SureFire Presentation                                                                                                                                                                                     

May 8, 2014 Hosted by Alternative Technology Solutions

The Keynote Speaker was Jennifer Curlee an IT Consultant at Surefire a manufacturer of high-end illumination tools use by Military and Law Enforcement. She said our products are too sophisticated to be called flashlights. There are three ingredients needed to successfully implement Salesforce CRM for a manufactures sales team.

1. Executive Sponsorship
2. User Friendly Configuration & Training
3. System Integration
4. Make the CRM a helpful tool for the sales person

Start with a business process review document how people are doing things now. How do the sales people do what they do. Don’t try to change it all at once. You will need to do multiple phases of training.

Next look at what systems are in place and how or if you want to integrate them. There are usually three silos in manufacturing environments: CRM System, Quoting System, and Enterprise Resource Management System (ERP). The typical flow is from a Lead in the CRM, that leads to a Quote, the Quote generates a Sale – Order, that is entered into the ERP to generate build, the product is build then shipped, a invoice gets generated and when paid the invoice is closed. Often in the past a sneaker network was used with paper and data being entered again at each stage generating errors and duplicating work.

It was very hard to build a forecast or even plan out a few months in advance. Integrating all three allowed a 360° degree view of the whole enterprise.  Not only was there a linier process of data flow from CRM, to Quote to ERP there needed to be a two way flow of information so if three were changes in one platform it would propagate to the other two without a person having to a manual entry or manual transfer of data. This two way flow now gave management a 360 degree view of all of the relationships in all three platforms, in real time no less!

To achieve this level of integration Surefire Co. used Alternative Technology Solutions software to tie it all together. This allowed real time bidirectional communications between the three platforms.

                                                                                                                                                        Jennifer Curlee – Consultant, Information Technology     jcurlee@surefire.com or jacurlee@gmail.com                                                             Jennifer Curlee has more than 30 years experience in information systems and information technology.  She is experienced in a full spectrum of process-enabling technologies, including enterprise architecture, ERP, web/internet, document imaging and management, database administration and analytical processing through data warehousing and business intelligence.  A proven leader in program management in multi-national environments, she has a successful track record in leading matrixed teams in delivering mission critical initiatives that accomplish strategic business objectives.