Executive Summary | How We Tested | Outsourcing CRM
Executive Summary
Midmarket CRM vendors like to claim their systems are usable "out-of-the-box." Not so. While products from ISVs targeting this market are a great deal easier to deploy than those for the large enterprise, implementation pains are still a given. But how debilitating will that pain be? Some products come closer to the ideal of out-of-the-box functionality than others.
We tested CRM applications from ACCPAC, Epicor, FrontRange, Microsoft and Soffront in our Business Applications Lab in Green Bay, Wis., for inclusion in our NWC Inc. infrastructure. We discovered that if you're willing to make modifications--some significant--to your core business processes, these products will indeed require very little customization and can be deployed successfully in just a few days.
However, if you believe as we do that your software should conform to your business processes, rather than vice versa (hey, call us crazy), you'll experience some discomfort. We rated products on their ability to import data from our DB2 database and integrate with our directory, ADS, and we checked their customizability. While no single product performed flawlessly, there were bright spots among the bleak darkness of implementating a CRM application.
Our Editor's Choice was ACCPAC's CRM 5.5. It was customizable yet had a primo feature set, all at a reasonable price. Offerings from Epicor and Microsoft tied for second place.
How We Tested
We tested CRM systems in NWC Inc.'s Business Applications Lab, using a Compaq ProLiant DL760 with eight 900-MHz processors, 2 GB of RAM, an
18-GB SCSI hard disk and a GBE copper NIC. Our base software included Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Microsoft SQL Server 2000.
We imaged five of the drives with the same base software configuration. Each product was installed on one of the disks; any additional required software was installed during installation.
After installation we worked on setting up users and groups. In the process we evaluated each product's ability, or lack of, to integrate with existing user-management solutions such as the ADS server in our NWC Inc. infrastructure. Once we had users and groups configured, we examined the process of importing corporate data from our existing DB2 database. Our goal was to import our customer, order and inventory data into the system with an eye toward synchronization in the future, via conventional database replication mechanisms or through an EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) solution.
We then administered and customized each product, a time-consuming process, as most programs are geared to B2B scenarios and NWC Inc. is a B2C-focused initiative. We closely assessed each product's ability to be customized to our environment and how well we were able to model our business with each product--including terminology.
Continued evaluation of each product after initial deployment and customization included testing work-flow capabilities, integration with messaging and, if applicable, customer self-service Web sites.
Outsourcing CRM
As an alternative, Salesforce.com offers a hosted CRM solution, which reduces TCO by housing the system offsite and requiring no desktop client. Salesforce.com takes its CRM program offline and lets mobile sales and customer-service reps work even when they're disconnected. Using the same model as the products from ACCPAC and Microsoft and a local MSDE (Miscrosoft Database Engine) installation, the hosted application can be synchronized with the desktop, providing all the information a mobile employee would need offline.
You might think such a system would hinder customization, but Salesforce.com has made it easy to tailor the application to your needs. In fact, ACCPAC and Microsoft offer hosted versions of their products without any loss of features or functionality.
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