SCG
Background
Providence Systems is the largest one-on-one business and personal coaching company in the country and has taught more than 500,000 real estate agents and lenders how to do business by referral. The company was experiencing rapid growth and the software system the company had in place would not support the increased demands so Providence enlisted SCG to help streamline the company's order entry and fulfillment process.

Situation
At the time Providence came to SCG, the company was using two separate software products to support their front office and back office processes, Goldmine and Great Plains. The only data integration between the two systems involved a process of manually entering sales orders. Not only was this an inefficient process, but it was also creating data integrity problems that resulted in the loss of key customer information and inaccurate data storage in one or both systems.

Challenges:
  • Two software products needed to be integrated for front and back office processes.
  • Staff was entering sales orders manually - an integrated and efficient system needed to be developed.
  • Integrity of data and data storage of systems needed to analyzed and enhanced.

    Key goals
  • Design a straightforward and easy to use interface that would allow sales, promotions, coaching and customer service departments a direct method to enter sales and subscription orders directly into Great Plains.
  • Manage customer information in both Great Plains and Goldmine.
  • Create web-compatible technologies to support a large-scale e-commerce site.
  • Leverage the functionality built into the Collaborative Portal Solution for future projects.

    Solution
    The user interface was built by creating a custom intranet site using standard Microsoft technologies (ASP & HTML) with a substantial amount of JavaScript to allow for heavy client side processing and viewing of data. At the foundation of the Collaborative Portal Solution, SCG utilized Touchpoint Framework, an approach and toolset based on Microsoft's DNA architecture that includes support for XML, HTTP, Microsoft BizTalk Server, and Great Plains BDX Server.

    Results
    SCG's system architecture, using Touchpoint Framework, significantly reduced development costs and development time for Providence Systems, which allowed rapid integration development. Other benefits included asynchronous, two-way synchronization between Goldmine and Great Plains. The creation of a straightforward and easy to use interface allows sales, promotions, coaching and customer service departments a direct method to enter sales and subscription orders directly into Great Plains.

    Staff can now manage customer information in both Great Plains and Goldmine. The creation of web-compatible technologies supported a large-scale e-commerce site. Providence now can leverage the functionality built into the Collaborative Portal Solution for future projects.

    •   challenges

    software integration

    manual order entry

    data integrity

    data storage
      technologies

    BizTalk Server

    Touchpoint

    Great Plains
      results

    reduced dev costs

    user-friendly

    web HTML client

    scalability
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