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The Customer
Cubiks is a specialist human resources consultancy within the PA Consulting Group, which provides online solutions for personnel selection, development and reward management. The company operates in 15 countries, acting for a broad range of multinational blue chip organisations.
The Challenge
The challenge was to implement a CRM database for use on an international basis. Cubiks’ CEO, Mr. Barry Spence, made clear that the key project drivers were based on commercial factors and these were clearly understood by the ASAP team.
Cubiks’ needs were not unusual but they were specific. Their system needed to meet the following requirements:
Better understanding of clients and global integration of sales and
marketing
Smoothing out administration processes
Simplifying and expediting the sales forecasting process.
Real time, universal access across the company to a single, integrated contact database.
The Solution
The ASAP solution was a highly customised version of Goldmine, their CRM contact management product. Cubiks’ internal planning began at the end of 2000 and ASAP was commissioned in December 2000. The system was designed and implemented in the Spring and beta testing took place in March 2001 before a roll out across Europe in July 2001.
Success Factors: Now up and running, the new Goldmine system is helping Cubiks in the following key areas:
Design: Although Goldmine can be a turnkey solution, ASAP implemented a high level of tailoring to make sure that the system met Cubik’s specific business requirements and also worked in a way that met the expectations of end-users. This combined the price advantages of an off-the-shelf package with many of the benefits of a more expensive bespoke solution. The resulting software had, for example, fields to track software licence expiry dates and the ability to automatically schedule diary reminders based on these dates.
Buy in: The ASAP implementation was highly focused on the needs of Cubiks’ staff. With the full support of the CEO and management team, they worked from the bottom-up to ensure maximum buy-in from the people who would be using the software
The approach involved key users in the specification process and the consultation process also seeded these key users during an early beta test phase to get their feedback. The key users were representative of Cubiks’ main countries throughout Europe and are known as Principal Users – business support staff, such as secretaries, client support, and administrators.
Once the system had been implemented, these Principal Users acted as champions and local users who could support others in their offices. Part of this process involved collating common questions and circulating the answers to all users so that knowledge was distributed, not centralised.
Training: This roll-out process was complemented by a customised ASAP training plan. Three Cubiks people attended train-the-trainer workshops at ASAP so that they could provide in-house training. ASAP also tailored the Goldmine user guide so that it became a Cubiks document that mirrored user work processes.
Part of this process was administrator-level training so that the Cubiks project leader and two others could make minor modifications to the database structure and screen layout to allow them to react to things like new product releases. This flexibility increased the overall value of the implementation.
Support: Cubiks agreed a full ASAP support package as part of the deal. This provided them with telephone technical support to all the users in different offices and prevented technical support issues constantly being funnelled through Cubiks’ head office, thus lightening the burden on their in-house IT staff.
Read the complete Cubiks story. Download the
PDF file.
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