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CASE STUDY: MAPP Construction LLC
- Empower CRM deployed as a SaaS model cost 50% less to implement than similar deployed solutions.
- Empower CRM made computing project scores 100% faster and more accurate than MAPP’s previous solution.
BACKGROUND
MAPP Construction is a Baton Rouge, Louisiana based construction company with over 200 employees. The company is a regional leader in the Southeast, with clients such as Starbucks, Hollywood Theaters, Home Depot, Ernst and Young, Target, Kohl’s, and is rapidly expanding into other areas of the United States.
THE CHALLENGE
Since its inception, MAPP Construction, like many other mid-market construction companies, had relied on MS Excel Spread sheets to keep track of multiple customer-related activities. Five spreadsheets were the norm: one holding customer addresses, a second to filter opportunities, a third for opportunities in queue and won, a fourth for potential project pre-bid calendars and the last, a summary to report to senior executives.
With so much updating and reporting required, this meant one person had to manage these sheets, and six business development representatives were charged with updating them regularly. As the company began to expand, so did the need for a more centralized and automated system, with greater risk of human error, security holes and the inability to consolidate information becoming increasing challenges. MAPP needed improved communications and a foundation.
MAPP began to seek a CRM solution that was not only configurable enough to handle opportunities, contacts and other traditional CRM tasks, but also to support and streamline the extensive pre-bid process required to ensure that each project would positively impact the company’s bottom line. They also wanted a hosted solution that could eventually be deployed behind the firewall.
In addition, MAPP needed an affordable solution that could accommodate the company’s mobile needs, was easy to use, and would integrate with their IBM Websphere Portal Server.
Upon an extensive search, they soon found that while many CRM providers offered “bells and whistles,” they came at a high price for customizations.
“These solutions weren’t necessarily made for a company of our size migrating from Excel spreadsheets,” said Derrick Jackson, Systems Manager at MAPP Construction. “We needed ease of use and affordability--something that was easy to understand for our users, but could also handle our specific industry needs.”
Even fewer providers had first-hand experience with IBM Websphere Portal integration and built-in wireless capabilities.
“Everyone here is glued to their BlackBerry,” said Derrick. “We needed a solution that would allow us to make changes while our team was on a plane to see a client or at an event.”
THE SOLUTION
MAPP Construction chose iEnterprises’ readily configurable, web-based CRM solution, Empower CRM, to tackle its challenges. Unlike many of the other CRM providers that MAPP evaluated, no code changes needed to be made and everything could be easily clicked and dropped without incurring an additional cost. Due to this extreme configurability, the entire implementation occurred over the short span of two weeks. In fact, the cleanup of the imported data from the spreadsheets took longer than the implementation itself. Due to Empower CRM’s open-source environment, MAPP Construction could always view code history and any changes that had been made.
Although Empower CRM enabled MAPP Construction to consolidate, automate and improve upon all the information found on the Excel spreadsheets, one of the biggest and unique industry-specific benefits that MAPP received from Empower CRM was automatic and centralized pre-bid filtering. With Empower CRM, the company could automatically score the potential of each project bid, depending on where each prospect was located; potential for recurring business/future opportunities; project type such as retail, entertainment, franchise; profitability, and bid procurement (whether the bid was invited, negotiated or made public). This automated filtering and scoring enabled the company to get a firm grasp on all proposals and share updates across the entire company. Due to Empower CRM’s mobile integration, this could be done right on the road from an employee’s BlackBerry handheld device.
“This helps our Business Development team to commit and be as aggressive as they need to be on bids. It is also useful to our executives. They always have access to up-to- the-minute reports,” said Derrick.
Construction “lingo” or nomenclature could also be easily changed. With one user-generated tweak, Empower CRM automatically updated all corresponding fields across the entire system—so it created a tailored, familiar interface for all users.
“Though it seemed easy, many other CRM providers did not offer this, or they did it for extra cost in customization,” said Derrick “Here, I could call clients “clients,” not “accounts.” It was a huge time-saver as we did not have to do much training.”
With Empower CRM, management of all CRM activities, reporting, opportunities and prospecting became automated, centralized, and up-to-date. The time spent on merely entering and updating a single new prospect, for example, was drastically abbreviated from hours to mere minutes with Empower CRM.
Concluded Derrick, “Empower CRM allowed us to be smart about what we wanted from a CRM system, without the extreme costs and time hits of other solutions. It was a good value for our specific needs.” | |