Arthur D. Little Case Study - "Lotus Award 2005 Best-in-Showcase solution streamlines CRM at Arthur D. Little"

Not long ago, Arthur D. Little’s Germany/Austria/Central and Eastern Europe organization wanted to streamline and consolidate its customer relationship management (CRM) system.

“All the information we needed for managing customers and opportunities was stored in separate, disconnected databases,” says Marc Winterhoff, a partner at Arthur D. Little (ADL) Germany. “And many of our partners had more than a thousand addresses in their personal address books, none of which were being shared. As a result we had a lot of repetition and double-entry of information, and a lot of inconsistent data.”

So Winterhoff and his organization set about finding an integrated CRM solution, with one requirement in mind. “We really wanted a messaging/calendar integrated solution with offline functionality -- and as we used Lotus Notes globally for many years and have the overall infrastructure and experiences with Notes, a Notes-based solution was the obvious candidate,” says Roland Wink, ADL CIO and Global IT Coordinator. “We also looked at everything from small Windows-based systems to Siebel and SAP solutions, but we didn’t want to roll out another client/server infrastructure for CRM.”

In the end ADL choose iExtensions CRM, for ten years one of the leading Notes/Domino-based CRM solutions worldwide, created by iEnterprises, Inc. Since 2002 iExtension has netted 14 Lotus, Beacon, Lotus Advisor and Apex awards. In 2005 it captured the unprecedented troika of the IBM Beacon Award for Best Lotus Solution and Lotus Awards for Best in Lotusphere Showcase and Best Collaborative Solution.

Configurable product, trusted partner mean rapid deployment
John Carini, Chief Software Architect of iEnterprises, says the product won the award by doing what it has done for ADL and for countless other customers: providing a value-driven approach to CRM, keeping total cost of ownership (TCO) low and quickly delivering a measurable return on investment (ROI).

A big part of iExtension CRM’s low TCO is the speed with which it can be deployed, relative to other CRM systems — a direct result of how easily and completely the product can be customized.

“iExtensions CRM is extremely configurable — it has over 500 user-defined fields, and every keyword or label can be changed,” says Carini. “So, in many cases, a company already running Notes and Domino can get off the ground with iExtensions CRM and deploy a CRM system fully tailored to its industry and its internal practices, in the time it takes to install and configure the product.”

Of course ADL, the world’s first consulting firm, isn’t just any company; it counts 75% of the Fortune 100 as customers, and at any given time it might be managing 1000-1500 projects in more than 30 countries globally. Nevertheless, the iExtensions CRM deployment at ADL’s organization was especially rapid: It took just two and a half months to deploy the product to 160 employees, and that included a four-week pilot period. Today, iExtensions CRM at ADL is used in five countries, and its user base is still growing.

Here Matt Zimmerman, VP of Global Sales, shares credit with weburi.com, iEnterprise’s Master Business partner in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. weburi.com’s Germany office, run by Senior Consultant Michael Wagner, managed the ADL engagement from presales through final deployment and continues to provide ongoing support.

weburi.com is an IBM Business Partner and one of our oldest partners, and Michael Wagner and his team have had tremendous success implementing our product over the past several years,” says Zimmerman.

“CRM applications traditionally involve long and complex rollouts, but in this case Michael had the pilot up and running very quickly, in just a few weeks, which let ADL see the benefits of the system quickly, which in turn really drove the deployment.”

Streamlined data access yields more efficiencies, possibilities
Once in place, iExtensions CRM delivers ROI by increasing productivity. “It can make every part of the customer relationship and the sales process more efficient,” says Carini. “For example, one of iEnterprises’ customers, a major financial services company, says that iExtensions CRM has increased productivity by 75%.”

ADL has yet to quantify its productivity gains, but it knows employees are working more efficiently with customer data. Today, for example, ADL employees spend much less time rekeying information — a real pet peeve with ADL’s previous collection of disconnected systems. “In the past, when an assistant set up an appointment with a client, he or she first keyed it into the Lotus Notes calendar and then went to the contact database and made another entry for the same meeting,” Winterhoff says. “Now we enter that information once into iExtensions CRM, and it appears wherever else it has to appear. Everyone is very happy with that.”

The system’s mass-mailing capabilities have streamlined everything from Christmas card mailings to customer event management. Users locate contact information instantly, from wherever they happen to be. “We just open our notebooks and all of our contact information is right there in the system,” says Winterhoff. And iExtensions CRM’s leveraging of Lotus Notes replication and offline use lets ADL’s users work from anywhere, at any time — a big plus given that roughly 80% of these users are highly mobile and often disconnected.

But the benefits go beyond efficiencies and conveniences. iExtension CRM lets ADL leverage information in ways that were difficult or impossible previously — ways that can accelerate projects and reveal new business opportunities.

“With iExtensions CRM we can more easily see customer activity across geographies or vertical markets, areas that were isolated before,” says Winterhoff. So it will be easier to spot and share new opportunities with our existing customers, and it will be easier to find and share information when consulting on mergers and acquisitions and the like.”

Even more to offer — including wireless access
iExtensions CRM has other market-leading capabilities that ADL can exploit in the future and that other customers are using today with great success. For example, the system is available in 11 languages — “and counting,” says Carini — making it the only Unicode Domino-based CRM solution available today. And earlier this year iEnterprises introduced Mobile Edge, a separate module that is also offered as a stand-alone product that lets users access iExtensions CRM — or any other CRM system including NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and SugarCRM— from a Blackberry or other wireless device. This hosted or premise-based wireless CRM application mimics the look and feel of its host CRM system and allows companies to extend their CRM and Notes investments. Says Carini, "Best of all, it's incredibly easy to use."

“Mobile Edge is based on J2EE technology, uses IBM WebSphere as middleware, and communicates between the handheld device and any CRM solution using Web services,” says Carini. “It lets users get critical customer, sales and marketing information anywhere, anytime. We truly believe that soon, everyone will be using Mobile Edge to access their existing CRM solution.”

Customers can look forward to much more. Carini says iEnterprises is perennially developing new ways to create and improve software and has already developed components that will leverage new features in Lotus Notes/Domino 7, particularly in regards to Web Services “We’ve incorporated new ways to work with DB2 as a back-end data store,” he says. “New functionalities in Domino 7 work well in an SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) environment—which is extremely beneficial for CRM on the Go as it gives us a modular and interoperable environment to work in. This offers us and our users greater flexibility for product configuration and scalability. Our users can effortlessly mix and match their wireless CRM features and options so they are tailored to their needs.”

Awards bring validation, growth
In the meantime, Carini and iEnterprises are enjoying the publicity — and a lift in sales — as a result of its Lotus awards.

“We were the first company to win three Lotus awards in a single year, and of course we’re proud,” he says. “We think these awards, together with our 2003 Best-in-Showcase award, have really propelled us to the head of the pack in the CRM area. We’ve seen significant growth this year, especially in Europe and Asia, and we attribute it to the Lotus awards and the industry recognition they bring.”