CRM Plus - An Innovative Way to Agile Solution Dev Elopement
Content
W H I T E P A P E R
CRM+
An Innovative Approach to Agile Solution Development
Executive Summary
The high failure rate of enterprise software due to inadequate business fit has raised the stakes in the long-standing battle of “build vs. buy.” Companies torn between the insufficient flexibility of “out of the box” solutions and the high risk and cost of custom development find themselves paralyzed between the lesser of two evils. But in today’s fast-paced business environment, inertia is not an option. This white paper offers good news: an alternative approach exists, and it has been proven to solve business problems with the combined speed, flexibility, precision, and cost-effectiveness today’s enterprises require. The solution is called CRM+, but it’s not just about customer relationship management; it’s about the ability to deliver a full range of automation and software support for unique business processes across the enterprise. CRM+ leverages the power and malleability of the platforms underlying certain CRM systems to build customized applications that extend far beyond the confines of sales, marketing, and customer service. This white paper examines the CRM+ approach and explains how it can give companies a much-needed third option for developing applications that support extensive enterprise business processes and enable ongoing agility.
Introduction
Now, more than ever, companies look to information technology to alleviate their business problems. However, no off-the-shelf software solution can accommodate a company’s unique needs with complete precision, nor can one solution address all technology needs across the enterprise. As a result, larger organizations usually find themselves in one of two unpleasant situations. They either purchase a sprawling collection of different “best of breed” software applications to address each of their business automation needs (and are stuck with resulting data silos and mammoth integration projects), or they resort to expensive, time-consuming custom development in order to get exactly the solutions they want. As organizations struggle to find efficiencies and stay competitive, it is becoming increasingly clear that they need an alternative to these two inadequate options—one that offers a favorable middle ground with greater flexibility to solve business problems in a timely manner in the face of unrelenting business change. The ideal alternative would offer the best of both worlds, combining the pre-built functionality, reliability, and speedy deployment of out-of-the-box solutions with the precise business fit of custom solutions—but without the cost and inherent risk associated with custom software development. The exciting news is that such a solution exists, and it has been proven to solve business problems with the combined speed, flexibility, precision, and costeffectiveness today’s enterprises require. The concept is called CRM+, but it’s not just about customer relationship management. CRM+ leverages the power It’s about the ability to deliver and malleability of some CRM a full range of automation systems’ underlying platforms and software support for to provide customized business processes across applications far beyond the the enterprise. CRM+ areas of sales, marketing, and leverages the power and malleability of the platforms customer service. underlying certain CRM systems to provide not just exceptionally tailored CRM, but customized applications far beyond the areas of sales, marketing, and customer service. This white paper explores the issues facing CIOs and other enterprise stakeholders as they seek to solve their software challenges and examines how CRM+ can give their companies a much-needed third option for developing applications that support extensive enterprise business processes, offering both a close technology fit for today and the flexibility to adapt to tomorrow’s needs.
Unique Business Processes; Unique Challenges
The collective wisdom and best practices of an enterprise lie in its business processes, which embody all of the workflows, business rules, and standard operating procedures that govern how the enterprise executes its mission. For many leading organizations, their business processes are as much a part of what makes them competitive and distinctive as the product or service they offer. Automating business processes with software effectively has become a critical component of business success—a mechanism to streamline and accelerate complex tasks, reduce redundancy, save time and resources, and ultimately reduce costs. Moreover, today’s corporate decision-makers rely on the data and metrics these applications provide to make strategic decisions for the enterprise. But even though companies have been implementing enterprise software and automating processes for decades, not all technology investments have delivered the returns businesses expected. While some generalpurpose software packages (such as word processors and spreadsheets) have proven effective over the long term, software supporting more complex and critical business processes has proven more challenging and high-risk. The problem is often attributable to inadequate business fit between the software and the business process being automated: the software simply doesn’t do quite what the business needs it to, or if it did at the outset, it does not have the flexibility to keep up with changing business needs over time. Despite vendor claims that their solutions can accommodate diverse business processes, many enterprises discover that their processes have unique elements and nuances that no automated solution entirely addresses “out of the box.” At that point, disillusioned CIOs are left to ponder the lesser of two evils: “Do we change the software to fit our processes, or do we change our processes to fit the software?” Either option entails costs, compromise, and delays. And in today’s fast-paced environment, it’s not unusual to find that by the time they have implemented either one of these options, new business drivers have forced new changes to business processes—and the vicious circle starts all over again. In this volatile and value-driven business climate, enterprises know they need to automate solutions to their firm’s unique and evolving business problems, but the cost of doing so continues to limit their options, forcing them to walk a thin line between implementing software solutions that truly meet the firm’s needs and minimizing IT costs and the risk of failure. This conflict stifles innovation, ties up IT budgets, hinders business
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agility, and prevents the enterprise from seizing emerging opportunities ahead of their competitors. What corporate technology leaders need is a solution flexible enough to quickly and cost-effectively automate their unique business processes both today and as they evolve. Until now, this happy medium has eluded them. The company has had to resort to one of two apparent options for implementing much-needed software solutions for the firm: buy a more general solution off the shelf or undertake a software development effort to build a solution from scratch.
to go back and compensate for missing features and inadequate flexibility. Most OOTB software vendors are in business to sell a generic solution to as many customers as they can, rendering true optimization for any single customer virtually impossible without custom work. But even if the company’s in-house developers know how to optimize the code, they probably won’t be able to modify it, since software vendors seldom allow anyone outside their own firm to access their proprietary APIs. The result? Kludgy workarounds and an increased risk of introducing unintended bugs. In an effort to avoid the limitations of some OOTB software packages, some companies “go big,” purchasing the commercial software packages with the greatest breadth from the biggest software vendors. Unfortunately, such solutions are notoriously expensive, bloated, and timeconsuming to implement and customize, which can again offset the benefits of buying commercial software. In some cases, the cost and duration of customization rival those of custom development. Whether a company starts with a “big” commercial package or a “smaller” OOTB solution, once the workarounds and customizations are in place and the functional requirements are reasonably satisfied, the enterprise can roll out the solution to end users and meet the needs of the business … for awhile. Then the inevitable business change overtakes the well-encapsulated offthe-shelf application. The conditions that made the OOTB application perfect for the firm when it was purchased change, leaving business leaders with a very difficult decision to make. Should they upgrade to the latest version, which often entails losing the customizations they have so painstakingly undertaken? Should they surround the purchased solution with more custom extensions and hope for the best? Or should they shelve it altogether, opt for a new OOTB package, and go through the evaluation and acquisition process all over again with the new requirements in mind, only to predictably encounter the same scenario yet again not far down the road? Off-the-shelf enterprise applications do offer business advantages, not the least of which is the avoidance of managing a long, often stressful custom software development effort. But any purchased OOTB application offers generic functionality, not your required functionality. It automates generic business processes, not your business processes. More importantly, most OOTB solutions are “point solutions.” They meet a certain set of needs at a discrete point in time, but they seldom span more than a sub-set of enterprise needs and areas. On the other side of the spectrum, in the case of “big” solutions, the software tries to be “all things to all people,” and thereby meets the exact needs of no one, while also being cumbersome and overly complex. In addition, whether “big” or “small,” most packaged
Option #1: Purchasing Off-the-Shelf Solutions
Companies that lack the budgets or resources to engage in custom software development—or that simply want a faster, easier solution—often turn to out-of-the-box (OOTB) applications to meet their enterprise application needs: that is, pre-built, commercially available software packages. Why reinvent the wheel when someone else has already built it? Vendors of packaged systems promise higher quality assurance, decreased risk, better technical support, and an overall lower total cost of ownership than a custom-built solution. Off-the-shelf software brings significant time-to-market benefits, but unfortunately seldom proves to be a panacea. A common industry rule of thumb states that OOTB software should meet at least 80% of a project’s required functionality to be considered for enterprisewide roll-out.1 But many IT executives who have invested in such packaged solutions Any savings realized from have found that out-of-the-box buying a pre-built solution functionality falls short of may end up cancelled out what they had expected. by the need to write, test, Though the company may and deploy kludgy be able to install the solution workarounds, customizations, in its default configuration quickly, tailoring the system and integrations. to the organization’s specific needs or integrating it with the firm’s existing application infrastructure often proves lengthy, problematic, and expensive. Any savings realized from buying a pre-built solution may ultimately be cancelled out by the need to write, test, and deploy kludgy workarounds, customizations, and integrations. Furthermore, companies often discover once their project is underway that they did not have a complete grasp of their functionality needs at the point of system selection—but by this time it is usually too late
1. Ledeen, Kenneth S. (2003), Build vs. Buy: A Decision Paradigm for Information Technology Applications.
http://www.nevo.com/our-knowledge/whitepapers/BuildVsBuy.pdf.
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software solutions prove unworkable in the wake of business change; they simply fail to accommodate the new mandate of enterprise automation in the 21st century: business agility. And even if all the stars align and the packaged solution proves a perfect business fit, it becomes yet another island of technology. Once it is installed and configured, the IT department must integrate it with their existing catalog of applications, usually at a high cost and level of developer effort—the very problem selecting an OOTB solution promised to alleviate in the first place.
These issues take a great deal of time to design, develop, test, and deploy. To make matters worse, the code that implements these functions operates behind the scenes; no one pays a great deal of attention to it until a problem arises. These potential pitfall areas include security, scalability, error handling, workflow management, data access methods, and transaction management, among others. The custom coding effort that goes into writing plumbing code is anything but trivial. Depending on the size of the application, firms spend as much as 35% of their development time just to handle these application infrastructure issues.2 And if the requirements change before the application goes live, as they often do, the underlying architecture must change to accommodate them, opening up the possibility of bugs that jeopardize the project’s deadline. Additional issues that plague custom development projects include the need to build complex integrations to other software, such as e-mail systems; the need to develop in-depth documentation to ensure that the system is intelligible to other developers, especially in the wake of IT turnover; and the need to anticipate and handle the upgrades, service packs, and even obsolescence of the technologies with which the custom system is integrated or on which it relies. Those custom development projects that do finish on time and on budget generally don’t stay that way for long. Even when companies build their own custom software, the net result is typically still a point solution that meets only a sub-set of business needs at a certain point in time. The breakneck pace of business change dictates modifications to even the most well-designed business processes, which in turn drives changes to the software that automates them. Even companies that invest in rapid application development tools are finding that they just can’t respond to change rapidly enough.
Option #2: Building the Solution from Scratch
Companies that find OOTB solutions unable to meet their specific business needs often put their requirements in the capable hands of their IT departments. Because enterprise software can be so specialized and is so crucial to “get right,” Even when companies many companies are willing to go great lengths to define, build their own custom analyze, model, and build the software, the net result software applications that will is typically still a point run their organizations. The solution that meets only a firms that embark on this path sub-set of business needs understand that modeling their unique business practices is at a certain point in time. critical to their success and seek to build a solution that fits their business needs exactly. But developing software from the ground up is a very costly and complex endeavor for the simple reason that the IT shop must typically build everything themselves. The back-end database. The framework. The web services. The user interface. The business logic. The infrastructure. Everything has to be hand-coded. And all of it must fit into the current company architectural standards and best practices. Not only does this level of effort require a great deal of skill, but also a great deal of time, expense, and risk, and therein lies the problem. Designing, developing, and deploying enterprise-grade software is a challenging process that takes a lot of time—something software development teams never have enough of. Development managers must juggle time-to-market concerns with tight budgets, pressure from stakeholders, and complex functional requirements that seem to be in a constant state of flux and scope creep. This frequently results in projects that are buggy, poorly documented, and—worst of all—late. But software developers engaged in custom development must deal with more than the functional requirements. When writing software from scratch, they must also deal with the dreaded infrastructure issues and non-functional requirements (commonly referred to as “plumbing code”).
Introducing CRM+, A Balanced Alternative
The “buy vs. build” dilemma is nothing new. All IT departments have encountered it at one time or another. Both options have their pros and cons, but neither represents an ideal choice. Buying software off the shelf solves business problems, just not necessarily any specific firm’s exact problems. Building apps from the ground up gives companies exactly the solution they need, but they pay a big price for it, and the chances of failure are uncomfortably high. Thankfully, there is a third option that offers the much-sought-after middle ground.
2. Frankel, David (2003), Reflections on the MDA Productivity Study, A Perspective for Executives.
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It’s called CRM+, and it offers both an OOTB solution and the power to build and customize applications rapidly. It is important to distinguish between CRM and CRM+. A CRM system is an application: a specific solution to a specific set of problems centering around customer relationship management (typically focused on marketing, sales, and customer service). CRM+, on the other hand, is a development concept: specifically, the idea of using the platforms that underlie some CRM systems as a powerful means to create additional software solutions. This CRM+ approach is by no means a capability supported by all CRM systems. The vast majority of CRM applications are just that: applications. These CRM systems typically offer a certain degree of configuration to help companies superficially With CRM+, firms not adapt the application to only get a flexible CRM their needs, but any deeper application, but also the customization requires power to create effective in-depth custom coding, additional business often using arcane proprietary code. However, a select few applications that may have CRM vendors, recognizing the nothing at all to do with a importance of close business conventional CRM. fit to CRM success, took a different approach to creating their CRM applications, building them upon a versatile purpose-built platform that permits great flexibility and ease of customization in the resulting CRM application. But this same platform layer is in no way restricted to building CRM applications; in fact, it contains all the core components—database structures, workflow tools, and form designers, just to name a few—that a company requires to easily build solutions to satisfy other enterprise automation needs. So why stop at using these components to support only customer relationship management processes? A CRM+ solution puts the platform’s easy applicationbuilding components in the hands of a company’s IT and business analyst teams, enabling them to build out additional solutions and automate other business processes on the same platform as their CRM solution. When firms invest in a CRM system that embodies this CRM+ approach, they not only get a flexible CRM application that can adapt easily to their unique and changing needs over time, but also the power to create effective additional business applications that may have nothing at all to do with the functions you would find in a conventional CRM deployment. The platform essentially provides the “toolkit” that allows technical teams to create unique line-of-business solutions and workflows from end to end. These solutions and workflows could be of any kind: human resource management, proposal management, facility management—virtually anything the enterprise needs to automate.
CRM+ platforms provide a layer of pre-built, pre-tested, pre-integrated, and pre-optimized components—the same foundations the CRM application sits on top of and was built from—that a company’s development team can use as a springboard to develop virtually any line-of-business application their firm needs. This gives companies a brand new paradigm, creating custom automated solutions without custom development, as well as a collection of much-needed benefits to the enterprise. These benefits include time savings, cost savings, better business fit, greater strategic agility, higher user acceptance, and the simplicity that comes with having an enterprise-wide software development platform. Let’s take a closer look at these CRM+ advantages.
Time Savings
A strong CRM+ platform supplies all of the plumbing code that software developers spend so much time coding and recoding. This frees them up to spend their time creating effective features, intuitive user interfaces, optimized forms, and streamlined workflows—the parts of the application end users actually use to accomplish their jobs and capture critical information every day. Furthermore, a CRM+ platform provides not just the plumbing code, but also the tools to more quickly and easily build out the functional application areas and interfaces with little or no coding as well. IT teams can focus on building the parts of the system that add clear user-facing value, not the invisible non-functional elements that don’t. Faster development is about more than just lightening the workload for developers; it’s about delivering needed solutions to the business at the fast pace it requires to stay competitive. Companies’ IT resources are limited, and naturally most companies would rather see those resources applied where they can add the most value. Using a CRM+ platform, the company saves the time its development team would typically spend building out the infrastructure and benefits from tools that help them fulfill the functional requirements much more quickly and easily, putting the desired functionality into the end users’ hands much faster. Furthermore, the ease of development and deployment supports a more iterative approach to solution development, enabling the applications team to roll out frequent upgrades and enhancements rather than a single monolithic application in a “big-bang” release.
Cost Savings
Due to the high cost of development work, firms that can cut the turnaround time from the beginning of an application project to the final deployment save a great deal of money. With CRM+, developers need no longer spend time reinventing the wheel on tedious, error-prone plumbing code. Because development teams can leverage the CRM+ platform tools, they have to build less functionality by hand, thereby decreasing IT costs.
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Development is not the only area in which CRM+ adopters save money. Because that code is already in place and underpinning the CRM application, developers and testers no longer have to spend time tracking down and fixing bugs in the business logic and data access tiers, thereby saving money in the QA cycle as well. They also have the CRM application itself as a best-practice model to follow in developing additional solutions on the platform. By building a custom application on a CRM+ platform, companies get the exact functionality they want while also saving the time and cost of evaluating, purchasing, implementing, customizing, and integrating a new off-the-shelf software package. Furthermore, they bypass the need for new skills training for their IT teams or to hire costly external consultants, and they eliminate an extra annual maintenance expense from the budget altogether.
they implement today will be flexible enough to change without a great deal of cost and downtime. Essentially, they want to “future-proof” their enterprise IT infrastructure. The astute executives that have adopted a CRM+ approach have found that it affords them just such an opportunity: business fit today and business agility tomorrow.
Simplicity through Standardization
Conventional application development has become so costly and complex that it has become a hindrance to business agility, rather than the accelerator it was intended to be. Nonetheless, today’s corporate enterprises need extensive software support to remain efficient and competitive. CRM+ simplifies the effort by providing a uniform layer of application architecture as a standard platform for multiple applications in the enterprise. By leveraging the functionality the CRM platform supplies out of the box, programmers don’t need to learn low-level APIs; the platform handles these issues for them. Additionally, CRM+ lowers IT costs by allowing corporate developers to leverage a uniform toolset to build applications. Having uniform tools results in a smaller learning curve for developers. They can get up to speed and on the road to developing high-quality solutions quickly, regardless of whether they are extending the functionality of the CRM application itself or building something entirely different. CRM+ platforms that provide standard toolsets allow teams to meet new demands without learning new tools. Building multiple solutions on a single platform also means fewer disparate systems to integrate. As any IT department knows, integration can be the most complex and timeconsuming elements of any implementation project, but without it, applications become impractical silos of data and functionality. Using a CRM+ approach, companies can avoid this complexity and save considerable time and money in deploying integrated solutions. A final—but extremely important—benefit of building multiple solutions on a single platform is the positive impact on user adoption and acceptance. Because applications built on a CRM+ platform use a common toolset, it is simple and natural to make them look and function similarly and flow together seamlessly. Not only does this improve user productivity, it also accelerates user adoption by offering users an intuitive, familiar interface and features that work as they expect them to. Training requirements are reduced or eliminated altogether, and companies avoid the user reluctance that comes from learning a “new system”—instead, new functionality can be positioned as extensions and enhancements to the CRM system and other existing functionality built on the CRM+ platform. Since user adoption is the true determinant of any application’s success, the positive impact of CRM+ on user
Business Fit
Shorter development cycles allow for more frequent program enhancements, resulting in solutions that more effectively meet end-user needs. If release 1.0 only takes a few months to build and deploy, release 1.1 should finish even faster. This benefit is especially valuable in environments in which there is frequent business change with can release little or no advance warning. More frequent releases also enable better business fit. When end users can give constructive feedback to the development team sooner, developers can in turn produce new and better features more quickly and easily, giving the users exactly the functionality they need. And when business drivers require a significant workflow change, the development team can automate new workflows without the time-consuming task of having to refurbish the underlying software infrastructure or write new code. Instead, teams can devote their full concentration to developing innovative iterations and enhancements, providing the enterprise with continuous business process improvement.
Firms that solutions to help them respond to new market opportunities quickly enjoy a significant advantage over competitors who can’t.
Strategic Business Agility
The business benefit of faster turnaround time goes way beyond mere cost savings. It enables the enterprise to be more agile, which is crucial to gaining a strategic competitive advantage. Firms that can release solutions to help them respond to new market opportunities quickly enjoy a significant advantage over competitors who can’t. Many business leaders know they need software applications to solve the business problems they have today. But they also know that business change is inevitable, so they want to make sure that the applications
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acceptance is perhaps the most compelling benefit of them all.
The Pivotal Platform: CRM+ in Action
The quintessential CRM+ solution, CDC Software’s Pivotal Platform is the system of choice for companies looking to create applications tailored to their unique business processes at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional software development methods. Engineered with business change in mind, the Pivotal Platform offers unparalleled flexibility and customizability. Applications that formerly took years to build now can be delivered in a matter of weeks or a few months, allowing companies to seize market opportunities and react to business change with agility. Built on the Microsoft .NET technology stack, the Pivotal Platform adds a critical layer The Pivotal Platform’s between its .NET foundations powerful metadata-driven and the application tier: a WYSIWYG ("what you see is layer of pre-built data access what you get") model makes methods, security, and user interface rules, as well as the application building and graphical tools that enable customization process rapid developers to easily construct and intuitive. tables, workflows, business logic, forms, navigation, and more with a minimum of effort and no custom coding required—though for .NET programmers who prefer to be “hands on” with the code, this is also always an option. Furthermore, the Pivotal Platform offers pre-built integrations to the Microsoft productivity tools relied upon by the majority of organizations worldwide—Outlook, the Office suite, and SharePoint—and embeds Microsoft Visual Studio, a tool of choice for today’s developers, right within the platform. This saves developers the effort of building these must-have integrations into any other application built on the platform. The Pivotal Platform’s powerful metadata-driven WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) model makes the application building and customization process rapid and intuitive. The platform solution provides out-of-the-box form templates with logic and rules built in, with the ability to easily attach additional logic and workflow. The Pivotal Platform exposes all of the functionality of the award-winning Pivotal CRM application it undergirds and gives it its renowned flexibility and ease of customization. But what makes the Pivotal Platform so unique is that despite its connection to this customer relationship management solution, the Pivotal Platform was initially conceived and constructed as a full application development platform, not just the structure beneath a CRM solution. The implications of this are huge. While several competing CRM vendors promote the
platform capabilities of their applications, their solutions were simply never designed to be platforms and are ultimately severely limited by this fact. A platform can be used to create almost any application, but attempts to reverse-engineer a platform from an application are invariably illogical and ineffective. Because the Pivotal Platform was designed first and foremost as a platform, it was engineered to serve as a flexible foundation for any application running any business process, making it an indispensable tool for today’s demand-driven IT teams. While the Pivotal Platform is not the only kind of platform or development toolkit available to companies looking to obtain highly customized CRM or to build other custom applications, it offers numerous advantages over both commercially available development environments and “big” enterprise software suites that also offer customization tools. First, the Pivotal Platform’s .NET foundations mean development teams don’t need to learn proprietary languages and systems just to be able to work with the platform. Secondly, its flexibility and ease of use eclipse those of big enterprise software platforms, enabling faster, easier customization and application development with fewer upgrade woes at a much lower total cost of ownership than competing solutions.
An Agility Multiplier
Using the Pivotal Platform, corporate developers can create custom applications without having to write the tedious, error-prone plumbing code and logic that has traditionally slowed them down—or, if they wish, without writing any code at all. They can easily add new tables, forms, and logic to quickly create entire new applications using a graphical toolkit. And because the Pivotal Platform is built on Microsoft .NET—a ubiquitous industry standard—developers don’t need to learn entire new skills and languages or receive extensive training; they can get up to speed quickly and easily. For the company, this also makes finding developers who can work with the system much easier and more cost-effective: no obscure skill-sets required. Using the Pivotal Platform, all of the steps for developing a new application—building tables, adding fields, defining relationships, setting security, creating forms—can be performed quickly and easily without time-consuming custom coding. Meanwhile, any hands-on coding developers do want to perform within the platform can be applied to activities that deliver higher value to the business. Using the Microsoft Visual Studio forms designer embedded within the Pivotal Platform, teams can simply draw their forms the way they want them and use the Pivotal Toolkit to easily build the infrastructure and functionality behind them. This translates into tremendous time savings, both in terms of development and testing. In this way, the Pivotal Platform multiples development teams’ agility, enabling them to fulfill new requirements, build new applications, and adapt to changing needs
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quickly and cost-effectively. This gives them the freedom to create applications for any line of business, while saving their firms a great deal of time and money. The Pivotal Platform achieves this exceptional resilience with an adaptable layer of business metadata. This sturdy yet flexible tier of logic separates data from business rules, making it easy to customize a solution to match even the most distinctive of business processes. It is this layer of technological cartilage that gives the enterprise true architectural flexibility. Following this CRM+ approach using the Pivotal Platform, the enterprise can adapt its software tools to business change in any way necessary. Change is what the Pivotal Platform was built for.
requirements precisely within the system or building entire new applications. For this reason, perhaps the best testament to the success of the CRM+ approach and the power of the Pivotal Platform is the proven success of the Pivotal CRM customer base in applying this strategy. Long before they ever heard the term “CRM+” (or “xRM,” as this concept is called by some vendors), forward-thinking Pivotal CRM customers were taking advantage of the Pivotal Platform and Toolkit to create their own custom solutions and roll out innovative integrated IT infrastructures within their firms. Here are just a few examples of solutions built on the Pivotal Platform: • A New Zealand utility company built an application to handle hazardous waste disposal. • A UK building-supply company created an application to manage the design, ordering, and installation of kitchens and bathrooms. • A food and beverage manufacturer built a solution to handle vendor management along with all procurement and related activities. • A radio advertising wholesaler created their entire enterprise application catalog—sales, marketing, customer service, ERP, human resources, and finance—all on the Pivotal Platform. As this list illustrates, the potential of the Pivotal Platform extends far beyond customer relationship management. In fact, numerous companies that have embraced the Pivotal Platform and the CRM+ concept say Pivotal CRM is the last software they’ll ever buy, because it can be used to solve almost any business problem. As one longstanding CDC Software customer said of her company’s IT strategy, “If the business issue is one that touches or faces the customer, we’ll build it into Pivotal; no questions asked. No new software acquisitions.”
Pre-integration with Microsoft Tools
Above and beyond its high flexibility and utility, the Pivotal Platform comes pre-integrated with the office productivity tools used by almost every enterprise: Microsoft Outlook, the full Microsoft Office Suite, and Microsoft SharePoint, as well as Microsoft Visual Studio. This spares companies the complexity of integrating these applications and enables them to easily embed these tools into custom end-user applications and workflows built using the Pivotal Platform, allowing users to access e-mail, contacts, calendars, and task lists without ever leaving the CRM+ application. Additionally, users of Word, Excel, and other Office tools can perform in-context Only the Pivotal Platform was look-ups of CRM+ application actually built as a platform data directly within the from the outset, giving it Office application simply by right-clicking on a piece a superior flexibility and of data; no need to switch intuitive toolkit with which back and forth between a to build and customize range of applications to find applications, unmatched by the data they need. The net any other CRM platform. result is a “sticky” application users enjoy using. They can continue working with all the applications they are already familiar with while still benefiting from all the advantages of the custom processspecific business application built upon the Pivotal Platform.
Conclusion
Today’s enterprises need software to support and automate their unique business processes. However, the two primary options for acquiring it leave a great deal to be desired. Packaged out-of-the-box software provides the easiest solution, but it rarely provides the close business fit large corporations require. On the other hand, writing enterprise-grade software in-house can give firms the exact functionality they want, but at a high price, a slow pace, and a significant risk of failure. And both options typically fall short when it comes to adapting rapidly and cost-effectively to evolving business needs. CRM+ is the answer to this dilemma. Using the functionality already built into the platform underlying certain CRM systems, companies can quickly and
A Proven Approach
CDC Software’s Pivotal CRM has long had the reputation of being the most flexible CRM solution on the market, easy to customize and adapt over time. The secret to this flexibility is the Pivotal Platform and its development toolkit, which enable Pivotal CRM customers to accomplish virtually anything they want to with the system, whether this entails modeling unique CRM processes and
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inexpensively create applications that address their specific business needs and automate their unique processes without having to develop the costly and tedious infrastructure components required by the average software development lifecycle. Furthermore, they can take advantage of this power and flexibility over time to more rapidly accommodate new and changing requirements, enhancing business agility and fueling innovation. While a handful of CRM applications claim to have the ability to support a CRM+ development approach, only the Pivotal Platform on which CDC Software’s Pivotal CRM was developed was actually built as a platform from the outset, giving it a superior flexibility and intuitive toolkit with which to build and customize applications, unmatched by any other CRM platform. This enables
companies to achieve the lowest possible total cost of ownership for both CRM implementations and additional solution development. Furthermore, its embedding of Microsoft solutions, including Microsoft Outlook and SharePoint, not only saves the company from having to do these common (but often troublesome) integrations, but also increases user adoption by enabling users to work with the familiar tools they already know and rely upon to perform their daily tasks. The power of the Pivotal Platform has been proven by the success of countless companies that have used it to create diverse custom enterprise applications rapidly and at a low cost, pre-integrated with each other and with Microsoft Outlook, Office, and SharePoint. This combination of unparalleled capabilities and proven success makes the Pivotal Platform from CDC Software the ideal solution for companies looking for much more than just a CRM system, giving them the ability to be agile, competitive, and innovative in meeting their unique software needs today and in the future.
Discover the Power of CRM+ For more information and a complete list of our worldwide offices, please visit www.PivotalCRM.com.
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CRM+
An Innovative Approach to Agile Solution Development
Executive Summary
The high failure rate of enterprise software due to inadequate business fit has raised the stakes in the long-standing battle of “build vs. buy.” Companies torn between the insufficient flexibility of “out of the box” solutions and the high risk and cost of custom development find themselves paralyzed between the lesser of two evils. But in today’s fast-paced business environment, inertia is not an option. This white paper offers good news: an alternative approach exists, and it has been proven to solve business problems with the combined speed, flexibility, precision, and cost-effectiveness today’s enterprises require. The solution is called CRM+, but it’s not just about customer relationship management; it’s about the ability to deliver a full range of automation and software support for unique business processes across the enterprise. CRM+ leverages the power and malleability of the platforms underlying certain CRM systems to build customized applications that extend far beyond the confines of sales, marketing, and customer service. This white paper examines the CRM+ approach and explains how it can give companies a much-needed third option for developing applications that support extensive enterprise business processes and enable ongoing agility.
Introduction
Now, more than ever, companies look to information technology to alleviate their business problems. However, no off-the-shelf software solution can accommodate a company’s unique needs with complete precision, nor can one solution address all technology needs across the enterprise. As a result, larger organizations usually find themselves in one of two unpleasant situations. They either purchase a sprawling collection of different “best of breed” software applications to address each of their business automation needs (and are stuck with resulting data silos and mammoth integration projects), or they resort to expensive, time-consuming custom development in order to get exactly the solutions they want. As organizations struggle to find efficiencies and stay competitive, it is becoming increasingly clear that they need an alternative to these two inadequate options—one that offers a favorable middle ground with greater flexibility to solve business problems in a timely manner in the face of unrelenting business change. The ideal alternative would offer the best of both worlds, combining the pre-built functionality, reliability, and speedy deployment of out-of-the-box solutions with the precise business fit of custom solutions—but without the cost and inherent risk associated with custom software development. The exciting news is that such a solution exists, and it has been proven to solve business problems with the combined speed, flexibility, precision, and costeffectiveness today’s enterprises require. The concept is called CRM+, but it’s not just about customer relationship management. CRM+ leverages the power It’s about the ability to deliver and malleability of some CRM a full range of automation systems’ underlying platforms and software support for to provide customized business processes across applications far beyond the the enterprise. CRM+ areas of sales, marketing, and leverages the power and malleability of the platforms customer service. underlying certain CRM systems to provide not just exceptionally tailored CRM, but customized applications far beyond the areas of sales, marketing, and customer service. This white paper explores the issues facing CIOs and other enterprise stakeholders as they seek to solve their software challenges and examines how CRM+ can give their companies a much-needed third option for developing applications that support extensive enterprise business processes, offering both a close technology fit for today and the flexibility to adapt to tomorrow’s needs.
Unique Business Processes; Unique Challenges
The collective wisdom and best practices of an enterprise lie in its business processes, which embody all of the workflows, business rules, and standard operating procedures that govern how the enterprise executes its mission. For many leading organizations, their business processes are as much a part of what makes them competitive and distinctive as the product or service they offer. Automating business processes with software effectively has become a critical component of business success—a mechanism to streamline and accelerate complex tasks, reduce redundancy, save time and resources, and ultimately reduce costs. Moreover, today’s corporate decision-makers rely on the data and metrics these applications provide to make strategic decisions for the enterprise. But even though companies have been implementing enterprise software and automating processes for decades, not all technology investments have delivered the returns businesses expected. While some generalpurpose software packages (such as word processors and spreadsheets) have proven effective over the long term, software supporting more complex and critical business processes has proven more challenging and high-risk. The problem is often attributable to inadequate business fit between the software and the business process being automated: the software simply doesn’t do quite what the business needs it to, or if it did at the outset, it does not have the flexibility to keep up with changing business needs over time. Despite vendor claims that their solutions can accommodate diverse business processes, many enterprises discover that their processes have unique elements and nuances that no automated solution entirely addresses “out of the box.” At that point, disillusioned CIOs are left to ponder the lesser of two evils: “Do we change the software to fit our processes, or do we change our processes to fit the software?” Either option entails costs, compromise, and delays. And in today’s fast-paced environment, it’s not unusual to find that by the time they have implemented either one of these options, new business drivers have forced new changes to business processes—and the vicious circle starts all over again. In this volatile and value-driven business climate, enterprises know they need to automate solutions to their firm’s unique and evolving business problems, but the cost of doing so continues to limit their options, forcing them to walk a thin line between implementing software solutions that truly meet the firm’s needs and minimizing IT costs and the risk of failure. This conflict stifles innovation, ties up IT budgets, hinders business
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agility, and prevents the enterprise from seizing emerging opportunities ahead of their competitors. What corporate technology leaders need is a solution flexible enough to quickly and cost-effectively automate their unique business processes both today and as they evolve. Until now, this happy medium has eluded them. The company has had to resort to one of two apparent options for implementing much-needed software solutions for the firm: buy a more general solution off the shelf or undertake a software development effort to build a solution from scratch.
to go back and compensate for missing features and inadequate flexibility. Most OOTB software vendors are in business to sell a generic solution to as many customers as they can, rendering true optimization for any single customer virtually impossible without custom work. But even if the company’s in-house developers know how to optimize the code, they probably won’t be able to modify it, since software vendors seldom allow anyone outside their own firm to access their proprietary APIs. The result? Kludgy workarounds and an increased risk of introducing unintended bugs. In an effort to avoid the limitations of some OOTB software packages, some companies “go big,” purchasing the commercial software packages with the greatest breadth from the biggest software vendors. Unfortunately, such solutions are notoriously expensive, bloated, and timeconsuming to implement and customize, which can again offset the benefits of buying commercial software. In some cases, the cost and duration of customization rival those of custom development. Whether a company starts with a “big” commercial package or a “smaller” OOTB solution, once the workarounds and customizations are in place and the functional requirements are reasonably satisfied, the enterprise can roll out the solution to end users and meet the needs of the business … for awhile. Then the inevitable business change overtakes the well-encapsulated offthe-shelf application. The conditions that made the OOTB application perfect for the firm when it was purchased change, leaving business leaders with a very difficult decision to make. Should they upgrade to the latest version, which often entails losing the customizations they have so painstakingly undertaken? Should they surround the purchased solution with more custom extensions and hope for the best? Or should they shelve it altogether, opt for a new OOTB package, and go through the evaluation and acquisition process all over again with the new requirements in mind, only to predictably encounter the same scenario yet again not far down the road? Off-the-shelf enterprise applications do offer business advantages, not the least of which is the avoidance of managing a long, often stressful custom software development effort. But any purchased OOTB application offers generic functionality, not your required functionality. It automates generic business processes, not your business processes. More importantly, most OOTB solutions are “point solutions.” They meet a certain set of needs at a discrete point in time, but they seldom span more than a sub-set of enterprise needs and areas. On the other side of the spectrum, in the case of “big” solutions, the software tries to be “all things to all people,” and thereby meets the exact needs of no one, while also being cumbersome and overly complex. In addition, whether “big” or “small,” most packaged
Option #1: Purchasing Off-the-Shelf Solutions
Companies that lack the budgets or resources to engage in custom software development—or that simply want a faster, easier solution—often turn to out-of-the-box (OOTB) applications to meet their enterprise application needs: that is, pre-built, commercially available software packages. Why reinvent the wheel when someone else has already built it? Vendors of packaged systems promise higher quality assurance, decreased risk, better technical support, and an overall lower total cost of ownership than a custom-built solution. Off-the-shelf software brings significant time-to-market benefits, but unfortunately seldom proves to be a panacea. A common industry rule of thumb states that OOTB software should meet at least 80% of a project’s required functionality to be considered for enterprisewide roll-out.1 But many IT executives who have invested in such packaged solutions Any savings realized from have found that out-of-the-box buying a pre-built solution functionality falls short of may end up cancelled out what they had expected. by the need to write, test, Though the company may and deploy kludgy be able to install the solution workarounds, customizations, in its default configuration quickly, tailoring the system and integrations. to the organization’s specific needs or integrating it with the firm’s existing application infrastructure often proves lengthy, problematic, and expensive. Any savings realized from buying a pre-built solution may ultimately be cancelled out by the need to write, test, and deploy kludgy workarounds, customizations, and integrations. Furthermore, companies often discover once their project is underway that they did not have a complete grasp of their functionality needs at the point of system selection—but by this time it is usually too late
1. Ledeen, Kenneth S. (2003), Build vs. Buy: A Decision Paradigm for Information Technology Applications.
http://www.nevo.com/our-knowledge/whitepapers/BuildVsBuy.pdf.
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software solutions prove unworkable in the wake of business change; they simply fail to accommodate the new mandate of enterprise automation in the 21st century: business agility. And even if all the stars align and the packaged solution proves a perfect business fit, it becomes yet another island of technology. Once it is installed and configured, the IT department must integrate it with their existing catalog of applications, usually at a high cost and level of developer effort—the very problem selecting an OOTB solution promised to alleviate in the first place.
These issues take a great deal of time to design, develop, test, and deploy. To make matters worse, the code that implements these functions operates behind the scenes; no one pays a great deal of attention to it until a problem arises. These potential pitfall areas include security, scalability, error handling, workflow management, data access methods, and transaction management, among others. The custom coding effort that goes into writing plumbing code is anything but trivial. Depending on the size of the application, firms spend as much as 35% of their development time just to handle these application infrastructure issues.2 And if the requirements change before the application goes live, as they often do, the underlying architecture must change to accommodate them, opening up the possibility of bugs that jeopardize the project’s deadline. Additional issues that plague custom development projects include the need to build complex integrations to other software, such as e-mail systems; the need to develop in-depth documentation to ensure that the system is intelligible to other developers, especially in the wake of IT turnover; and the need to anticipate and handle the upgrades, service packs, and even obsolescence of the technologies with which the custom system is integrated or on which it relies. Those custom development projects that do finish on time and on budget generally don’t stay that way for long. Even when companies build their own custom software, the net result is typically still a point solution that meets only a sub-set of business needs at a certain point in time. The breakneck pace of business change dictates modifications to even the most well-designed business processes, which in turn drives changes to the software that automates them. Even companies that invest in rapid application development tools are finding that they just can’t respond to change rapidly enough.
Option #2: Building the Solution from Scratch
Companies that find OOTB solutions unable to meet their specific business needs often put their requirements in the capable hands of their IT departments. Because enterprise software can be so specialized and is so crucial to “get right,” Even when companies many companies are willing to go great lengths to define, build their own custom analyze, model, and build the software, the net result software applications that will is typically still a point run their organizations. The solution that meets only a firms that embark on this path sub-set of business needs understand that modeling their unique business practices is at a certain point in time. critical to their success and seek to build a solution that fits their business needs exactly. But developing software from the ground up is a very costly and complex endeavor for the simple reason that the IT shop must typically build everything themselves. The back-end database. The framework. The web services. The user interface. The business logic. The infrastructure. Everything has to be hand-coded. And all of it must fit into the current company architectural standards and best practices. Not only does this level of effort require a great deal of skill, but also a great deal of time, expense, and risk, and therein lies the problem. Designing, developing, and deploying enterprise-grade software is a challenging process that takes a lot of time—something software development teams never have enough of. Development managers must juggle time-to-market concerns with tight budgets, pressure from stakeholders, and complex functional requirements that seem to be in a constant state of flux and scope creep. This frequently results in projects that are buggy, poorly documented, and—worst of all—late. But software developers engaged in custom development must deal with more than the functional requirements. When writing software from scratch, they must also deal with the dreaded infrastructure issues and non-functional requirements (commonly referred to as “plumbing code”).
Introducing CRM+, A Balanced Alternative
The “buy vs. build” dilemma is nothing new. All IT departments have encountered it at one time or another. Both options have their pros and cons, but neither represents an ideal choice. Buying software off the shelf solves business problems, just not necessarily any specific firm’s exact problems. Building apps from the ground up gives companies exactly the solution they need, but they pay a big price for it, and the chances of failure are uncomfortably high. Thankfully, there is a third option that offers the much-sought-after middle ground.
2. Frankel, David (2003), Reflections on the MDA Productivity Study, A Perspective for Executives.
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It’s called CRM+, and it offers both an OOTB solution and the power to build and customize applications rapidly. It is important to distinguish between CRM and CRM+. A CRM system is an application: a specific solution to a specific set of problems centering around customer relationship management (typically focused on marketing, sales, and customer service). CRM+, on the other hand, is a development concept: specifically, the idea of using the platforms that underlie some CRM systems as a powerful means to create additional software solutions. This CRM+ approach is by no means a capability supported by all CRM systems. The vast majority of CRM applications are just that: applications. These CRM systems typically offer a certain degree of configuration to help companies superficially With CRM+, firms not adapt the application to only get a flexible CRM their needs, but any deeper application, but also the customization requires power to create effective in-depth custom coding, additional business often using arcane proprietary code. However, a select few applications that may have CRM vendors, recognizing the nothing at all to do with a importance of close business conventional CRM. fit to CRM success, took a different approach to creating their CRM applications, building them upon a versatile purpose-built platform that permits great flexibility and ease of customization in the resulting CRM application. But this same platform layer is in no way restricted to building CRM applications; in fact, it contains all the core components—database structures, workflow tools, and form designers, just to name a few—that a company requires to easily build solutions to satisfy other enterprise automation needs. So why stop at using these components to support only customer relationship management processes? A CRM+ solution puts the platform’s easy applicationbuilding components in the hands of a company’s IT and business analyst teams, enabling them to build out additional solutions and automate other business processes on the same platform as their CRM solution. When firms invest in a CRM system that embodies this CRM+ approach, they not only get a flexible CRM application that can adapt easily to their unique and changing needs over time, but also the power to create effective additional business applications that may have nothing at all to do with the functions you would find in a conventional CRM deployment. The platform essentially provides the “toolkit” that allows technical teams to create unique line-of-business solutions and workflows from end to end. These solutions and workflows could be of any kind: human resource management, proposal management, facility management—virtually anything the enterprise needs to automate.
CRM+ platforms provide a layer of pre-built, pre-tested, pre-integrated, and pre-optimized components—the same foundations the CRM application sits on top of and was built from—that a company’s development team can use as a springboard to develop virtually any line-of-business application their firm needs. This gives companies a brand new paradigm, creating custom automated solutions without custom development, as well as a collection of much-needed benefits to the enterprise. These benefits include time savings, cost savings, better business fit, greater strategic agility, higher user acceptance, and the simplicity that comes with having an enterprise-wide software development platform. Let’s take a closer look at these CRM+ advantages.
Time Savings
A strong CRM+ platform supplies all of the plumbing code that software developers spend so much time coding and recoding. This frees them up to spend their time creating effective features, intuitive user interfaces, optimized forms, and streamlined workflows—the parts of the application end users actually use to accomplish their jobs and capture critical information every day. Furthermore, a CRM+ platform provides not just the plumbing code, but also the tools to more quickly and easily build out the functional application areas and interfaces with little or no coding as well. IT teams can focus on building the parts of the system that add clear user-facing value, not the invisible non-functional elements that don’t. Faster development is about more than just lightening the workload for developers; it’s about delivering needed solutions to the business at the fast pace it requires to stay competitive. Companies’ IT resources are limited, and naturally most companies would rather see those resources applied where they can add the most value. Using a CRM+ platform, the company saves the time its development team would typically spend building out the infrastructure and benefits from tools that help them fulfill the functional requirements much more quickly and easily, putting the desired functionality into the end users’ hands much faster. Furthermore, the ease of development and deployment supports a more iterative approach to solution development, enabling the applications team to roll out frequent upgrades and enhancements rather than a single monolithic application in a “big-bang” release.
Cost Savings
Due to the high cost of development work, firms that can cut the turnaround time from the beginning of an application project to the final deployment save a great deal of money. With CRM+, developers need no longer spend time reinventing the wheel on tedious, error-prone plumbing code. Because development teams can leverage the CRM+ platform tools, they have to build less functionality by hand, thereby decreasing IT costs.
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Development is not the only area in which CRM+ adopters save money. Because that code is already in place and underpinning the CRM application, developers and testers no longer have to spend time tracking down and fixing bugs in the business logic and data access tiers, thereby saving money in the QA cycle as well. They also have the CRM application itself as a best-practice model to follow in developing additional solutions on the platform. By building a custom application on a CRM+ platform, companies get the exact functionality they want while also saving the time and cost of evaluating, purchasing, implementing, customizing, and integrating a new off-the-shelf software package. Furthermore, they bypass the need for new skills training for their IT teams or to hire costly external consultants, and they eliminate an extra annual maintenance expense from the budget altogether.
they implement today will be flexible enough to change without a great deal of cost and downtime. Essentially, they want to “future-proof” their enterprise IT infrastructure. The astute executives that have adopted a CRM+ approach have found that it affords them just such an opportunity: business fit today and business agility tomorrow.
Simplicity through Standardization
Conventional application development has become so costly and complex that it has become a hindrance to business agility, rather than the accelerator it was intended to be. Nonetheless, today’s corporate enterprises need extensive software support to remain efficient and competitive. CRM+ simplifies the effort by providing a uniform layer of application architecture as a standard platform for multiple applications in the enterprise. By leveraging the functionality the CRM platform supplies out of the box, programmers don’t need to learn low-level APIs; the platform handles these issues for them. Additionally, CRM+ lowers IT costs by allowing corporate developers to leverage a uniform toolset to build applications. Having uniform tools results in a smaller learning curve for developers. They can get up to speed and on the road to developing high-quality solutions quickly, regardless of whether they are extending the functionality of the CRM application itself or building something entirely different. CRM+ platforms that provide standard toolsets allow teams to meet new demands without learning new tools. Building multiple solutions on a single platform also means fewer disparate systems to integrate. As any IT department knows, integration can be the most complex and timeconsuming elements of any implementation project, but without it, applications become impractical silos of data and functionality. Using a CRM+ approach, companies can avoid this complexity and save considerable time and money in deploying integrated solutions. A final—but extremely important—benefit of building multiple solutions on a single platform is the positive impact on user adoption and acceptance. Because applications built on a CRM+ platform use a common toolset, it is simple and natural to make them look and function similarly and flow together seamlessly. Not only does this improve user productivity, it also accelerates user adoption by offering users an intuitive, familiar interface and features that work as they expect them to. Training requirements are reduced or eliminated altogether, and companies avoid the user reluctance that comes from learning a “new system”—instead, new functionality can be positioned as extensions and enhancements to the CRM system and other existing functionality built on the CRM+ platform. Since user adoption is the true determinant of any application’s success, the positive impact of CRM+ on user
Business Fit
Shorter development cycles allow for more frequent program enhancements, resulting in solutions that more effectively meet end-user needs. If release 1.0 only takes a few months to build and deploy, release 1.1 should finish even faster. This benefit is especially valuable in environments in which there is frequent business change with can release little or no advance warning. More frequent releases also enable better business fit. When end users can give constructive feedback to the development team sooner, developers can in turn produce new and better features more quickly and easily, giving the users exactly the functionality they need. And when business drivers require a significant workflow change, the development team can automate new workflows without the time-consuming task of having to refurbish the underlying software infrastructure or write new code. Instead, teams can devote their full concentration to developing innovative iterations and enhancements, providing the enterprise with continuous business process improvement.
Firms that solutions to help them respond to new market opportunities quickly enjoy a significant advantage over competitors who can’t.
Strategic Business Agility
The business benefit of faster turnaround time goes way beyond mere cost savings. It enables the enterprise to be more agile, which is crucial to gaining a strategic competitive advantage. Firms that can release solutions to help them respond to new market opportunities quickly enjoy a significant advantage over competitors who can’t. Many business leaders know they need software applications to solve the business problems they have today. But they also know that business change is inevitable, so they want to make sure that the applications
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acceptance is perhaps the most compelling benefit of them all.
The Pivotal Platform: CRM+ in Action
The quintessential CRM+ solution, CDC Software’s Pivotal Platform is the system of choice for companies looking to create applications tailored to their unique business processes at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional software development methods. Engineered with business change in mind, the Pivotal Platform offers unparalleled flexibility and customizability. Applications that formerly took years to build now can be delivered in a matter of weeks or a few months, allowing companies to seize market opportunities and react to business change with agility. Built on the Microsoft .NET technology stack, the Pivotal Platform adds a critical layer The Pivotal Platform’s between its .NET foundations powerful metadata-driven and the application tier: a WYSIWYG ("what you see is layer of pre-built data access what you get") model makes methods, security, and user interface rules, as well as the application building and graphical tools that enable customization process rapid developers to easily construct and intuitive. tables, workflows, business logic, forms, navigation, and more with a minimum of effort and no custom coding required—though for .NET programmers who prefer to be “hands on” with the code, this is also always an option. Furthermore, the Pivotal Platform offers pre-built integrations to the Microsoft productivity tools relied upon by the majority of organizations worldwide—Outlook, the Office suite, and SharePoint—and embeds Microsoft Visual Studio, a tool of choice for today’s developers, right within the platform. This saves developers the effort of building these must-have integrations into any other application built on the platform. The Pivotal Platform’s powerful metadata-driven WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) model makes the application building and customization process rapid and intuitive. The platform solution provides out-of-the-box form templates with logic and rules built in, with the ability to easily attach additional logic and workflow. The Pivotal Platform exposes all of the functionality of the award-winning Pivotal CRM application it undergirds and gives it its renowned flexibility and ease of customization. But what makes the Pivotal Platform so unique is that despite its connection to this customer relationship management solution, the Pivotal Platform was initially conceived and constructed as a full application development platform, not just the structure beneath a CRM solution. The implications of this are huge. While several competing CRM vendors promote the
platform capabilities of their applications, their solutions were simply never designed to be platforms and are ultimately severely limited by this fact. A platform can be used to create almost any application, but attempts to reverse-engineer a platform from an application are invariably illogical and ineffective. Because the Pivotal Platform was designed first and foremost as a platform, it was engineered to serve as a flexible foundation for any application running any business process, making it an indispensable tool for today’s demand-driven IT teams. While the Pivotal Platform is not the only kind of platform or development toolkit available to companies looking to obtain highly customized CRM or to build other custom applications, it offers numerous advantages over both commercially available development environments and “big” enterprise software suites that also offer customization tools. First, the Pivotal Platform’s .NET foundations mean development teams don’t need to learn proprietary languages and systems just to be able to work with the platform. Secondly, its flexibility and ease of use eclipse those of big enterprise software platforms, enabling faster, easier customization and application development with fewer upgrade woes at a much lower total cost of ownership than competing solutions.
An Agility Multiplier
Using the Pivotal Platform, corporate developers can create custom applications without having to write the tedious, error-prone plumbing code and logic that has traditionally slowed them down—or, if they wish, without writing any code at all. They can easily add new tables, forms, and logic to quickly create entire new applications using a graphical toolkit. And because the Pivotal Platform is built on Microsoft .NET—a ubiquitous industry standard—developers don’t need to learn entire new skills and languages or receive extensive training; they can get up to speed quickly and easily. For the company, this also makes finding developers who can work with the system much easier and more cost-effective: no obscure skill-sets required. Using the Pivotal Platform, all of the steps for developing a new application—building tables, adding fields, defining relationships, setting security, creating forms—can be performed quickly and easily without time-consuming custom coding. Meanwhile, any hands-on coding developers do want to perform within the platform can be applied to activities that deliver higher value to the business. Using the Microsoft Visual Studio forms designer embedded within the Pivotal Platform, teams can simply draw their forms the way they want them and use the Pivotal Toolkit to easily build the infrastructure and functionality behind them. This translates into tremendous time savings, both in terms of development and testing. In this way, the Pivotal Platform multiples development teams’ agility, enabling them to fulfill new requirements, build new applications, and adapt to changing needs
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quickly and cost-effectively. This gives them the freedom to create applications for any line of business, while saving their firms a great deal of time and money. The Pivotal Platform achieves this exceptional resilience with an adaptable layer of business metadata. This sturdy yet flexible tier of logic separates data from business rules, making it easy to customize a solution to match even the most distinctive of business processes. It is this layer of technological cartilage that gives the enterprise true architectural flexibility. Following this CRM+ approach using the Pivotal Platform, the enterprise can adapt its software tools to business change in any way necessary. Change is what the Pivotal Platform was built for.
requirements precisely within the system or building entire new applications. For this reason, perhaps the best testament to the success of the CRM+ approach and the power of the Pivotal Platform is the proven success of the Pivotal CRM customer base in applying this strategy. Long before they ever heard the term “CRM+” (or “xRM,” as this concept is called by some vendors), forward-thinking Pivotal CRM customers were taking advantage of the Pivotal Platform and Toolkit to create their own custom solutions and roll out innovative integrated IT infrastructures within their firms. Here are just a few examples of solutions built on the Pivotal Platform: • A New Zealand utility company built an application to handle hazardous waste disposal. • A UK building-supply company created an application to manage the design, ordering, and installation of kitchens and bathrooms. • A food and beverage manufacturer built a solution to handle vendor management along with all procurement and related activities. • A radio advertising wholesaler created their entire enterprise application catalog—sales, marketing, customer service, ERP, human resources, and finance—all on the Pivotal Platform. As this list illustrates, the potential of the Pivotal Platform extends far beyond customer relationship management. In fact, numerous companies that have embraced the Pivotal Platform and the CRM+ concept say Pivotal CRM is the last software they’ll ever buy, because it can be used to solve almost any business problem. As one longstanding CDC Software customer said of her company’s IT strategy, “If the business issue is one that touches or faces the customer, we’ll build it into Pivotal; no questions asked. No new software acquisitions.”
Pre-integration with Microsoft Tools
Above and beyond its high flexibility and utility, the Pivotal Platform comes pre-integrated with the office productivity tools used by almost every enterprise: Microsoft Outlook, the full Microsoft Office Suite, and Microsoft SharePoint, as well as Microsoft Visual Studio. This spares companies the complexity of integrating these applications and enables them to easily embed these tools into custom end-user applications and workflows built using the Pivotal Platform, allowing users to access e-mail, contacts, calendars, and task lists without ever leaving the CRM+ application. Additionally, users of Word, Excel, and other Office tools can perform in-context Only the Pivotal Platform was look-ups of CRM+ application actually built as a platform data directly within the from the outset, giving it Office application simply by right-clicking on a piece a superior flexibility and of data; no need to switch intuitive toolkit with which back and forth between a to build and customize range of applications to find applications, unmatched by the data they need. The net any other CRM platform. result is a “sticky” application users enjoy using. They can continue working with all the applications they are already familiar with while still benefiting from all the advantages of the custom processspecific business application built upon the Pivotal Platform.
Conclusion
Today’s enterprises need software to support and automate their unique business processes. However, the two primary options for acquiring it leave a great deal to be desired. Packaged out-of-the-box software provides the easiest solution, but it rarely provides the close business fit large corporations require. On the other hand, writing enterprise-grade software in-house can give firms the exact functionality they want, but at a high price, a slow pace, and a significant risk of failure. And both options typically fall short when it comes to adapting rapidly and cost-effectively to evolving business needs. CRM+ is the answer to this dilemma. Using the functionality already built into the platform underlying certain CRM systems, companies can quickly and
A Proven Approach
CDC Software’s Pivotal CRM has long had the reputation of being the most flexible CRM solution on the market, easy to customize and adapt over time. The secret to this flexibility is the Pivotal Platform and its development toolkit, which enable Pivotal CRM customers to accomplish virtually anything they want to with the system, whether this entails modeling unique CRM processes and
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inexpensively create applications that address their specific business needs and automate their unique processes without having to develop the costly and tedious infrastructure components required by the average software development lifecycle. Furthermore, they can take advantage of this power and flexibility over time to more rapidly accommodate new and changing requirements, enhancing business agility and fueling innovation. While a handful of CRM applications claim to have the ability to support a CRM+ development approach, only the Pivotal Platform on which CDC Software’s Pivotal CRM was developed was actually built as a platform from the outset, giving it a superior flexibility and intuitive toolkit with which to build and customize applications, unmatched by any other CRM platform. This enables
companies to achieve the lowest possible total cost of ownership for both CRM implementations and additional solution development. Furthermore, its embedding of Microsoft solutions, including Microsoft Outlook and SharePoint, not only saves the company from having to do these common (but often troublesome) integrations, but also increases user adoption by enabling users to work with the familiar tools they already know and rely upon to perform their daily tasks. The power of the Pivotal Platform has been proven by the success of countless companies that have used it to create diverse custom enterprise applications rapidly and at a low cost, pre-integrated with each other and with Microsoft Outlook, Office, and SharePoint. This combination of unparalleled capabilities and proven success makes the Pivotal Platform from CDC Software the ideal solution for companies looking for much more than just a CRM system, giving them the ability to be agile, competitive, and innovative in meeting their unique software needs today and in the future.
Discover the Power of CRM+ For more information and a complete list of our worldwide offices, please visit www.PivotalCRM.com.
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