Business Intelligence Case Study

- The Business Store Oracle CRM On Demand

Auckland-based business consulting and management company The Business Store implemented Oracle’s CRM On Demand to boost its sales intelligence and reporting. It also aims to help its clients do likewise.

Key Business Requirement

Director Paul Speary says the search for a CRM platform at The Business Store had been an “on and off” project for nearly 18 months. The company had also undertaken a couple of CRM reviews for its customers.

The Business Store had been using Microsoft Outlook, spreadsheets and manual processes to manage and report sales activity, but this combination lacked integration and took too much time.

Speary says the company needed to be able to report and then extrapolate that report into separate reports for its clients.

The key unique requirement was providing on demand business management. A solution that is scalable to requirements and could just as easily downsize when customers fall away.

Business Benefit

“We are investing in systems and showing clients how they can work for them,” he says.

Solution Delivered

After reviewing various CRM options over an 18 month period including Salesforce.com and Microsoft CRM the company preferred Microsoft software. However, the cost to implement MS CRM was way beyond the budget of the small company, especially the up-front capital cost.

A client of the company was using Salesforce.com, but it was the much broader range of standard reports available in the Oracle product and the ability to create custom reports that finally swung the deal.

With reporting a key requirement of the companies performance management, the Oracle CRM On Demand platform not only met its demand, but was also affordable.

Traditionally, Oracle has been a large enterprise solution provider - but the product had good local support from implementation partner Fusion5.

Project Cost

Total Project Cost $20,000 over two years including implementation.

Per-seat cost is $96 a month

Set-up between $5,000 and $8,000, including loading the data.

Deployment Plan

The Business Store implemented three seats initially but expects to roll out more in 2009.

The Business Store expects 3-15 clients to adopt the system over the next 18 months, along with several more of their own users accessing the system.

Implmentation Partner

Fusion5 does a lot of Oracle work but also sells and implements Pivotal and Microsoft.

With the lightest IT footprint and the lowest technical requirements for business users, there was no need for IT involvement, according to CRM Business line manager Amanda Peake.

Peake says Fusion5 can implement the system in around seven working days — if the data is clean.

Planned Next Step

but expects to need more over the next quarter and further systems for its clients. It is already using the system even as data is being uploaded — one of the advantages of the on-demand model.

Business Feedback

• The implementation will create separate areas for The Business Store’s clients to use CRM On Demand for their businesses. The plan is then to migrate these to the client and exit.

   

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