We recently moved from MS-CRM to Vista CRM because we wanted better reporting capabilities on our quote follow-ups, quotes to orders, sales funnel, etc. Vista's CRM doesn't come with any additional reports that don't already exist in Sales Reports. However, I'm not an IT person (I'm the bosses daughter who get's special projects like implementing CRM :-) ) but I was able to use some good Crystal Reports books and I have created some really good reports we're using on a regular basis. I did find one snafu with pulling quote information directly into a crystal report rather than doing a BAQ report and I can share that with you if it is important to you.
The integration is no problem whatsoever. One word of caution, before you turn CRM on you need to know everything that needs to be setup before you turn it on - we learned it the VERY hard way.
We purchased Epicor portal and information worker to be able to integrate with Outlook. We've only been using IW for a couple of weeks (at the most - CRM since about June) and we have mixed feelings about the Outlook integration. It isn't as robust as the MS-CRM which makes sense but we're also running into issues because we have a large database of customers (4000+ - doesn't include the ship tos) and we have lots of contacts. During a training with a Vista consultant they recommended pulling in all of our customers and their contacts into outlook but that didn't happen becuase it just took too long and it timed out. So we've had to be a little more flexible. We mainly wanted the outlook intergration to be able to track emails. You can track emails but only if you've brought the contact in to outlook (this isn't nearly as easy as it was in MS-CRM). Our outside sales force will use IW the most becuase it doesn't run any faster than Vista does in house.
Overall, it's not perfect but we believe each new release will get better. It works for us now. Are there things we wish it would do or do better, sure but that is with everything. We've made a conscious decision to try to limit other IT purchases outside of Vista/Vantage becuase it disconnects our data. We've realized that the more information that we have in Vista the better our reporting becomes and the better we're able to understand our success with movement of prospects to suspects to customers on down the line.
If you have any other questions just ask. Sorry for the long post.
Emily
The integration is no problem whatsoever. One word of caution, before you turn CRM on you need to know everything that needs to be setup before you turn it on - we learned it the VERY hard way.
We purchased Epicor portal and information worker to be able to integrate with Outlook. We've only been using IW for a couple of weeks (at the most - CRM since about June) and we have mixed feelings about the Outlook integration. It isn't as robust as the MS-CRM which makes sense but we're also running into issues because we have a large database of customers (4000+ - doesn't include the ship tos) and we have lots of contacts. During a training with a Vista consultant they recommended pulling in all of our customers and their contacts into outlook but that didn't happen becuase it just took too long and it timed out. So we've had to be a little more flexible. We mainly wanted the outlook intergration to be able to track emails. You can track emails but only if you've brought the contact in to outlook (this isn't nearly as easy as it was in MS-CRM). Our outside sales force will use IW the most becuase it doesn't run any faster than Vista does in house.
Overall, it's not perfect but we believe each new release will get better. It works for us now. Are there things we wish it would do or do better, sure but that is with everything. We've made a conscious decision to try to limit other IT purchases outside of Vista/Vantage becuase it disconnects our data. We've realized that the more information that we have in Vista the better our reporting becomes and the better we're able to understand our success with movement of prospects to suspects to customers on down the line.
If you have any other questions just ask. Sorry for the long post.
Emily