R.J. Smith, CFO of ISC Corporation, an 85-person technology services provider, joined App Talks to share how his organization has leveraged Salesforce and several apps from FinancialForce.com’s ERP suite to better connect with customers, employees, suppliers, and partners.

It all started with a free trial request for FinancialForce Accounting just over a year ago – when the ISC Corp CIO decided that death by spreadsheets, information silos, and limited visibility into data across the org was over for his team. Now Salesforce and FinancialForce.com are helping ISC Corporation connect their entire front office and back office organizations.

Check out the full story about how the ISC Corporation has changed now that everyone in the organization leverages Salesforce and business apps from FinancialForce.com, or dig into one of the vignettes below.

Creating End-to-End Visibility

“Our sales team now has visibility into current amounts outstanding, past orders, sales patterns – information that was historically reserved for the operations folks. Now in finance and operations, we can do better forecasting and probabilities, and provide our supplier partners better forecasts of what orders are coming down the line. Our engineering and support teams have access to data they never had before about how important a customer is – and they retrieve information rather than emailing and asking the customer. Now we can act as a team and not have individuals out there in the dark about what’s really going on.”

Inspiring Customer Confidence with Centralized Data

“We’ve had 15% year-over-year growth and at the same time our costs attributable to the ERP platform are down 30%. Customers have a higher degree of confidence. Supplier partners and other folks in the process are working off one master set of information – a central point of truth, which is incredibly powerful for us. Customers have a wide variety of choice when it comes to who they’re going to buy technology solutions from. We want to be able to deliver an enterprise class solution though we’re not by any means the largest. We’re able to acknowledge and thank the customers for their orders, catching errors, catching opportunities to sell different or better solutions."

Making the Move to the Cloud

Below is Smith's advice for other CFOs considering a move to the cloud:

1. Get ready for social change

"Salesforce and FinancialForce.com as our ERP has allowed us to become a more social organization. We’re seeing the use of Chatter increase while email is decreasing. As a CFO, I’ve had to change my mindset as to just what information sharing means from the perspective of the finance and operations function. You have to open your mind to see where you can really take the organization. Have a solid plan about how you’re going to train and guide your employees – not just within the sales function, but also the accounting function, to be able to adapt and really embrace these new technologies and the social collaboration." 

2. Consider your implementation plans and strategy for data use, aggregation and reporting

"We’ve seen an incredible amount of efficiency – we have a lot more data that cross-connects. That’s great and wonderful – but it’s also responsibility. We’ve spent a lot of time developing and refining reporting and learning a lot about our organization." 

Check out the FinancialForce Accounting and Supply Chain Management apps on AppExchange to see what other customers have to say about extending Salesforce across the enterprise with fully integrated ERP apps.  

Learn all about how to build apps that better connect your business by downloading this e-book.