We have extensive experience in business ownership of CRM and eCommerce portal programs, particularly, but not exclusively, based on Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power BI, and Microsoft PowerApps Portals.

The gap we commonly see, and look to fill for you, is between:

  • The business leaders in sales, marketing, finance, supply chain, etc. who the platform is there to serve and who have the high-level requirements, often lack the time and experience to be able to turn those requirements into business process flows and specifications that IT and your vendors can implement, and work closely with them during the implementation
  • The IT team and vendors who will implement the platform to meet the businesses requirements understand the technology, but do not have a detailed understanding of the business requirements and workflows

Somerford Business Advisory’s considerable experience in this space means we can help you bridge the gap. This can make help you deliver a better platform, with a great user experience for customers, resellers, and employees, and deliver it faster and at lower cost.

Initial Advisory

At the outset of your program we can help you understand the “art of the possible” and best practices of a modern CRM and eCommerce portal. We will spend time getting to know your business, your business leaders and current business processes. With this background in place we provide a customised readout of the “art of the possible” together with recommendations on not only how to implement CRM and/or eCommerce portals, but also how to adapt business processes. Our experience is these programs are most successful when they cover both these aspects, indeed its often transforming the business processes that yields the biggest benefits. Typically, the deliverables of this first stage are a written report and a live presentation we deliver to the business leaders and IT.

Requirements and Workflow Documenting and Improvement

The second stage is where we work with your business leaders to capture the existing and proposed new business processes and turn those into detailed requirements and workflows that your IT team and vendors can implement. The main value we bring by doing this for you is we bring our experience of doing this for other businesses before and uniquely we combine both business acumen and platform understanding to create requirements that are clearer, more detailed and better aligned with the business needs. Resulting in a program that delivers better value to your business and is right first time. Typically, the deliverables for this stage are a set of details requirements and business workflow documents that your IT team and vendors use to implement against.

If required we can also aid with vendor selection, including RFP creation and evaluation services.

Implementation

The third stage is where we work with you during implementation and launch. We normally advocate an agile development methodology; the requirements are prioritised to create a “Minimum Viable Product” (MVP) and a backlog. The MVP is what you will initially launch, this approach gets the platform into users’ hands as quickly as possible where you can learn and adapt and prioritise implementation of the backlog based on user feedback.

During this stage we will answer questions and as required adapt the requirements documentation. We will also help you planning for launch, including creating training, recruiting and trained user champions, setting up the processes and executing a successful

Typically post launch updates are made in “sprints” every 2-4 weeks. Each sprint has a combination of 1) bug fixes, 2) adaptions based of feedback and 3) features prioritised from the backlog.