Customer success story
Over a thousand invoices a day, and a view you could not get before
Inter-Data handles more than 1,000 order and invoice lines a day across 6,000 customers. Rapidi carries them between Microsoft Dynamics C5 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM, which is what makes a product matrix possible: total sales by product group, per customer, over time.
Inter-Data A/S implemented Microsoft Dynamics CRM to get an overview of communication and total sales per client. That only works if customers, products and invoices move between the ERP and the new CRM. Rapidi does it in both directions: customer data and the assigned sales representative flow from C5 into CRM, where the representative field controls who can see what; products and pricing follow the same way; invoices generated in C5 transfer to CRM and are analysed there.
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The business need
Inter-Data A/S was founded in 1993 and is today one of the leading Danish distributors of PC and server solutions, IT equipment and consumer electronics. It employs about 60 people across Silkeborg and Copenhagen. More about the company at inter-data.dk.
Inter-Data A/S deals with over 6,000 customers and handles more than 1,000 order and invoice lines every day in its ERP system. To get an overview of the communication and the total sales to each client over time, the company chose to implement Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
That decision carried a condition. A CRM is only as useful as what it knows, so information about customers, products and invoices had to move between the ERP and the new system. Without that, the CRM would have been a second place to type things.
Rapidi’s data integration solution was recommended by our CRM partner and made it possible to take advantage of the valuable data in our systems. The data coming from our ERP system to our CRM system can now be used in a product matrix, where we can get an overview the total sales made by product and by client over time. Having this overview gives us a competitive advantage and leads to more sales.
The key challenges
- A stable and secure interface between the CRM and the ERP system
- Flexible two-way integration
- Handling a large volume of orders and invoices
- A minimum of maintenance
- Keeping data consistent across both systems
The solution
Rapidi is the link between the company’s Microsoft Dynamics CRM system and its general financial system, Microsoft Dynamics C5. It makes sure any relevant information is exchanged between the two automatically.
Customer data moves in both directions. The sales representative assigned to each customer is maintained in the ERP and transferred automatically to CRM, where it controls access to customer data, so the permission model follows the ERP rather than being maintained twice. Products and pricing are also maintained in the ERP and updated automatically in CRM.
Invoices are generated in the ERP and transferred automatically to CRM, where they are analysed with BI. That is what produces the product matrix: an overview of total sales per product group for each individual customer over time, which is difficult to get out of Microsoft Dynamics C5 on its own.
The results
Better sales process and work routines. The sales process runs in both C5 and CRM, so the data has to be current in both. Rapidi keeps them in step, which saves a great deal of time and frees up people: no duplicated entry, and no switching between systems mid-task.
Better customer service. A sales person can now see the total and the detail of what a customer has bought, easily. That is a genuinely useful thing to have in front of you during a conversation, and Inter-Data treats it as a competitive advantage rather than an internal convenience.
Take it with you
The whole story as a PDF
Five pages: the 6,000 customers, the 1,000 lines a day, the product matrix that C5 alone could not produce, and the partner on why access beat escalation. Yours after one short form.
The partner’s view
This story is unusual in that most of what is on record comes from the implementation partner rather than the customer. Morten Gad, Technical Consultant at C2 Relations, works with Rapidi across a portfolio of clients, and his interest is in what a tool does to his own delivery.
C2 Relations is a Danish company that implements Microsoft Dynamics CRM solutions. It implemented the solution for Inter-Data and built the Business Intelligence part inside Dynamics CRM — the piece that turns the transferred invoices into the product matrix. More about the partner at c2-relations.dk.
Rapidi is the perfect data integration platform for us as a partner, as it covers all our needs and requirements in one tool. We don’t have to educate ourselves in various tools in order to serve the different needs of our clients. Rapidi is very flexible and covers data integration to many different systems, but is especially strong when integrating to the Microsoft Dynamics Product Suite.
On this project specifically, the volume is what made it hard, and the answer was access rather than escalation.
As Inter-Data has a lot of data that needs to be transferred, it makes the integration solution very complex, but working with Rapidi we are able to handle everything is a very flexible way. We — as a partner — have access to the configuration interface and there we are able to determine and set-up ourselves all the needed transfers. Furthermore we can decide when, how and how often it should run. That gives us the freedom and the flexibility that we need.
Moving invoices at volume between ERP and CRM?
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