Customer success story
The CRM nobody was using, and what it took to change that
Homespice Decor had held Salesforce licences for six months. One person used it, as a contact list, entirely separate from the customers and inventory in Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Rapidi connected the two, and the CRM went from ignored to fully used.
Homespice Decor is a family-owned business importing and wholesaling braided rugs and other décor. It carries roughly 3,000 products with up to eight possible prices each, and dealers sitting at different levels. All of that lived in NAV, behind a limited number of licences that sales people shared. Rapidi made it visible in Salesforce, synchronised every two hours, and the company saved about half a full-time job a week.
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Six months of shelfware
Homespice Decor is a family-owned business, nine people today, importing rugs and other décor items from India and wholesaling them across North America. It began trading in the United States in 1998 and now supplies around 25,000 retailers in the United States and Canada. More about the company at homespice.com.
Karla Sinclair joined Homespice Decor as a sales person. The company had already bought Salesforce six months earlier, and in that time exactly one person had started using it, as a contact database with no connection to anything else. There had not been time to make more of it.
Meanwhile the actual business data sat in Microsoft Dynamics NAV: the customers, the inventory, the accounting, the sales orders. Getting to it was not straightforward. Homespice had only a limited number of NAV licences, so sales people often shared logins and accounts to get in at all. Out in the field, none of it was available.
Sinclair wanted the data inside Salesforce so it could be reached from anywhere. She found two integration vendors listed on the AppExchange, contacted both, and chose Rapidi.
What made this awkward
The catalogue is the complication. Homespice carries around 3,000 products, and the pricing model allows up to eight different prices per product. Dealers are recorded at different dealer levels on top of that.
An integration that only moves a product name and a single price would have been useless here. Before the project, all of that structure was reachable only from inside NAV.
The requirements were correspondingly plain: reach ERP data from anywhere, keep customer and dealer information accurate, get faster reports on sales and inventory, have help making Salesforce and NAV work together, and end up with something flexible enough to grow.
What moves, and how often
Accounts and customers synchronise in both directions. Product inventory, all price lists, open sales orders, sales history and payment history flow into Salesforce and stay current, refreshed every two hours.
“With integration we now have a complete list of all our items on stock and we can see what inventory is coming in,” Sinclair says. “We can see orders, invoices and ledger entries. Having all this information right there we now know straight away what we can deliver, which saves us a lot of time and effort.”
Having our Salesforce and MS Dynamics NAV integrated dramatically increased the value of Salesforce, since we can see all our information needed inside Salesforce, accessible from anywhere.
The next step is order entry: creating sales orders inside Salesforce and transferring them to NAV automatically. Sinclair is direct about why that matters commercially. “This will enable our sales reps to process customer orders from anywhere at any time, even right in front of the customer, which is something our competitors are not doing and probably won’t be doing for some time. What a competitive advantage!”
Trade shows are the sharpest case. “As we are attending several trade shows a year we will be able to create sales orders right at the trade show. In that way we can see right away what we have to order instead of having to wait days to get that overview.”
Missed Promised Data
Homespice has its own name for a problem worth watching: Missed Promised Data, meaning sales orders whose delivery date has passed. Reducing them is an active goal.
That is a case where accuracy is not a nicety. You need to know when orders are arriving and when they can be delivered, and you need to see the whole set quickly. With current data in one place, the company can produce an MPD report and act on it before a customer has to call.
Dealer relationships benefit from the same accuracy. “By having all this accurate and up-to-date data in one system gives us a much better overview of what items the dealers are reselling. This gives us the power and advantage to up-sell to them, as we have the overview of what items they have and have not sold.”
Take it with you
The whole story as a PDF
Seven pages: the six months of shelfware, the 3,000 products with eight prices each, Missed Promised Data, and Karla Sinclair on what changed at the trade shows. Yours after one short form.
The results
Four things came out of it, and one of them is unusual enough to state plainly.
Roughly half a full-time job a week saved, through work routines that no longer involve fetching data from a system most people cannot reach.
Full use of Salesforce. The licences that had sat nearly idle for six months became the place the sales team works.
Fewer NAV licences needed, because sales people no longer need a seat in the ERP just to look things up. That is a saving that pays every year.
Better marketing and up-selling, on the back of data that is accurate rather than remembered.
Without Rapidi we would still be suffering from not having access to our data instantly in one place. We are a very happy customer!
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