Benefits
- Rapid time from selection through data migration and automated ongoing integration
- Unified view of critical information immediately accessible 24/7 to executives and sales staff alike
- Efficient end-to-end processes
- Forecasting time reduced from one week to one click
- Reduced costs and increased employee productivity
- More empowered employees increase customer satisfaction
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Pervasive Data Integrator: Key to WinMan ERP and Salesforce CRM Integration
Esterline Racal Acoustics (ERA) utilized WinMan as its ERP to maintain customer, inventory, product and sales data. The company wanted to add depth, accuracy and robustness to its sales forecasting and set out to select and implement a feature-rich Customer Relationship Management (CRM). ERA’s Head of Commercial Andrew Burns felt confident that Salesforce CRM, if properly integrated with WinMan ERP, was the remedy. Burns wanted a rapid, reliable integration approach and asked salesforce.com for their recommendation.
Salesforce.com professional services director recommended against custom coding and instead suggested Pervasive Software’s integration middleware. Burns’ selection of Salesforce and his decision to use Pervasive Data Integrator have been spot on—ERA’s sales forecasts are now comprehensive, current, complete, and executive management has access to dashboards that quickly and graphically communicate critical pipeline information. With good advanced training, executive support and automated integration between Salesforce and the ERP, ERA’s sales team successfully and rapidly adopted the CRM and related forecasting discipline. Now key players from sales engineers to the managing director access the dashboards and forecast data within Salesforce almost daily.
Tackling Real-Time Integration for Accurate Data and Forecasting
The ERA global sales team needed better visibility into new and modified customer data across the business. Andrew Burns, who as Head of Commercial has responsibility for the internal sales desk, commercial contracts and import/export compliance, knew the strategic value of robust forecasting. “I knew that with an accurate view of our detailed forecasts, sales managers could really gain the ability to focus on the opportunities that matter and gain a bigger impact on the business,” Burns notes. The existing environment required pulling data from multiple sources, including individuals’ spreadsheets and databases, so that compiling a forecast could take several days and a lot of manual effort.
Having the processes and technology for real-time forecasting, including executive dashboards, meant implementing a powerful, customizable CRM – ideally one accessible from both office computers and mobile devices. With the U.S. sales team supporting accounts nationwide and the UK-based team supporting accounts across the rest of the world, these sales teams are often on the road and need an easy way both to have current information for working while in transit and the ability to access customer data from a Blackberry while on-site to check payment terms, identify key contacts within the account, etc. At the same time, critical data needs to be current and correct across the ERP and the CRM so users of either system would have up-to-date, complete information.
Burns liked Salesforce’s browser-based accessibility, robust reporting and dashboarding, and the ability to customize it to meet ERA’s specific forecasting methodology. Further, he notes, “We knew Salesforce was vital to our sales success, but we had to have the right integration to our ERP system to make the project succeed.” In short, Burns wanted a flexible, reliable middleware solution that could quickly be deployed and that could tackle both initial migration of data into Salesforce and ongoing integration with the ERP system.
Pervasive Software A Middleware Favorite for Fast, Flexible Integration
Andrew Burns delved more deeply into assessing his integration options. “Middleware is more flexible than custom code, and salesforce.com said their favorite middleware is Pervasive. Pervasive provides agile middleware that can be rapidly deployed. Once it’s in production, it can also easily be updated to reflect changes in business flows and processes.” With hundreds of Salesforce integration customers under its belt, Pervasive had deep expertise in rapidly, reliably integrating Salesforce to a broad array of other on-demand and on-premises applications, including a wide array of ERP, marketing automation, and accounting systems.
ERA wanted to be able to base its forecasts and resource allocations on the actual pipeline information that the sales team would record in Salesforce. The objective of the project was to perform an initial load of current data held in WinMan ERP to the new instance of Salesforce and to provide ongoing regular synchronization between the two systems via a SQL staging table. Pervasive Data Integrator would perform both the initial data migration and the ongoing integration.
The integration design created by Pervasive consultants in conjunction with Salesforce and ERA involved staging tables between WinMan and the integration. As new information is created within WinMan, the integration creates corresponding records in the staging table. On the subsequent execution of the integration, new information is extracted from the staging table and updated in the corresponding record in Salesforce. The flow is bidirectional, so every 10 minutes, automated synchronization captures the creation or modification of any new WinMan records and replicates that data to Salesforce and vice versa.
Implementation in 4 Weeks
It took only four weeks total to implement bidirectional integration between Salesforce CRM and WinMan ERP— including process design, requirements gathering, configuration, business validation and technical testing. The US office went live in March 2010 and the UK completed its rollout in May. A series of training sessions prior to rollout helped prepare the sales teams and ensure rapid, successful adoption of Salesforce, including entering and tracking account information for forecasting roll-ups.
Strategic Advantages of Real-time Forecasting
“For me and the company CRM is about 3 things: forecasting, forecasting, forecasting,” Burns stresses. Pervasive Data Integrator helps assure Burns and his management team that they can meet this requirement, enabling the organisation to base forecasts and resource allocations on current, complete pipeline information from Salesforce. The ability to leverage newfound operational visibility in the integrated system, in turn, helps ERA’s sales management focus their efforts on the most strategic accounts.
Burns points out, “This investment represents a strategic commitment to helping our salespeople focus on the opportunities that matter and will have a bigger impact on the business. Previously, the opportunity management reporting process was manual and cumbersome with information scattered in different locations. Now, sales management no longer needs several days to prepare forecasts—they already have them available on real-time basis. It just takes a single click to view complete, current forecast information and identify the accounts where we should prioritize our efforts, and everyone from the managing director to our front-line sales staff are viewing that forecast data on an almost daily basis.”
A view of the sales pipeline gives ERA sales managers confidence and the ability to target strategic accounts and focus on opportunities with high revenue potential. It also provides sales managers a more effective way to manage the sales teams themselves. Armed with a comprehensive 360-degree customer view improves the all-around agility and responsiveness of the sales team.
A Positive Outlook For ERA
Now that Pervasive Data Integrator has provided ERA a fast, efficient and cost-effective way to coordinate tasks across applications, Burns and his staff are freed up to take on other critical projects, including the potential to leverage data integration in other areas of the business. “Pervasive has an agile, extensible product that can solve many integration challenges,” Burns notes. “I look around and see many areas where it can make a positive impact at ERA.”
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