TeamBlog

Today is the day that we will convert from our GoldMine to the RedHorse CRM system within our organization. It’s been many years since we’ve made any major software changes such as this internally.  We will be converting from GoldMine Corporate Edition being our production information system to RedHorse CRM, a newer more complete “It’s all Included” product line.  Today we have 4 major software products with a multitude of 3rd party and custom applications in which we have invested time and expertise to know them inside-out.  We handle a massive amount of activity and data with few people.   RedHorse CRM promises to streamline areas for us even better!  So far, my experience with others in utilization of the product has indicated that is absolutely the case.

Our current system:

1. GoldMine – the central point of all activities and information -We live ” if it’s not in GoldMine it didn’t happen”.
2. TeleSupport HelpDesk – the customer service software that tracks all service activities and stats of such
3. QuoteWerks – the quoting and proposal generation software, all our years of products, templates, etc are there.
4. QuickBooks – the accounting software which is the end of the line

All our current products have years of information, they are connected although roughly and with special expensive-to-maintain connection programs.  We have years of add-on utilities that we’ve come to depend on.  A bit scary!

Those that may be familiar with our company may find this post amusing since installation and setup of CRM systems is our core business. But, as is true with many things in life, it is more difficult emotionally to change oneself than it is to supervise and execute a change for others.

As with any project, we’ve done our pre-switchover training, testing, cleansing, and in fact we are certified experts in the product we are switching to. We have done a few (try a few hundred over the years) of these conversions for others with success; we even can call in the forces (aka. Chief Developer) if needed as we are close to the company and its founders. But still, the small concerns are there as we all know there are unpredictable challenges at every software upgrade, update or installation.

We are confident that we will have some significant learning curves regarding the change of our paradigm but here we go.

Listed below are the known items of concern and I am confident I will return with more as time progresses.

A few of our items that must be addressed:

1. Document Management / Template Naming conventions in the new system.  This is a time we can use to clean up a bit of the legacy pieces.
2. Need to train the team a bit more on Filters/Sorting – we utilize filters and sorting heavily in our marketing efforts.  The RedHorse CRM is much more powerful in this respect but again, a difference we must deal with.
3. Support Tickets: Our current methods utilize the TeleSupport HelpDesk product line that we sell, service and support
4. Extended details – GoldMine’s details have ‘behind the scenes’ information that during a first round of testing, the extended pieces didn’t move quite appropriately.
5. Mergecodes: We use merge codes to determine who we have permission to communicate with via Email, Fax and telephone, etc. (we use filters/groups for what goes to them)
6. AutoDial:  we use yet another product to dial the phone (nope, not our fingers – we use TapiLink and TeleVantage).  I worked with the developer on the Skype and Tapi Dialing testing so we should be good here.
7. Web Imports:  As you might imagine, we use our web import forms heavily.  It is probably one of the most common methods for us of receiving new leads into the system.  We even use the forms to add new leads ourselves due to its automation abilities.
8. Quote Templates:  We have years of templates built mostly in QuoteWerks but in GoldMine as well.  Those will have to be recreated as they do not convert.
9. Service Agreements:  In our system we track service availability time.  Meaning, how much prepaid support time does a customer have.  RedHorse has a much more detailed and thorough system for this but we will have to re-enter the service agreement balances.
10. Invoice templates:  RedHorse will be used to send the service usage “Invoices” or shall we call them “Usage Notices”.  We will need to design those templates as well.
11. Quickbooks Import / CleanUp:  We will be using the Quickbooks items list to populate the quoting systems available parts and labor codes.  We, as most companies do, have a few (or more) items which were not used and are no longer necessary to carry along.  This means a bit of clean up in Quickbooks so we don’t pull ‘garbage data’ into the quoting system.
12. E-mail Accounts:  We will need to reproduce our email credentials in the RedHorse system as most of our users monitor multiple e-mail accounts.  Just a few moments per user to add those.
13. ArgoSoft: We use a 3rd party smtp program called Argosoft to handle our mass e-mails outbound for marketing.  We have not tested RedHorse with this but it should be rather straight forward as it is just another SMTP address.
14. SigFiles:  We will need to create our sigfiles in RedHorse – again small but came up in conversations.
15. E-mail Templates:  This one could be a time consumer as we utilize e-mail templates for most communications, product deliveries, registrations, lead management, etc.  Again fairly easy in RedHorse but minutes none the less.
16. Support Staff Readiness:  Those of us on the team who have spent time training, learning, experimenting and fumbling will have new experiences but those who were not in the loop will have major setbacks in terms of productivity.  A new training curve is about to happen.

At this point we I am ready to go to the server and make sure all appropriate backups from last evening are intact, USABLE, and ready to roll.  Remember backups are USELESS if not USABLE (more on that in another article.)

Will return!!

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 6th, 2009 at 12:06 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.