Customer Reference – MainStreet Business Services

MainStreet Business Service’s (MainStreet) mission is to help small business owners compete with major corporations. They do this by appealing to group purchasing organizations (Affiliates) and bringing them under the MainStreet umbrella allowing them to use their combined market power to lower purchasing costs, increase competitive advantage, and meet the national competition head-on. By combining the interests and market power of thousands of independent businesses, MainStreet is then able to gain the interest of a wide range of business services vendors. Then, turn around and offer those services, everything from insurance to merchant card services, from package delivery services to PC purchases, back to its Affiliates. MainStreet’s main website is http://www.mainstreet-monitor.com.

Critical Issue

MainStreet needed a centralized place to store data about their Affiliates, Affiliate Members, Vendors, and other contacts. They currently get Affiliate Member data in spreadsheets from their Affiliates. These spreadsheets are not consistent in the details they provide for the members. MainStreet would also like to get a complete picture of their contacts by maintaining a history of all communications with their contacts. Being a small company, cost was a major consideration. MainStreet was not only looking at the cost of the software but also the cost of implementing, configuring, customizing and maintaining the product in the long run.

Alto’s Solution

Alto walked through a demo of MS CRM to the key decision makers. They were happy to see that the product was very intuitive and did not have much of a learning curve especially for users already familiar with Outlook and the web. Alto worked with MainStreet’s hosting company to implement CRM. Alto provided training to MainStreet staff to bring them up to speed with the application and its features. A power user was also trained to configure CRM to meet their initial and changing business needs.

Alto also provided a development/test CRM server to MainStreet to make configuration changes to CRM database and forms which were then imported into their production environment. Alto helped develop custom import processes to import the Affiliate Member data from the Excel spreadsheets into MS CRM and update some account level fields via nightly updates. Automated processes also included generation of unique Account Numbers where the rules for the Account Number generation were dependant on the type of Account that was being created.

Resulting Benefits

• Centralized data store of Accounts, Contacts and the related communication history is accessible to the entire organization.
• Flexibility and expandability in the architecture of the MS CRM application allows MainStreet to add features unique to their business.
• Administration and configuration tools built into MS CRM allow MainStreet to configure CRM on their own, thus helping them to keep their costs down.
• Custom business processes such as the data import process, automatic account number generation and data validation during import procedures have decreased end user time entering data and administrative time spent cleaning information already entered.

Technologies Used

• MS CRM 1.2
• IIS 6.0
• SQL Server 2000
• Windows 2000 Server
• ASP.Net, MS CRM SDK
• Exchange Server 2000
• Outlook 2000