system that could be easily integrated with QuickBooks, the accounting system we put in place," said Tavares.

As Opalis Software grew in size, more customer service and support representatives were brought on to help the company stay ahead of new customer requests. These employees also needed access to complete customer records.

"Our sales team needed a fast way of recording customer details in our database, which they could send to our accounting department to start processing orders. At the same time, our customer service and support department had to have access to the database to efficiently and effectively address customer concerns. In short, what we needed was a CRM system," said Tavares.

The Maximizer Enterprise Solution

Opalis Software chose Maximizer Enterprise over several possible solutions because it met their technology needs from a sales force automation perspective, and because the product offered the flexibility and integration capabilities the organization required.

"We wanted to turn our sales reps' account information into an asset the entire company could use," Tavares recalled. "When we evaluated different CRM systems, we looked for one that was scalable, proven and affordable, and could integrate easily with QuickBooks and our custom license manager and registration system, and would give us a variety of reporting options."

Implementation

According to Tavares, the first phase of the implementation was focused primarily on automating their sales processes. Working with Toronto-based Customer Continuum Group (CCG), a Maximizer Software Certified Solution Provider, the solution was up and running in about a week.

According to Bruce Russell, President of CCG, "Opalis management then wanted to create a breakthrough by integrating Maximizer Enterprise with their custom license and registration system, as well as their QuickBooks accounting software. This second phase of the implementation took us about a month to complete."

Adam Westland, Opalis Software's Systems Manager, says it was time well invested and points to the high user adoption rate as evidence of the success of the project.

"Maximizer now drives many of the processes within the company, from lead management to invoicing to product registration - it's a totally integrated tool. What used to take several people and several steps has now been streamlined into a single process triggered from within Maximizer Enterprise, starting with the customer," said Westland.

The third phase in the implementation was introducing the sales team to the Maximizer Enterprise Web client.

"We found the features and functions with the Web client to be very powerful and the upfront costs were pretty minimal, especially when compared with some of the on-demand alternatives and more complex systems out there," said Tavares. "The Web portal within Maximizer Enterprise is great and since it was built on the Microsoft .Net platform it can work entirely over the Web. Many of our salespeople use the portal to access information when they are on the road or at client meetings. Maximizer Enterprise provides us with a flexible platform to build upon as our company continues to grow.

"Once we achieved our initial SFA goals, the next steps were incremental and, from our point of view, had almost no costs associated with them with major benefits to the users," said Tavares.

Results

For the sales reps at Opalis Software, Maximizer Enterprise CRM is providing them with access to critical data at the click of a button. The system also met Opalis Software's goals of reducing the time per transaction and better reporting on customers.

"Overall, Maximizer Enterprise has provided significant improvement in sales rep productivity with a 20 percent across-the-board time savings, as well as 23 hours a week time savings on reporting and forecasting from a business unit," said Tavares

As for the future, Tavares plans on rolling out Maximizer Enterprise to more than one hundred users.

"Eventually we plan on opening up the portal to our resellers and partners too," said Tavares.