Thomson Financial

The biggest challenge for the project was that there was very little time to train staff before a busy period occurred. Avery, comments, “the successful Sage business partner, helped us greatly to manage the process through effective training and support.”

The most challenging technical aspect of the implementation involved the creation of an effective User Interface (UI) to match the unique workflows of Thomson’s business processes. “The SBP provided us with the support we needed by allowing us constant input into the creation process. There was also a high level of user acceptance testing.”

Sage CRM comes with a powerful workflow engine, built on open architecture and a web services interface. It allowed Thomson Financial with the SBP's help to develop an application that closely aligned with the business processes they wanted to automate, as well as providing strong integration capability and depth of functionality.

Benefits to the business and ROI There was a range of objectives the new Sage CRM solution set out to achieve, including: • Centralised tool for all users to ensure better management and information flow about current and future events. • To further improve the scheduling of resources across multiple projects. • Alerts to ensure the timely delivery of mission critical tasks. • Accurate and readily available reporting across multiple projects.

According to Avery, Sage CRM has allowed them to re-structure the business to achieve greater client focus and offer superior levels of customer support. As the product was customised for Thomson Financials use there are a number of features that have further increased their operating efficiency:

• Automatic reporting;
• Real-time data;
• Each client is assigned a contact person to assist in service delivery;
• Lowers the risk of data duplication.

About Sage Group

The Sage Group plc, an established FTSE 100 company, is a leading supplier of accounting and business management software solutions and services to 5.2 million small and medium sized clients worldwide. With over 13 000 employees, the Sage Group comprises market-leading businesses throughout Europe, United Kingdom, North America, South Africa and Australia. Its products and services are sold through a global network of 23 000 reseller partners, 40 000 accountants as well as directly to clients from Sage companies throughout the world. For the financial year ending 30 September 2006, the Group’s revenue grew by 22% and the operating profit rose by 18%.

Thomson Financial is the world’s leading provider of corporate communications webcasts, delivering over 25,000 webcasts
annually via its global webcasting infrastructure.

When Thomson Financial’s Australian operations needed a solution that would help them better manage their workfl ow to increase their ability to service clients; they implemented a Sage CRM solution from
SBP.

Part of Thomson Financial’s success is attributed to the attention paid to developing maximum levels of redundancy for both live and archived webcast services. Thomson Financial’s Streaming Operations Centre (“SOC”) is located at the regional head office in Pyrmont Sydney.

The SOC is the world’s largest and most technologically advanced live internet streaming broadcast facility.

The need for change

Growing from a small business, through acquisition, to a large corporation, the business needed to grow its CRM capabilities from manual processes to a large, automated database solution.

Finding a compatible CRM system was a necessary step in assisting the business to manage its ever-growning client base.

Richard Avery, Australasian General Manager - Production, comments, “Although clients have a designated Events Co-ordinator, event information can feed through a number of diff erent staff members. We needed one central database to store it all”.

Thomson Financial was also looking for a better range of reporting capabilities that would allow them to:

• Forecast peak periods so resources could be allocated and aligned properly to meet the extra demand.
• Share all relevant customer information by maintaining a central database accessible to all staff .

Why Sage CRM

A number of vendors were considered but most were eliminated early in the selection process. The workfl ow capabilities of SageCRM certainly put it ahead of the rest. Avery says, “Discussions took place with several manufacturers but they were qualified out quite early due to poor fi t. We had established through our own research that Sage was going to be the best provider for our specific needs”.

The Implementation

Thomson Financial has rolled out 29 licences in their Sydney Office, which incorporated the main facility for establishing and streaming the webcasts. Initially the system was trialled and assessed with two super users in the team. After the initial assessment the system was extended to various other key stakeholders in the Thomson team.

The biggest challenge for the project was that there was very little time to train staff before a busy period occurred. Avery, comments, “The business partner, SBP helped us greatly to manage the process through eff ective training and support.”

The most challenging technical aspect of the implementation involved the creation of an eff ective User Interface (UI) to match the unique workfl ows of Thomson’s business processes. “SBP provided us with the support we needed by allowing us constant input into the creation process. There was also a high level of user acceptance testing.”

Sage CRM comes with a powerful workflow engine, built on open architecture and a web services interface. It allowed Thomson Financial with SBP’s help to develop an application that closely aligned with the business processes they wanted to automate, as well as providing strong integration capability and depth of functionality.

Benefits to the business and ROI There was a range of objectives the new Sage CRM solution set out to achieve, including:

• Centralised tool for all users to ensure better management and information flow about current and future events.
• To further improve the scheduling of resources across multiple projects.
• Alerts to ensure the timely delivery of mission critical tasks.
• Accurate and readily available reporting across multiple projects.

According to Avery, Sage CRM has allowed them to re-structure the business to achieve greater client focus and off er superior levels of customer support. As the product was customised for Thomson Financial’s use there are a number of features that have further increased their operating efficiency:

• Automatic reporting;
• Real-time data;
• Each client is assigned a contact person to assist in service delivery;
• Lowers the risk of data duplication.

Our technology experience is combined with our focus on business process improvement – from Customer Centric Selling in sales and marketing to manufacturing, distribution, service and finance.