Reed Elsevier
"The power and capabilities of the iAnywhere and Sybase products which underpinned the CRM system, matched with the support of ProspectSoft was hard to beat."
Piers Costley
Sales Office Manager
Farmplan
Reed Elsevier, a force in the growing agricultural applications market, needed to enhance business efficiency and inter-application integration by replacing an obsolete DOS-based contact management solution. Using Sybase technology, Reed Elsevier created a powerful customer relationship management solution that enables it to look after customers more effectively. Business Advantage Key Benefits Sybase Technology Industry
Overcoming a Difficult Legacy
While the name Reed Elsevier is synonymous with publications and magazines, few people know that the group has software interests too. Following the acquisition of Farmplan, a specialist software house, Reed Elsevier is now a force in the growing agricultural applications market.
Farmplan was a software house in Gloucestershire, established over 25 years ago selling systems to the rural community for managing farm estates. Its software handles financial control, systems management, traceability and legislation, and part of its service includes advice, training and support. Regular updates to the software as they become available are also included in the price. The overall concept is to provide a one-stop shop for a relatively unskilled (in terms of IT) market. Farmplan has a 50-user network at one site and a remote sales force using mobile technology, as well as a second linked department that is now at Reed Elsevier's main building in London.
The sales office manager of Farmplan, Piers Costley, explained that as the company grew, the fact that it was using different systems to keep in touch with its customers became an increasing commercial challenge. "We had been using a range of different products for contact management over the years," he said. "We'd ended up with a basic DOS customer relationship system which was okay, but it wasn't dealing with the sales side, so we had a different system for sales, and separate systems for all parts of the business."
One of the major weaknesses of any DOS-based system is that it is designed to run on comparatively slow computers and is bad at handling more than one task at a time. This means that any organization depending on it for contact management is slowed down and hampered by its inability to connect to other parts of the organization.
Costley wanted to bring all of his disparate systems together and started looking for something that could manage this task. "We looked at various software options and then went down the route of getting a bespoke system written for us," he said. "After a year of doing that and realizing it was going nowhere we decided we would just go and get a new sales system."
The feeling was that having one combined database for all aspects of the business was going to be too big a job.
A Difficult Combination to Beat
Farmplan started investigating standard, off-the-shelf software, but these packages did not fit the bill. "We then came across ProspectSoft's offering. We started to look at it and realized it was going to do exactly what we wanted on the sales side, but it could also handle the customer side, contract management and link into our accounts system," Costley said.
ProspectSoft developed its CRM system using leading products from Sybase's iAnywhere subsidiary, including SQL Anywhere Studio, Ultralite, MobiLink and Sybase PowerBuilder.
"Implementation and learning was swift," Costley said. "The power and capabilities of the iAnywhere and Sybase products which underpinned the CRM system, matched with the support of ProspectSoft was hard to beat. In areas such as remote synchronization they complemented our own in-house knowledge considerably. The upshot was that the new financial systems were integrated within a few days and other functions were added on request."
Initially, the CRM system offered core contact management for salespeople and document management, which linked with Microsoft Office. A link into Farmplan's support line call center was established soon afterwards. So when a customer calls up, a Caller Line ID link tells the helpdesk whether the customer has a current user license and what additional support contract they have, before they've spoken.
Farmplan pushed ProspectSoft's development capabilities to its limits. "We put both the company and the products under the toughest pressure, but the software and the team coped admirably," Costley said.
Enterprise-wide Deployment
Over time, Farmplan acquired 35 licenses to use the ProspectSoft system in house, specifically for the call center, sales team and administration functions. An additional seven remote mobile users, who are the area sales managers, have copies of the database, which they update overnight by synchronizing with the main Sybase database. Newly acquired offices in Hampshire as well as the FWi department at Reed's Sutton offices can also synchronize fully with the main Sybase iAnywhere databases held at Farmplan's Mitcheldean headquarters.
More than Just a Contact Manager
This powerful solution ensures that Farmplan can acquire a full, real-time view of what the business is doing at any time. With the new system in place, the company now has a great deal more than a powerful contact manager.
The new solution developed by ProspectSoft makes extracting management information, marketing analysis and accounts far simpler than it was before, and all of the people who need it, have up-to-date information at all times.
Farmplan has added functions since the implementation began. "The newest thing is that we have a Web service," Costley said. "This is a more compact version of the data set which links our accounts system with ProspectSoft and handles the licensing for our own software." So salespeople can issue customers new licenses in the field when they are needed, rather than generating invoices back at the office and going through a long manual process.
Indeed, there is every reason to expect that the software and its use will continue to expand. Costley has been so impressed by the Sybase iAnywhere-powered application developed by ProspectSoft that he is always keen to look at new developments that can improve the companies' systems.