Complex tool, but works well.
November 12, 2012
Complex tool, but works well.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Overall Satisfaction
- System does a great job normalizing business process and automating order processing tasks. Before TeamWorks, the process was much more manual and more expensive staff ($65k to $70K) were required to manage the process. Since implementing TeamWorks, we need much lower-skilled workers to manage order processing.
- System ensures that we have consistent data across all systems.
- Rules engine is really the “company playbook” – it is the heart and soul of how the company works. It handles thousands of orders per day
- Related to the importance of the system to the company, it represents a single point of failure. Company is totally dependent on the system to enable to company to function.
- A complete order cycle might take two weeks. If a rule is modified during this cycle, the system may break (e.g. looking for a data object which is required to make a decision but which is no longer available). A new rule must be manually constructed based on the old one, and then used to replace the old rule. There is no real version control management for rules. This is something that is available on the latest version of the software.
- Data consistency. Data in SFDC is not kept updated automatically without requiring salespeople or others to manually keep the system up to date.
- Automation means that order processing is much easier for staff – less skilled people needed.
Product Usage
30 - Mainly used by Support and Finance – perhaps 30 people total.
- Order management. Sales orders are entered in SFDC by salespeople and all of the processing and business rules for order management are handled by the TeamWorks business rules engine. Integration with SFDC is extremely important.
Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Training
- In-person training
Configuration
This software is, by definition, heavily customized. It does not come out-of-the-box ready to go. The rules engine must be built and configured to support business rules specific to the business.
Some advice:
• Follow the documentation closely – it is very accurate and helpful.
• Configuration mainly consisted of changing configuration files / domain names
• We modified the documentation somewhat in an internal wiki to reflect our internal process but would be prepared to share with other similar businesses.
Some advice:
• Follow the documentation closely – it is very accurate and helpful.
• Configuration mainly consisted of changing configuration files / domain names
• We modified the documentation somewhat in an internal wiki to reflect our internal process but would be prepared to share with other similar businesses.
Support
Usability
Reliability
Integration
- SFDC / Great Plains / Customer Portal (home grown)
• All integrations are XML / web services based and were fairly simple to build. SFDC needed its own middleware.