A large, publicly-traded solar power company used Salesforce to track sales activities and SAP for billing and other finance-related functions. Each of these systems performed their respective functions effectively; however, our customer believed that sharing information between systems could greatly improve efficiency with new customer deployments and internal processes. They called on us to help advise them and implement a new integration. Our team focused first and foremost on the business needs. Many data integration projects fail to deliver returns because they focus on tools and tech at the expense of the business drivers. Once requirements were fully understood, we … Read More
Smart Cards Speed Up Just-in-Time Provisioning
A large government organization hosts a common services platform for thousands of users. Their user provisioning process required manual intervention, which took time and was susceptible to error. With hundreds of thousands of users, this time and exposure to error added up. Our team optimized the user provisioning process by designing and implementing a just-in-time (JIT) provisioning solution. However, instead of relying on SSO and SAML assertions, our solution grabs the required information from the user’s two-factor authentication source, their smart card. In this way, users are automatically provisioned to the web applications as they attempt to access them, instead … Read More
Accounting vs Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Software
Today, businesses have to manage multiple types of data from multiple sources, all while managing a myriad of business processes. To meet these challenges, businesses rely on software to support their accounting and process requirements. In this article we will discuss the differences between software choices; specifically, Accounting software and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, as well as how this relates to the difference between “reporting” and “analytics”. Accounting software simply provides core financial information; basically, a snapshot of “what happened”. This software is tailored specifically for accounting, to be used by the Accounting and Finance departments. Enterprise Resource Planning … Read More
Cloud-First Applications at Harvard Business Publishing
Harvard Business Publishing is an organization responsible for strong corporate learning programs and prestigious publications such as the Harvard Business Review. M&S Consulting was tasked originally with performing a migration of HBP’s infrastructure from on-prem to the AWS cloud. The initial solution focused on a traditional lift-and-shift migration to get the HBP data and application infrastructure to the AWS cloud. M&S Consulting utilized infrastructure-as-code through AWS CloudFormation to build a repeatable, versioned infrastructure for the migrated applications. Once in the cloud, the solution focused on re-architecting and optimizing existing applications to take advantage of cloud infrastructure capabilities, as well as … Read More
Higher Ed Survey: Experience Teaching in Different Formats
In our recent survey on the impact of COVID-19 on higher education, 82% of our respondents had no experience online teaching. How will that impact institutions this fall? Final survey results will be available in late August; keep watching this page and our website for more insights. Our Higher-Ed experts can help in this difficult period, by implementing the proper tools, migrating applications, assisting faculty in moving classes to your LMS, or delivering appropriate training. Contact us today to see how we can help.
The Sales Reports You Want vs The Sales Reports You Get (video)
Leadership at a large media and entertainment company with over 2,500 sales-focused users was receiving standard sales reports through Salesforce. Managers could not easily view data for each user in the same format as the rolled-up reports, and individual users could not see their own data the way their manager could. This meant that there was a constant disconnect between how leadership managed the business and how individual contributors tracked their own results. The popular business intelligence tools oversimplify the data or create basic dashboards, which did not meet the client’s needs. Working closely with our client, we developed a … Read More
Higher Ed Survey: Top Higher Ed Online Teaching Challenges
In collaboration with several university professors, we recently conducted a survey on the impact of COVID-19 on higher education. Unsurprisingly, student engagement was identified as a widespread issue. The top identified higher education online teaching challenges from our survey were: Student Engagement: 35% Adjusting Coursework: 21% Technology: 19% Other: 10% Proctoring Exams Remotely: 8% Simulating Clinical Experiences: 7% Final survey results will be available in late August; keep watching our LinkedIn and Higher Education pages for more insights.
Nonprofit Theater Keeps the Film Rolling with Salesforce
A non-profit organization that shows classic, foreign, and indie films use Salesforce to track memberships and yearly festival pass purchases. The original configuration struggled to track people and households that passed through their theater, leading to extra manual work. They also needed a better way to track and report on membership and renewal campaigns, to improve business performance. Our team upgraded them to and customized the latest version of the Salesforce Nonprofit Starter Pack to deliver a comprehensive tracking and reporting system aligned with their business and community needs. The new system more effectively tracks and manages membership, donations, and … Read More