We're a professional services firm. We've been using a decades-old, industry-standard ERP system for years which everybody on staff hates. We don't want to hire software engineers to build one from scratch because that's too far outside our competencies. What we would like to do is select the best SaaS applications out there and determine how to integrate them. But there are SO. MANY. A sample scenario: We charge a minimum number of hours when we perform onsite work. If a consultant enters time for an onsite visit which is less than the minimum, the ideal system would: 1. warn the consultant and ask whether this is what s/he wants to do 2. if the consultant says yes, then the system should require the consultant to enter justifying details which get sent to a manager for approval prior to billing With granular business logic like this, we're unlikely to find a single set of SaaS applications that'll do everything we want. How can we even get started with this?
I once faced a similar issue - I needed a CRM that could also manage the production of standardized proposals and track them from creation through sending and the client acceptance / revision / rejection stages and then create a project and assign resources dynamically.
All the systems at the time could handle some of that - but none did all of that. Building the entire thing from scratch was too expensive and rife with risk.
What I was able to do was find an open source CRM (SugarCRM) and then hired out the development of the additional features. By building on the backbone of a system that covered most of the needs, and still allowed us to extend the product ourselves, we got just what we needed - within a budget we could live with.
There may be an analogous opportunity for you to do the same.
Happy to discuss some of the pitfalls and challenges we encountered along the way.
Answered 9 years ago
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