Jul 21, 2010
Author: John Graham
When Craig Marowitz, the President and Owner of Expert Technology Associates (ETA) found his business exploding, he realized quickly that growth would be impeded by trying to scale the business with a collection of professional services automation software that was on life support.
“Our business process management solution was on life support,” said Craig Marowitz. “If we kept investing money and time, we could keep it working but it was frustrating for staff and management. We believed there had to be better way.”
ETA provides business communications solutions to help customers achieve their forward looking strategies and goals using phone network systems and IT infrastructure. ETA’s competitive advantage is its institutional knowledge base, attitude and expertise grounded in ongoing strategic planning. Unfortunately, ETA was building this business on the back of a 20 year old accounting system and six year old CRM package that required months on end to implement needed changes.
ETA’s biggest business challenge is growth. But growth means serving more customers while not jeopardizing a positive customer experience. Repeatable deliverables and being able to fulfill requests and/or changes to deliver the experience their customers demanded, required access to integrated company information.
Objective: ETA needed seamless professional services automation integration throughout all aspects of customer information processing - from sales to billing - in order to deliver the experience they wanted for their customers.
Options Reviewed:
- Maintaining the “status quo” was not a viable course if the business was to grow.
- Looked at professional services automation Software as a Service (SaaS) products but was nervous about the integration expertise required in-house to make it all work. “Aligning your business processes with software means you don’t just log on and hit “go”,” says Craig.
- Could develop an in-house professional services automation system but it would take too long and ETA would lose market opportunity not to mention cost to scale it up and maintain it
- Could string together individual products for CRM, ERP and accounting but that would be more of what they were already doing. And that wasn’t working
Process:
- The Director of IT who had a firm grounding in ETA's the business requirements, was tasked to own the project
- Brought in a project manager to define the evaluation process
- Started by building the project team and then interviewed everyone in the company. Current best practices were identified as well as desired work flow improvements. What resulted were well defined processes that encompassed all current company activities
- Conducted an online search and consulted with peers
The Wish list: One system to manage the entire business
- Business processes to drive accounting
- Integrated approach to data sharing among all departments
- Reduce the cost and length of time to customize professional services automation options that the company would encounter while growing
- Capture all billing information and invoice it in ONE place
Solutions360 delivered access to the right information at the right moment
- System allows you create tickets quickly and thoroughly and provides visibility into entitlement and workflow all the way through to billing
- Tracks tech utilization hours
- Improves project management
- CEO gets job costing information that is accurate and in real-time
- Provides maintenance profitability by ticket and by customer in real-time
- People on the outside can use mobile devices and web portals to enter data in real time
“Can’t build managed services unless we can plug stuff into the database. Now we know we can build out what we need to grow the managed services part of our business,” says Craig Markowitz. “We have discovered that the architecture of the system is paramount to understanding what we need to do in our business to support growth now and in the future. Patching together non uniform systems that are difficult to scale with our business is not the way to do it.”
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