Summit Group Software Blog

Did you get the memo?? Summit Group Software has moved!

Our new location has many great new benefits — perhaps the best one… Our new training room! We are putting it straight to good use and running a Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Administration class for customers this week. It’s a full house in there and they are getting their training fix!

We are running a full calendar of training events - in our new West Fargo facility, as well as classes in Chicago, Omaha, and Kansas City for the first time! And don’t forget our full schedule of webinars, too!

What better way to gear up for fall than by getting yourself some of that much needed training on Microsoft Dynamics, Microsoft SharePoint, and others!

Check out the new training schedule today:
http://www.summitgroupsoftware.com/php/training.php

What would you do if time and money were not a consideration?

Who cares?? I dare you to find one company for whom time and money are not a consideration. Even the largest companies with the deepest pockets have some sort of ownership or shareholders to which they are accountable for those little details like time and money.

Of course we want it all and we want it for as cheap as possible. Those are sometimes (not always) opposing desires. So what’s a company to do in making their decisions… simple — prioritize. I see companies struggle with prioritization everyday in my role managing implementation projects of CRM and ERP software for businesses. The catch though, is that prioritization really isn’t simple. It comes with… ugh… tradeouts.

My advice on tackling prioritization is to start at the very top. Assess the high level strategy as determined by the leadership. These strategies can help guide what is important down to some of the most tactical things. For example — is the strategy to ‘grow’? Then the priorities that should be emphasized in a software implementation are ones that support expanding the infrastructure, scaling out capabilities like access and reporting, and support flexibility or the ability to change processes as the organization grows.

Once you understand the high level direction of the company, those strategies need to be applied to the decisions around solutions that will support those goals. And then finally, those high level strategies serve as the directionality when making decisions about what that system needs to do, how customized something needs to be, and/or where tradeouts may need to be made.

This can guide decisions on everything on possible integrations with other systems to the depth of a customization. If a trade out over convenience and complexity has to be made taking cost into consideration, I will always challenge the decision makers I am working with by asking those questions about what is acceptable or not in the context of their short and long term business goals. And challenge assumptions about the both the cost of the software or services as well as the cost associated with their people, processes, etc.

Again, it isn’t simple. Even if you can gather consensus on the highest level strategies — interpretation of what that means for a team, department or an individual is often up for debate. This is the tricky part that often involves a little soul-searching on the part of the groups I am working with.  In the ’storm’ of the implementation, it is very hard to cling tightly to the highest level strategic priorities when the noise and pressure from individual users or teams is often not only loud - but legitimate. Open communication and a fair assessment of those true priorities, along with transparency (as much as is possible) to those affected by a prioritization decision helps garner support for those tradeouts when they have to be made. Good luck! Happy Prioritizing!

Summit Group Software implemented a time and expense entry system for our consulting practice using xRM (Microsoft Dynamics CRM) as the platform.

It started out as a simple use of some additional entities for projects, time entries, expense entries in order to track our billable time and expense entries for clients. These entities have relationships to customers and are integrated (using Scribe Insight) over to our Microsoft Dynamics GP accounting for billing purposes. In the past couple of years since we have been working on this evolving functionality, two great benefits have been acheived over our legacy time entry system.

1) Natural linkages with all our customer data in CRM– account/contacts, links to cases for support incidents, etc. That insight to every person in the organization on who has been billed and for what has been a great thing.
2) REPORTS, REPORTS, REPORTS! Ah! Finally - instant insight to our billing data for clients, on a per-project basis, and of course our own utilization reporting. The old system left us with almost no insight. As the consulting team manager, every day I sing the praises of my instant reporting through CRM and SQL Reporting Services! It has changed the way I work.

A third benefit is one that we always talk to our clients about and it is really cool to see it ourselves — Flexibility with our changing business needs.

Summit Group has rolled out numerous changes to our business in the past year including the allowance of discounted, prepaid time and a Managed Services plan that really changes the way we look at billable services for our clients. xRM (CRM) as the platform for our time entry system has allowed for new entities, many-to-many relationships between all of them, and very fast changes to reporting through SRS to be agile and make our time entry and project tracking system bend to the needs of our business. When I think of the way we could think about turning parts of our business model upside down and just have the systems ‘work’ to support whatever changes we needed for our business… that is priceless. A ‘custom’ built time and expense entry system with the supportability of being built into the rest of our CRM system. What more could a consulting manager ask for?

Summit Group has worked on an evolving project using the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform over a couple of years. In the beginning, we set out to build a training registration system for clients in the training center industry. (Companies that run computer training as their core business.) This set of customizations was initially marketed under the name Summit TCM. We built some extentions that utilized some basic entities to manage registrations, link them to people/companies and tapped into the Service Scheduling module. Again with some extensions were able to link events in the calendar to registrations and then people.

We have been able to take this basic set of extensions for the purpose of managing technical training and bend them further to managing any type of  class registration, including soft skills training sessions, arts and musical training, etc. And we have also moved this even further to do just general event manegement for some of our clients who have a need to track events, places, people, etc. With the flexibility of the CRM platform, we have been able to transform Dynamics CRM from being a place to just keep track of customer interactions - to stretch into an entire registration, scheduling, and event management platform. Adding this to basic CRM functionality around opportunity and pipeline/revenue reporting we have a pretty powerful solution now to deliver to service businesses that have a need for registration and event management.

Earlier this year we had a chance to put together a very unique solution for one of our clients in the trucking industry. They were in need of a solution to replace a legacy ticket entry system which was plaguing them with inaccurate data and a platform that was rigid, didn’t scale, and no one could really maintain. We designed a solution using Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Scribe to create a fast and flexible data entry environment for tracking and calculating tickets. We were able to integrate customer data from Microsoft Dynamics GP and driver data from an external 3rd party database using Scribe. Once the data was in CRM, we used Jscript to complete numerous form customizations with a lot of complex calculations and defaults. SQL Reporting Services served as the reporting engine to pull in tickets and calculate batch data.

The beauty of this ticket entry system, is that as this customer grows and further refines their own customer engagement strategy, Microsoft Dynamics CRM is already the platform they are using for their core ticketing system… and is ready to step in with all the customer, driver, and ticket data to be used in a more traditional CRM function in the future.

Summit Group recently had the opportunity to work with one of our banking clients to utilize Microsoft Dynamics CRM in a very unique way (xRM).  Taking advantage of Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Scribe we built a reporting solution for easily calculating Loan Loss Reserve Adequacy.  Nightly we push all loan data from their Fiserve solution into custom entities in CRM using Scribe.  Along with this we have created the ability to track various factors relative to loans such as risk and economic ratings, guarantee information, and other values.  The system allows for quick modeling to determine the impact on Loan Loss Reserves due to changes in various factors.  It also freed up about 2 days a month for the person who previously figured this out by hand! 

Not only was this solution delivered within budget but it also allowed this institution to free up a significant amount of cash that was being held in Loan Loss Reserves.  Finally, this platform now is being expanded for more traditional CRM use with the added benefit of already having some vital customer information in the system. 

In a world of acronyms (and Microsoft loves acronyms) you may be wondering what xRM stands for.  xRM is really an extension or evolution of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Customer Relationship Management) product.  Because Microsoft Dynamics CRM sits on the .Net platform it is much more than a traditional CRM product.  Instead, a better way of viewing Microsoft Dynamics CRM is as a rapid development platform with out of the box CRM functionality, capable of instantly leveraging the .Net platform, and a vast array of other applications. 

What does the ‘x’ in xRM stand for?  That’s easy, in today’s business environment companies demand the ability to manage anything (X=anything), not simply relationships with customers.  xRM is the idea of extending the Dynamics CRM platform beyond traditional uses of CRM.  We love the idea of working with Dynamics CRM in this creative way to solve a wide array of problems and business needs. In the coming weeks we’ll post numerous examples of how we’ve worked with many of our clients in this way.  These examples will highlight the abilities and flexibility of the Dynamics CRM platform.