GFT Resourcing Dynamic CRM White paper

Transcription

1 GFT Resourcing Dynamic CRM White paper Developed by equadriga Software Private Limited Date 22 nd November 2011 Author Author mail id For Sairam Raju Sairam@equadriga.com equadriga Software Private Limited

2 About: Our Client - GFT Resourcing GFT Te h ologies AG.gft. o has it s head ua te i Ge a a d o e offices in 7 different countries, and with customers based in over 30 different countries. GFT employs about 1,300 permanent employees and 1,300 freelance IT consultants. GFT AG has two main business areas namely services and resourcing. They have over 250 enterprises rely on their solutions; they cater almost 15 global market leaders and more. They are value-centric firm, serving their customers with longterm relationships, reliability and professionalism, as much as their customers do. GFT Services specialises in designing and implementing IT solutions for the financial services industry; combining technological expertise and seamless project management with a deep understanding of the industry. GFT Resourcing is an international recruitment specialist. GFT Resourcing offers their clients instant access to the team of recruitment specialists. They have the experience and skills to attract, recruit and retain the best staff for their client organizations. They work with their client organizations to recruit and retain the high-value employees they need. Apart from providing fast and efficient recruitment services, they also List the vacancy details received from the client organizations in job-boards Match the a didate s skillset to the lie t s e ui e e t Arrange the interviews with suitable applicants based on the convenience of the recruiter and the candidates. The benefit to the client organization is that, they can focus on the core business and rely on a professional partner to improve their business flexibility. November /16 equadriga Software Private Limited

3 About : equadriga equadriga Software Private Limited was started in December 2000 as the first MNC in Trichy, Tamilnadu. It was started to cater to the software development needs of the Klett Group, Germany. In October 2003, equadriga software was acquired by GFT technologies, Germany and became their offshore development center. In March 2008, equadriga again became independent to explore new markets and GFT still continues as a shareholder in equadriga. Starting from its initial days, equadriga has been catering the European market and hence, "Delivery on Time, Delivery with Quality" has been the mantra which has elevated the company to where it stands today. Situation GFT Resourcing was using Legacy software alled E)A ess f o Bond International, UK for their day to day operations. The firm needs to maintain voluminous data pertaining to companies, contacts, candidate CVs, and job-orders/vacancies. They also need to track the standard activities like phone calls, appointments, and s for contacts, and additionally to track activities like sendouts, interviews, and placements for the candidates and other related communications. GFT Resourcing had out-grown the features in EZAccess over the years, built lots of customizations in the form of work-around and patches around the EZAccess application. Due to this, the maintenance and further support became more and more complex. From the year 2005 to Till-date, equadriga has been the offshore services provider for GFT Resourcing, with a dedicated team managing the back-end customizations (Oracle Database) and IT operations support (Second Level support) for the EZAccess Application. Solution November /16 equadriga Software Private Limited

4 GFT s I te al I department in consultation with equadriga, decided to go for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 as the base to migrate the e isti g E)A ess Resou i g application. The following points were considered for arriving at this decision: There was enormous synergy between Microsoft Dynamic CRM and GFT Resou i g s usi ess p o ess. Microsoft Dynamic CRM 2011 had simpler customization features. equad iga s domain expertise and availability of experienced.net based development team at Offshore (India), supported the GFT IS department in the migration to Microsoft Dynamic CRM. GFT was convinced that by using a robust platform like Microsoft Dynamics CRM as the basis, GFT resourcing will able to move to a much mature and futuristic technology and executed an application that is designed bottom-up and cleaned the patches and work-around. Since GFT was already using Microsoft Dynamic CRM as the basis for the Account Management System (AMS) for the GFT services division, Microsoft Dynamic CRM was the natural choice as the base platform for the EZAccess successor application for its other division GFT Resourcing. It was decided that the new migrated GFT resourcing application will be developed based on the standard CRM product Microsoft D a i s CRM a d this p oje t s code was named as TRACE. For around 6 years, equadriga has been providing back-end support services for the EZAccess based legacy application by providing a strong IT Support team from offshore India. GFT has a contract with equadriga for providing the services for developing and deploying the Dynamic CRM 2011 based TRACE application. November /16 equadriga Software Private Limited

5 equadriga started the development task around December 2010 and on October 31st 2011, the Migrated application has gone Live. In this White paper equadriga will be sharing the highlights about the TRACE application covering the following details: Why Microsoft Dynamic CRM 2011? Architecture overview about the base platform that was used for TRACE, including Microsoft Dynamic CRM 2011 platform, Sharepoint 2010, Dynamic CRM router, reporting using Sharepoint Excel services integrated with Microsoft Powerpivot and Microsoft Outlook integration. Highlights about Data migration challenges, size of the data that was migrated, Customizations were done for the project in the form of ASP.NET based services and application etc. Comparison between Dynamic CRM 2011 and Siebel CRM (Including Multi location licensing approach and costing differences). Why Microsoft Dynamic CRM 2011? o Microsoft Dynamics CRM offers the same familiar interface as Microsoft Office and empowers the employees through natural, productive, and insightful experiences. It offers real-time analytics and streamlined business processes that facilitate informed decisions and operational efficiency. o MS Dynamics CRM is a mature CRM platform that allows the migrated solution to focus on the business functionality as opposed to building basic platform services like data modeling, security and other common services (which is taken care by the Microsoft Dynamics CRM product). November /16 equadriga Software Private Limited

6 o By design, Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a horizontal platform that developers could use to create their own CRM systems. o While the application portion of the system includes a sales module, a marketing module and a service module, the underlying database simply contains a set of entities, each with certain characteristics and relationships. What is called an opportunity in the base application and is used to track potential sales opportunities can be easily modified to vacancy and can be used to track till placement. What is called a contact can be a candidate or a company contact. The platform allows the developer to change the names of these core entities to accommodate the function equivalent to what is available in EZAccess (related to GFT Resourcing business). o Not only the data entities, but the related forms are extensible and customizable, so that more screen fields relevant to our functionality can be added to the existing forms, also new forms can also be developed where ever required. o Any type of business application that typically track information about people (in our case the company contacts and candidates), opportunities (in GFT Resourcing terminology Vacancies), or services (Like placement and placement related contract details etc.), i.e. any application that have the activities and communications done around them; and have relationships between them are ideal candidates for migrating to the Microsoft Dynamics CRM based platform. Architecture Overview November /16 equadriga Software Private Limited

7 Mapping Microsoft Dynamic CRM Entities to GFT Resourcing November /16 equadriga Software Private Limited

8 The mapping of the Microsoft Dynamic CRM 2011 e tities to the GFT Resou i g s business entities is shown below. Company (CRM: Account) Representative (CRM: Contact) Activity (CRM: Phone call, , Appointment, Letter) Vacancy (CRM: Opportunity) Interview (CRM: Custom) Send Out (CRM: Custom) Placement (CRM: Custom) Sharepoint 2010 Integration with Dynamic CRM 2011 One of the key requirements of the GFT resourcing application (TRACE) was an integrated Search feature for candidate CVs a d a didate ork-history documents. Mi osoft D a i CRM s i teg atio capability with Sharepoint 2010 was decided as the right choice. The entire candidate CVs (word documents and PDF around documents) were migrated to Sharepoint based document library. The Sharepoint search was integrated within the Dynamic CRM 2011 based TRACE application. Whenever a new candidate is created from TRACE, the ca didate s CV ill e sto ed i Sharepoint 2010 and the incremental crawling at regular intervals daily and full crawl November /16 equadriga Software Private Limited

9 that happens weekly in the Sharepoint 2010 will take care of making the CVs available for the Search feature inside the TRACE application. Dynamic CRM Router integrated with MS Exchange Server TRACE required the features such as sendouts and mailshots to be sent to the contacts and candidates respectively. The Dynamic CRM 2011 based customizable templates were used, and the mails were routed from TRACE application using the Dynamic CRM router to the GFT s exchange server. Microsoft Outlook Client ( Outlook 2010 ) GFT Resou i g s e d users were already using MS-Outlook 2010 and the Dynamic CRM 2011 Outlook client plug-in was installed, and users were happy to get the application integrated, with a Ribbon interface familiar to the regular look and feel of an outlook. November /16 equadriga Software Private Limited

10 The tracking of the incoming s to the CRM was also an important feature which the users found very useful. A sample screen shown from TRACE (Microsoft Outlook view) is shown below. Browser based Web clients Alternatively browser based (Internet Explorer 9.0) interface was also being used by some of the users. PowerPivot for Sharepoint for Reporting Requirements of TRACE Sharepoint creates a dedicated analysis services engine on the TRACE application layer and when we upload a workbook with PowerPivot data containing analytical data from the Dynamic CRM SQL Server database. The data is separated out into the analysis November /16 equadriga Software Private Limited

11 services engine. Thus enabling to view the XLS based reports, which does not need any installation of Excel and PowerPivot. o PowerPivot for SharePoint adds services and infrastructure for loading and unloading PowerPivot data. o In contrast with other large, Corporate BI data sources that are limited in number and closely managed by database specialists, PowerPivot data is managed by services and infrastructure. o At any given time, there might be tens or hundreds of PowerPivot workbooks open in memory on application servers in the farm. The PowerPivot system service tracks this activity, setting up new connections to data that is already loaded in memory and caching or unloading data if it is no longer used or when there is contention for system resources. Data migration Challenges November /16 equadriga Software Private Limited

12 The Data migration was done from Oracle 10g based existing EZAccess (Legacy system) database to the CRM SQL Server 2008 based Database. The Data migration was done in the weekends (Saturday and Sunday), without affecting their business hours. The strategic methodology facilitated a silent migration from EZAccess to the new CRM based TRACE application. The following are the major highlights of the migration: Administration Data migration (for migrating the User related data) The administration data for CRM needs to be imported using the import wizard. Administration data includes the below components. The xml files can be imported directly and no change within the file is required. Go to Workplace -> Import -> Import from the ribbon November /16 equadriga Software Private Limited

13 The Excel file need to be provided to CRM in the order specified for import the one time data. Other Data migration (for migrating the user related data) C# based utility tools were developed and used to migrate data in various stages. This tool fetches the data from migration stage tables in the oracle server and creates the XML file for CRM to be imported. To speed up the process during the migration of the XML file, it was done simultaneously in 3 machines to meet the silent migration challenge. The amount of data migrated from EZAccess to TRACE is as given below : Records Around Entities Company (CRM:Company Entity) November /16 equadriga Software Private Limited

14 Contact (CRM:Contact Entity) Candidate (CRM:Lead Entity) Vacancy (CRM:Oppurtunity Entity) Sourcehistory (Custom Entity) Workhistory (Custom Entity) Activity Entities ShortlistedCandidate SendOut (Custom Activity) Interview (Custom Activity Placement (Customer Activity) Tracking (dependent on Entities) Task (CRM:Task Activity) 102 Appointment (CRM: Appointment Activity) (CRM: Activity) Phone Call (CRM: Phone Activity) Attachment (dependent on Entities) All Attachments (Candidate, Contact, Vacancy and Company) into CRM SharePoint Uploads (dependent on Entities) CV Attachments (CV, mhtml files) Work history November /16 equadriga Software Private Limited

15 ASP.NET based customizations and External Services A combined search was developed as an external ASP.NET application and integrated within the CRM Form. This component was required for doing a combined search with a part of the data existing in CRM and other parts namely the free text search existing in SharePoint. For example refer to the screen image below, the Candidate Status, Availability, Main-Address Country are the data that existing in CRM and the CV Search Criteria Li u AND Be ate has to happen from Sharepoint on the CV Documents. The results icon in the search screen below should show the results after combining both the CRM data filtering that was provided and the CV criteria that was provided. November /16 equadriga Software Private Limited

16 The TRACE application also required some WCF Services that were to be used in some work-flow scenarios, where the CRM was not supporting some of the features out of the box. So those WCF Services were also developed apart from the ASP.NET based Search utility discussed above. Mi rosoft s Dy a i CRM vs Ora le s Sie el CRM Source: Migration Assessment Guide_OracleSiebel (Edition1a_FINAL_October2011) Siebel has been an industry leading CRM application for many years. IDC recently reported that Oracle was the CRM applications market leader with 11.8% global market sha e i. Co e sel, Fo este epo ted that ie el s appli atio o ple it, high cost, and lengthy implementation schedules have given customers cause for o e i the past., Gartner cautions companies that Siebel deployment complexity is associated with enterprise-class implementations. November /16 equadriga Software Private Limited