Benefits

Improved productivity
The new smart sign-up form has reduced process from 50 steps in Access to ten maps.

88% reduction in run time
The process run time has been slashed from 2 hours to only 15 minutes with one click of a button.

Process is smarter
Pervasive’s enhanced business logic has reduced the number of unvalidated leads that need to be converted manually by 66%.

Savings
The increased efficiency from automation saved Money-Media $40k per year in labor costs. Egon Smullyan sums up the results of the project, “Time is money and cutting hours per day of manual processes frees up our marketing team to drive business opportunities. Automating what were previously manual processes has saved us almost $40,000 per year. We have a very lean, committed group willing to take on a lot but at some point we would have needed to hire someone or create more efficiency.”

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Integrating Internal Applications and Business Systems with Salesforce CRM

Money-Media, a Financial Times company, provides competitive intelligence on crucial money management and corporate governance issues. Managing its operational infrastructure and making all its tools work together was largely a manual process. These processes were time consuming to maintain and quickly became overwhelming as the company grew.

Money-Media wanted to integrate its internal applications and business systems with its instance of Salesforce CRM for seamless data and communication across systems. Marketing and client services soon realized they’d have to embrace newer technologies if they were to drive the growth they sought. “We were spending far too much time managing the business of information flow,” says Egon Smullyan, Director of Client Services.

Evalution and Selection: Pervasive Delivers Performance, Flexibility and Ease of Use

Over 2 1/2 months, Money-Media evaluated three integration vendors: Pervasive Software, IBM Cast Iron and Informatica. Each of the companies’ products was judged against the overall requirements, and involved in-depth technical discussions, demos and proofs of concept to understand precisely how each respective integration product actually performed.

Pervasive was selected based on the comprehensive nature of its approach to integration – its flexible architecture readily adapts to any business situation. Pervasive Data Integrator is a low-cost solution that delivers performance, flexibility and ease of use.

Egon Smullyan describes the selection process, “We needed integration to a lot of different applications and were immediately attracted to Pervasive’s wide range of connectivity and low cost. Informatica On Demand was very step-oriented, too much like what we were already doing in Access. IBM Cast Iron didn’t offer the full range of connectivity we required. Additionally, the per connector pricing structure resulted in an overall higher cost. Unlike competitors, Pervasive provides unlimited connectivity with no incremental per-connector fees for full integration— as it should be.”

Automating Integration Between Rosetta to Salesforce and More 

Money-Media aggregates leads collected on its Web sites as visitors sign up for a free trial. This information is then stored in Rosetta, a proprietary MySQL reader fulfillment database used to manage reader subscriptions. From there, the free trial records get pulled from Rosetta and put into Lyris, an Email Web service and marketing tool, and Salesforce CRM, and then pushed back down into Rosetta where trials get converted over to existing accounts. Most businesses would use the native Web-to-lead functionality in Salesforce to generate the leads and have their IT department or a consultant develop a solution for the Lyris integration, but the native Web-to-lead functionality did not align with their business model, and their IT department did not have the resources to develop a solution.

Money-Media’s commercial business side faced a twofold challenge: it needed to automate the integration of Rosetta to Salesforce CRM without using an apex developer and develop a solution for the integration to the Lyris list hosting server on its own.

Originally, updates from Rosetta to Salesforce to Lyris were being performed manually, record by record and then eventually the process became pseudo-automated with Microsoft Access or an application UI. Microsoft Access was used to manage free trial conversions and generate sales leads. For the lead conversions a 50-step process was required in Microsoft Access. It had a tool to update in bulk from Salesforce CRM to Rosetta but it wouldn’t integrate with Lyris. The workflow was inefficient and time-consuming.

Highlights of requirements:

• Seamless bi-directional integration of Rosetta with Salesforce CRM as the primary system of record
• Integration of Rosetta into Lyris and Salesforce CRM
• Automation of processes
• Reduce run time
• Enhance validation logic

Lowering TCO with Functionality and Scalability

Pervasive Data Integrator is now used to create and automate complex business processes and integrations between some of Money-Media’s most vital systems. With a broad range of connectivity options for disparate platforms and data formats, Pervasive’s powerful and flexible design environment eases the mapping and transformation of data. With design interfaces that are both easy to use and administer, staff members regardless of skill sets and levels can boost their productivity by utilizing the tools to standardize on all integration projects, further extending organizational capabilities and efficiencies. All design metadata is saved and stored in an open XML-based design repository for easy metadata interchange and reuse.

“Pervasive Data Integrator stands out from alternative solutions with rich functionality and scalability for varying integration requirements within Money-Media. It can be re-deployed on other projects, lowering the overall total cost of ownership,” explains Smullyan.

Eliminating Manual Intervention for a Smart Sign-up Process

A nightly batch process provides data feeds from Rosetta to Salesforce and Lyris. As visitors sign up for trials on the Web site for one or more of the six Money-Media products, these contacts are either leads or new subscribers who belong to existing accounts. The smart sign-up form automatically creates leads, automatically converts leads to opportunities, and adds new subscribers that belong to existing accounts in Rosetta. This smart sign-up process eliminates the manual intervention steps that formerly required processing record-by-record. This process which used to take 2 hours to run in a 50-step macro logic process in Access has been reduced to 10 maps with enhanced logic. The automated process is smart enough to know how to process all sign-up records from the Web sites and put them into the appropriate group. This process integrates Rosetta with Salesforce and connects to an FTP queue to be imported back into Rosetta.

Smullyan explains, “The process run time has been reduced from 2 hours to only 15 minutes with one click of a button. The validation logic is also much smarter and has decreased the number of unvalidated leads that need to be converted manually by our marketing and sales department by two-thirds. Now because more leads are validated upfront as direct to opportunities in Salesforce, our sales team is able to reach out to opportunities and leads much quicker and start converting them into paid subscribers.”

No More Manual Repetitive Processes

“Pervasive has freed us up and ended the frustration with manual processes. People can focus where they know they’re adding value. Each new process makes people’s jobs easier and makes the organization focus on more critical, strategic initiatives. The team morale has been boosted now that people have moved away from the manual repetitive processes,” adds Smullyan.

The new infrastructure provided by Pervasive has allowed Money-Media to take their business to the next level. Money- Media will leverage Pervasive Data Integrator for future projects. “Pervasive Data Integrator is a critical operational infrastructure tool for us. This is just the tip of the iceberg. We have several integration projects scheduled for next year that will save additional time and improve existing processes and operations even more,” Smullyan concludes.