Construction company Hyundai Construction Equipment Australia (HCEA) has moved from using Excel spreadsheets for client management to implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) system.
Systems Manager, Matt Golby, said the upgrade is the first step in HECA’s move to the Cloud, and that it was necessary after staff communication became problematic.
“The CRM is the first tool that we’ve put in through the net and the rest is systems based and driven back through the internet… Cloud services will provide a more user friendly platform for us,” he said.
“With this CRM portal we’re using, it provides us with flexibility, and [beforehand] it was very stagnant because we couldn’t communicate back to our management team.”
After informally looking at a few companies, Golby said he chose Sage as a vendor because of HECA’s use of the vendor's ERP Accpac.
“We didn’t get anyone else involved, but we did have a look with other offerings like Salesforce and SAP, but to go down that path we probably would have changed our whole environment and systems,” he said.
“Sage was a natural progression for us [because of] the cost benefits we incurred and [because] the... package itself works well.”
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With some 70 staff in Australia and a dealer network extending to Papua New Guinea, the rollout at HECA was fairly slow, Golby said.
“We took baby steps with this and... we made sure that it was an easy transition for staff so they could go from an Excel environment to more of a systems environment that could integrate between departments,” he said.
Next on Golby’s agenda is a continued effort to embrace mobility, with HECA now looking at implementing a tablet strategy.
“The next step for us is to look at tablets between now and when Sage CRM provides services in a tablet form,” he said. “We’re looking at using iPads and taking that next step and... the business is looking at taking its next step in upgrades.”
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