For a company in the access business, Total Access Steel’s computing setup was hardly a model of accessibility.

Until it implemented a customer relationship management (CRM) system earlier this year, the south Auckland company’s work scheduling software could only be accessed by managing director Harley Taylor, on whose laptop it was installed.

That was fine until about 18 months ago, when the four year-old business underwent a growth spurt, with headcount more than tripling from four to 15, and orders going up accordingly.

“It was just hopeless,” Taylor says. “Our accounting package was MYOB but our scheduling, quoting and paper trail was all running through my computer.”

Orders and delivery schedules for the scaffolding supplier, whose customers range from big construction companies to painters, were recorded in the iCal calendar that is a standard feature of Apple computers.

When Taylor took on a 50:50 partner in the business a year and-a-half ago, the manual quoting and booking system could no longer cope with the volume of work. He contracted 10-year-old Auckland company TEIQ to implement SugarCRM, on the recommendation of an existing TEIQ customer.

The software is web-based so Taylor no longer has to be dislodged from his laptop for other staff to access the work schedule.

SugarCRM is open source software with several license options, so Total Access has no license fee for its use. After the initial development and deployment costs, Total Access just pays TEIQ a monthly web hosting fee.

The software has numerous features, of which Taylor says he is still just scratching the surface. Its sales force automation function includes contact management, account management, forecasting and contracts, all of which centralises what amounted to piles of paper for Total Access.

In pre-CRM times, with Taylor frequently on customer sites delivering and erecting scaffolding, orders would be recorded in a quote book for entering into iCal when he was back in the office.

The quote book hasn’t been thrown out, but now estimates are prepared in the CRM and, when a quote becomes a firm order, all the details are already in the system. Any employee with a log-in can then see when jobs are scheduled and what the equipment and manpower requirements are.

A key benefit is speeding up Total Access’ invoicing. Before implementing SugarCRM, Taylor would spend a day a month going through iCal to remind himself what jobs had been done before manually entering them into MYOB to generate an invoice.

Once he has got to grips with the CRM’s sales data export functionality, he will be able to transfer records of completed work into MYOB without having to rekey them.

“I’d like to press a button, have it [SugarCRM] analyse all the data and spit out an invoice.”

SugarCRM has effectively “de-risked” Total Access’ business, says TEIQ director James Beamish-White, with the hosted solution providing backups and security, without the business being dependent on a single laptop. By automating records of customer transactions and making them shareable, billing no longer relies on Taylor’s recollection of the month’s work.

“It means the managing director doesn’t have to be the only person who knows everything that needs to be billed each month.”

The system doesn’t just streamline the quoting, order-taking, scheduling and invoicing functions, but Taylor says as time goes by, it will have collected enough data to provide useful business performance information.

Its case management feature centralises each customer’s dealings with the company, allowing Taylor to see how jobs have been handled, making it easier to keep customers happy.

“I’m still not 100 per cent familiar with what the CRM can do,” Taylor says. “We’re sort of learning it as we go.”

In the meantime he’s confident Total Access is getting a return on its CRM investment through improved access to information, and the efficiency that goes with it.

FOR MORE INFORMATION//

TEIQ CRM
www.teiq.co.nz
James Beamish-White
P: 09 527 0260
www.sugarcrm.com









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