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R E V I E W

Integrating CRM: No Pain, No Gain

June 13, 2003
By Lori MacVittie

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ACCPAC CRM 5.5

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	In this article
	Introduction
	Integration & Customization
	ACCPAC CRM 5.5
	Epicor Clientele 8.1
	Microsoft Business Solutions CRM 1.0
	Soffront CRM 8.0
	FrontRange GoldMine 6.0
	Executive Summary \| How We Tested \| Outsourcing CRM
	Report Card

With its easy customization, painless installation and well-rounded feature set, ACCPAC CRM handily won our Editor's Choice award for midmarket CRM solutions. This product starts off on the right foot by including all the required software. Unlike Microsoft's CRM, ACCPAC required no preinstallation software or configuration changes before we began.

Customizing ACCPAC CRM was a pleasant experience. We could extend tables and customize screens to include company-specific fields from within a browser. These capabilities greatly influenced our choice of ACCPAC, because no business will align perfectly with the database schemas a CRM vendor supplies. Industry-specific fields or ones necessary to the organization's business process are inevitable. Only Soffront was more flexible in this regard, as it let us completely define our data schemas without losing anything in the translation.

We were surprised by ACCPAC's well-designed work-flow engine and its inclusion of escalation and notification features. Escalation provides a method of ensuring timeliness of response to customers similar to procedures found in network-management systems. Midtier CRM products are rarely so complete.

We were also impressed with ACCPAC's reporting capabilities. All the products we tested offer enterprise-class reporting, internally or via Crystal Reports. And all but Microsoft include a version with the system. Soffront's and ACCPAC's reporting capabilities are flexible and based on user-customizable queries. Soffront's reporting functionality is built-in; ACCPAC users can choose built-in reports or Crystal Reports.

ACCPAC's base product includes a customer self-service portal that lets customers access the knowledgebase and interact with customer-service and sales representatives. Such a component, which Epicor and Soffront also include, is critical to a successful CRM solution. We were disappointed that the products from FrontRange and Microsoft lack this feature.

The only drawback to ACCPAC's application is its reliance on Excel to import data. Excel 2000 limits the number of rows in a spreadsheet to 65,536. Our test case, therefore, would require at least nine different Excel files to import our 600,000 customers and a whole lot more to import our millions of orders. Though the vendor said that this limitation can be alleviated by using Office XP, our testing showed that the limitation still exists within XP. In either case, we had to install Office on our server--something we really rail against doing. We greatly preferred to import a CSV or DBF, as the competition allows. ACCPAC says it is working on a version that will remove the Excel requirement and offer alternative methods of importing data.

ACCPAC gives users a well-designed GUI complete with an intuitive navigation scheme. Looking up a customer is a breeze and all relevant communication is conveniently attached to the customer for quick navigation among products, cases and detailed customer information. Users can personalize the dashboard, which offers information on recently viewed companies or customers and the user's task list. Likewise, users can configure a wide variety of preferences, such as a default search screen (with company, person and lead) and date and time preferences.

ACCPAC CRM 5.5, ACCPAC International, (800) 945-8007, (925) 461-262. www.accpac.com