On-Premise CRM to Salesforce Migration

On-Premise CRM to Salesforce Migration - Benefits, Challenges and Best Practices

Table of Contents

1. Introduction 4

2. Benefits Of On-premise CRM To Salesforce Migration 4

3. Challenges On-premise CRM To Salesforce Migration 6

4. Salesforce.com Implementation Best Practices 6

5. Conclusion 7

6. Acknowledgments 7

Introduction

Benefits of On-Premise CRM to Salesforce Migration

Organizations implementing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) have to focus on hardware, software, security, upgrades, and also have longer implementation cycle time.

With the advent of cloud computing and Software as a Service (SaaS), many companies provide CRM as SaaS solutions. Salesforce.com has been the leader in proving SaaS CRM application.

Today, most of the organizations have started with cloud computing roadmap and strategies and looking to migrate their existing On Premise CRM application to Salesforce.com. This white paper focuses on the benefits, challenges and best practices to be followed for migration.

The following are the benefits of On-Premise CRM to Salesforce migration:

For End Users:

Simple and Easy Navigation – The User Interface (UI) and navigation of Salesforce.com is easy and simple. Different features (or UI elements) are not cluttered together. Also, features like roll over details and mini pages makes navigation easy.

Empowering End Users – Users can have the ability to manage the information which they want to see and how they want to see it.

Analytics – Reports and dashboards can be created on the fly since data for reports is easily available within Salesforce. Also, dashboards can be created using drag and drop feature.

Salesforce Search – The search feature allows users to enter case insensitive search. However, in some On-Premise CRM, customization is required to achieve this.

Focus on Business – End users can focus on the business such as, acquiring and managing customers rather than spending time on system performance, upgrades and system related issues.

For Customizations/Configuration:

All customizations are upgraded with zero customer effort and cost.

Salesforce AppExchange provides wide range of applications to extend the existing CRM

application easily.

There is no added overhead for maintenance of data, backup and recovery, maintenance of Database Servers and Database application.

Performance tuning is handled by Salesforce. The application is scalable and due to its subscription based model, users can be added at any point.

Simple customizations and enhancements can be achieved with click and drag-and-drop ability without any intensive training, deployment coordination and downtime. Additional On-Premise tools require training and support for enhancements and specialized resources.

4 Salesforce.com Implementation Best Practices 6

Record types help in maintaining different types of records under the same object.

Mass ownership transfer and record ownership are configurable and easy to maintain.

Reassignment of Leads, Cases, Contacts and Accounts can be done very easily.

Workflows and approval process is easier to create in Salesforce.com.

For Integration:

Salesoforce.com is SOA compatible; this means that any application can be integrated with Salesforce.com using Web Services.

Easy integration with various third party applications including Google applications, social

networking sites, etc

Salesforce.com provides standard applications for iPhone, Blackberry and Windows mobiles, thus offering immense benefit for mobile users like Sales Representatives, Agents, etc.

Salesforce.com is easy to integrate with Outlook, Lotus Notes and can synch tasks, emails, and contacts easily.

Salesforce Data loader mapping is simple and it is easy to import/export data from Salesforce.com.

Most of the simple processes that were performed by ETL can easily be done by Data loader. These processes can be performed by an administrator rather than technical resources required.

Ease of Maintenance:

There is no application downtime, and Salesforce publishes all the information about scheduled downtimes regularly.

No hardware and environment setup is required for Salesforce and hence no maintenance is required.

Field and Data level permission settings can be developed, tested and deployed in Salesforce without any downtime.

Salesforce provides Recycle Bin for the users. If user deletes a record accidentally, the same can be retrieved from the Recycle Bin. In On-Premise CRM, data needs to be retrieved from the database.

Deployment is simple as some of the changes in Salesforce like drop down values, page layouts, workflows, etc can be done with none or minimum downtime.

Reporting requirements can be directly handled through Salesforce.com application. There is no need to maintain separate reporting servers.

Costs:

Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) as Salesforce.com is a subscription based model. Also, there is no hardware or upgrade cost involved. In addition, it reduced the support cost involved.

Faster Return on Investment (ROI) as Salesforce.com has smaller implementation life cycle. Also, organizations have been able to implement Salesforce.com faster than upgrading On-Premise CRM from the older version to the newer version.

5 Challenges On-Premise CRM to Salesforce Migtraion Salesforce.com Implementation Best Practices

The following are the challenges in On-Premise CRM to Salesforce migration:

All functionalities from On-Premise CRM cannot be mapped to Salesforce as process change is required and Business needs to be convinced about the same. Some On-Premise CRM provides vertical solutions and Salesforce provides horizontal solutions. This requires extra coding effort (medium to high) to implement certain out-of-the-box functionality in Salesforce.

Many objects in On-Premise CRM has many-to- many relationship. Customization is required in Salesforce to achieve the same.

The data migration effort is underestimated due to assumption of one-to-one mapping of entities .

Since Salesforce is based on multi tenant architecture, there are certain API and Governor limits which may affect the implementation.

Challenges in implementation of Overlay Business for territory management and also for

Forecasting.

In Salesforce, audit history can be done only on 20 fields per object. Therefore, it is important to identify the frequently changed fields for history tracking.

Some On-Premise CRM allow single user to have multiple positions. This is not possible in Salesforce and each user will view the information based on role and profiles assigned.

The following best practices can be followed while implementing the Salesforce.com:

Importance of Preliminary Data Analysis and Data Sampling: Ensure that the data analysis and sampling is done early in the project. This is one of the main factor which might affect the schedule of the project in later stages Maximize leverage of Salesforce.com Out of Box Functionalities: Over customization may delay the

projects. Encourage the usage of Out-of-the-Box features and configuration of Salesforce.com

before considering customization for development. Proper cost-benefit analysis needs to be done for the business processes to be implemented Leverage AppExchange for Rapid Development: Reduce the total development time by utilizing AppExchange products based on the customer business processes.

Use of ETL Tool for Data Migration and Integration: In case of large volumes of data and complex integration points, ETL tool with Salesforce connectors like Pervasive, Informatica On demand, Relation Junction, Cast Iron, etc, to be used

7 Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Salesforce.com has various advantages like empowering end users, easy point and click configuration, less dependences on infrastructure, reduced implementation cycle times, easy upgrades, scalable, low costs and higher ROI. This paper will serve as a guideline for organizations to assess the pros and cons while migrating the On-Premise application to Salesforce.com.

References

[1] The Salesforce website provided insight into the product features. Also the Salesforce partner resources provided insight in similar implementations

http://www.salesforce.com/in/resource_center/

[2] The insidecrm.com website provided information on comparison of Salesforce and On-Premise CRMs http://www.insidecrm.com/comparison-guides/