 BLUEPRINT: The Sign Company
THE EFFICIENCY EQUATION
The Building Partner
The Sign Company is a National LED display supplier and standard business sign
fabricator and installer with multiple locations throughout North America. TSC
delivers standard business signs and LED signs in every size and have achieved
the status of being the #1 OPTEC LED Display distributor in the United States
in less than three years.
+ Surveying the Project
The Sign Company was faced with challenges of reducing administrative costs
while increasing the visibility of customer information throughout the
organization. Automating the sales process, providing sales pipeline
visibility and enhancing customer service were all drivers for change.
The company was expanding rapidly and needed a solution in place quickly
to support that expansion.
+ Drafting the Blueprint
TRG formulated a plan to implement a solution based on Microsoft Dynamics
CRM 3.0 and integrated with Microsoft Dynamics GP (Great Plains) to meet
the requirements of the financial, sales, marketing and customer services
business functions. The Sign Company needed to both automate and integrate
their web-created leads into their lead pool from their externally-hosted
web site. The process of directing leads to the right person was a manual
task of monitoring an email box to which all web-completed forms were sent.
The generic web generated email box was monitored manually by an assigned
TSC resource, but in some cases hours or days passed before the right person
in the organization received the request and could act on it. In addition,
integration with Dynamics GP was required to provide visibility into customer
account information by the sales force without the need to enter the
Dynamics GP application.
+The Microsoft
Building Blocks
The breadth of the Microsoft product stack provided the foundation necessary
to achieve The Sign Company’s goals. Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 running on
SQL Server 2005 formed the core of the system. The addition of Scribe Insight
software allowed quick integration with Dynamics CRM 3.0 and Dynamics GP.
The Sign Company also wanted to develop and test the solution using a virtual
environment, which facilitated the use of Microsoft virtualization technology
which offers the flexibility to easily re-set the test environment.
+ The Rand Group Expertise
The Rand Group team, consisting of business analysts with sales and marketing
experience and Microsoft certified CRM developers, implemented the solution
in less than 30 days. Onsite “train the trainer” training sessions allowed
The Sign Company to rapidly bring their entire organization up the speed on
the new technology.
= Measurable Results
This approach, coupled with the open architecture of Microsoft Dynamics 3.0
and the flexibility of using XML based customizations that update the database
schema on the fly, provided The Sign Company with an end to end solution that
scales with their rapid growth and changing needs. The Rand Group created
multiple integrations to automatically enter various types of new leads and
support requests originating from a web based form on The Sign Company web
site. Using workflows natively built-in to Microsoft CRM, these new leads
were directed to the responsible team member automatically within seconds,
dramatically reducing the response time to act on a potential sale. This
eliminated the need for up to 5 new full time employees to handle incoming
email messages from the website.
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