Case Study: CRM and Portfolio Management System Integration

Industry: Financial Services

Introduction: The organisation wanted to maximise their return on investment from their CRM system and assist the sales team to develop new business by having the appropriate data from their Portfolio Management System available in a secure and timely manner.

Challenges:

• The business had significant information available within their PMS such as client holdings across funds, positions, subscriptions, redemptions and valuations which needed to be manually retrieved, this in itself was such a time consuming process that it was mostly avoided

• This PMS-based information needed to be reviewed in conjunction with the data stored in the Client Relationship System, looking at all related information in one place made it far more powerful and effective

• The data needed to be up to date, visible to only authorised personnel and not negatively impact the performance nor the stability of the PMS

Objectives:

• The data from the PMS needed to be enriched with all available related information from the CRM

• All relevant information pertaining to the client needed to be accessible from within 1 screen

• The information needed to be available near real-time

• The performance of the PMS needed to be unaffected

• Security should be in place to ensure that only relevant information was available and that any confidential or unrelated information was excluded

Solution:

This Investment Manager partnered with Synetec in order to deliver functionality to enrich and make available information that has improved the performance of their sales team. In the absence of a proprietary API, the data from the PMS was accessed through scheduled nightly reports.

Not only could the sales person view all relevant CRM information of the client, but also any transactions involving the client’s accounts and the valuation of their holdings.

Benefits:

This system allowed the valuable data that was locked in the PMS to contribute to the success of the business as a whole. Initial indications are that sales have improved significantly with the sales team attributing the majority of that increase to this integration and the additional information at their fingertips.

George Toursoulopoulos is a technology specialist and Director at Synetec, one of the UK’s leading providers of software services and solutions.

Top 3 Tips when taking software to mobile devices

Introduction

Can we have a version of that for Tablet and Smartphone please? We have long since passed the point where tablets and smart phones are being used for business, the challenge is when a proprietary system has functionality that is inaccessible on these devices. This article attempts to address the key criteria to assess before taking that step forward.

Which part?

"We want to use the system on our iPad" is all well and fine, but does the entire system need to be accessible via a tablet? For example, in a CRM system, the list of clients and client contacts is viewed almost every time the user logs on, it's a primary purpose of the system, but do they really to be able to change their user settings or schedule reports to run via a tablet version? It might make sense to take a phased approach and leave the less frequently used parts of the system for a future phase, if at all. The main objective is usually to make the frequently used parts of the system available on different devices, not to make a complete mobile version of the system, making that distinction can save an awful lot of time and money.

Which way?

The existing systems architecture will influence many of the decisions to be made and also affect what sort of effort will be required. Having the same functionality implemented on different platforms will greatly increase the effort and costs when implementing new or changing existing functionality. For example in a windows-based system, it might make sense to move all common functionality to a WCF service that can be called by both the windows application and the mobile version, this would ensure only 1 set of code and greatly increase maintainability. Thought has to go into which platforms to develop for, is both Android and iOS required? If so, can that perhaps be implemented by making a dynamic web-based version of the application (using responsive or adaptive html) that is then accessible and works across platforms. Often a change to the main application can make moving forward much easier.

Watch it!

Maintain the system's integrity is often overlooked in these types of projects, with all the excitement of moving to a mobile platform issues such as system and data security can be overlooked and with this different type of accessibility come different types of security challenges. The usability of the system is also something that can be underestimated, to do this properly the commonly used pieces of the system need to be redesigned so that they are usable on the different devices. To get the most out of the system it will look different on a tablet from a Smartphone.

George Toursoulopoulos is a technology specialist and Director at Synetec, one of the UK’s leading providers of software services and solutions.