Will Sugar work for our situation easily?

[shelzmike]

Hello -

I have a quick question and would like to get input from you all before I start a new project.

I recently got a job as the IT Specialist for a home entertainment company and Regional Service provider for a leading satellite provider. The latter is the biggest chunk of what we do. There are currently a couple of projects going on and one of which is a new database and custom applicaiton program to interact with the database and to change the information flow because what they are using now is a beast, inefficient, and well..dangerous. (What I am about to say may make you gasp.) -

The basic information flow is as follows: The provider has a database of Work Orders that we have to essentiall download in Excel format. This database contains what you would normally expect in a work order for installation and trouble tickets: i.e. customer name, account number, work order number, contact info, and a set of two letter codes (can be a few or a lot), among other information.

What they had before I came on board was an access database with forms. Everyone uses the database IN the database itself and it is a huge behemoth, as one could imagine. Whenever an update takes place (which is manual at this point), everyone has to be out of the database. We have about 10 reps that work with this database on a regular basis (working with the work orders with customers and technicians).

The technicians currently have very limited access. We do have a guy that is basically building a completely custom application (we also have other departments, such as HR, Billing, Inventory, and dispatch scheduling that need to be able to work with this as well) on top of MySQL. Okay, we are working at least somewhat towards the right direction. But I think there are many pitfalls to this situation, but that is for another day. He is doing a good job of it, just not sure if it is necessary if there is another option.

I have used Sugar Community edition before in a more standard sales and marketing role. However, I really think that it can be applied here. It is not that complicated of a situation. The customers will be the major object in the database, the each customer needs to have a way to have work orders associated and the ability to manipulate those orders using a form. The rest of the departments could fall in easily after that.

So, on that does anyone know if and how SugarCRM could help us out with this? Would this be so far away from what it is intended to do that it would be very hard to implement? ANY advice would be helpful!

EDIT: By the way, there is very little sales done on our end..it is all service and installation driven.

- SM

[salesagility]

Certainly Sugar is a great base to start from and certainly will be far superior to a custom built application ... but you can have the best of both.

The great strength of Sugar is customisability .... use the Community Edition as the base ... so you start out with a highly functional core system ....

then start to map the processes you seek to replicate ... find the function gaps ... then

1. goto to sugarforge ... find the modules that best fill the function gaps ... build on top of those to close the gap

or

2. Build custom functionality yourselves

Cuppla tips:

1. Rome wasn't built in a day and neither will this ... incremental steps concentrating on achievable business wins

2. Engage with the users ... they're the ones who will make the solution work ... not you

All the above is the usual opinion and bluster