Customer Reference – Twin City Wire, Inc.

In March of 2005, Unified Screening & Crushing became the uniting force behind a long standing group of screening, sizing and crushing media manufacturers located across the United States. Each of the member companies brought unique benefits, strategic inventory locations, exceptional quality and competitive prices to the marketplace. Twin City Wire, Inc. is one of these member companies located in Eagan, Minnesota. More information about Twin City Wire can be found on its website at http://www.tcwire.com.

Critical Issue

TCW needed a central repository for their customer and contact information along with a summary of sales data from their ERP system. On the business applications front, the sales manager needed the ability to forecast sales, track leads throughout the sales process and track the activity of the sales team. The sales team needed an application that gave them easy access to all the necessary information related to a customer including sales summary.

Alto’s Solution

Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM 3.0 (CRM) was chosen as the Customer Relationship Manager tool. Their ERP (TCM) data was imported into CRM using the Data Migration Framework that is part of the Dynamics CRM toolkit. Their implementation of CRM was customized to handle their business processes and to capture their data. TC Wire uses CRM’s Outlook client so the end users do not have to open any other application to access their CRM data. A custom application was written to update the Sales Summary data in CRM on a nightly basis. Once the CRM system was ready to be used, Alto trained TC Wire’s staff to help them with the transition to the new application. Alto also trained a member of their staff to be an administrator of their CRM application to help keep their ongoing support costs to a minimum.

Resulting Benefits

• TC Wire was able to get their staff up and running very quickly.
• Customization of CRM to meet their users needs along with the training helped in gaining user adoption.
• Sales staff gets the information they need without having to switch applications when working with a customer.
• Ability to access their desktops and MS CRM remotely gives them the added advantage of being able to work from anywhere.

Technologies Used

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0
• SQL Server 2000, SQL Reporting Services
• Exchange 2003
• MS Windows 2003
• Visual Studio 2003
• MS Office Outlook 2003