I am working on a implementation for a customer whose customers are thousands of unrelated individuals, rather than the Account/Contact paradigm that seems to be prevalent in most CRM systems. For people who have implemented systems in this environment, what is the best practice? Is it better to fit the business to the tool (in salesforce.com, they created both an Account and a Contact for each customer, but that produced its own problems), or to modify the tool (SplendidCRM) by copying Account, adding the features of Contact I deem necessary, and get a good business fit.
I am leaning toward the second option (modification), but am concerned future software updates will leave me "stranded" on a path that does not benefit from future enhancements.
Thanks,
Brian
I just finished option 2, I tried to make as little impact on the core code as posible. I documented any changes I made to core and tsql. I am stranded as far as updating that particluar client to latest and greast - but fact of matter is - it doe snot matter to them. The system is exactly what they want. Know what I mean.
BTW - Had to make exact same change, i.e. implementation required we go from (100's of thousands) leads to "Contact/Account and Opportunity (so all the agents charts had nice data in them)". I autmoted Lead -> Account/Contact?Oppotunity/Callback process, exactly what customer wants. (so much so that as lead was converted , lead would drop from system, only acct and opportunity created , and then when first opportunity closed get a contact that was visible (so contacts are only people who actually bought). I also put "timezoned power dialing and scheduled callback" feature into the application. Which required links (used linked TV SQL server, and sprocs to do most of this) to Vertical phone server, however i made changes in employee managment screen in splendid ie. to link phone and splendid users. also made some other changes for e-mail signatures for call agents..... and available call timezzones.
The requirments they have would have stranded them on any version.
But hey - that is what open source is all about :-)
If you have to make the change you can.
Customer is THRILLED with system - They knew goign in to it - it was a best base to build on.
