Project Details:
SugarCRM Customization for Commercial Grounds Care Company
Utilize SugarCRM’s many advantages to help the Client move away from their paper based system to a solution that is centralized, available online and easily accessible by any staff and customer from any location and any device.
Technologies Used:
PHP, MySQL, SugarCRM, YII Framework, Bootstrap HTML Framework (Mobile Interface)
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BACKGROUND
- U.S. Lawns is the #1 Commercial Landscape Franchise in America with over 250 locations.
- With its customer data distributed in multiple local QuickBooks installations of individual U.S. Lawns Franchisees, it was difficult to access and make use of this highly fragmented data.
- Client wanted to eliminate and move away from its current paper based tracking and reporting solution used by all of its Franchises.
- The Client wanted a create a new application that will help it to move away from the paper based system to a solution that is centralized, available online and easily accessible by any staff and customer from any location and any device.
SCOPE
- Recommend a better technology solution that will help U.S. Lawns create a more customer centric application that will provided centralized access to all contracts, property details, invoices, payments etc.,
- Provide better tracking and control over data submitted by Franchisees.
- Provide customers with their own login to access to their contract information, invoice and payment history, as well as the ability to make payments online.
- The final system needs to be scalable, user friendly, and tie all franchises and end customer’s entities together with a professional look and feel.
SOLUTION
- Due to the scope and size of the project, Benchmark’s technology experts proposed a more agile approach to the development process in order to maximize the quality of the end product, improve transparency between the Client and our team and to help keep the project costs under control.
- SugarCRM was selected as the backend solution as it met all of the Clients requirements and requested features. In addition, this open source CRM solution offers great flexibility as it can be integrated with numerous 3rd party applications, offers myriad of add-ons, and can easily be customized for our Clients growing needs.
- The feature rich, high performance YII framework has been used on this project to help reduce development time and manage costs.
- A map of the damages is created to assist managers and other office staff to view the scope of damages and their impact in real time.
- The BootStrap HTML Framework was also used to help make the pages responsive for a better user experience on mobile devices and desktop computers.
- The end solution offered:
- easy access to customer information,
- facilitated online payments, order services online,
- connect various users,
- increase information flow,
- facilitate better tracking and communication
- offer corporate performance dashboards to easily view important data
- The first phase was focused on building out the basic yet important sections for each user to use the new system in a meaningful way.
- The administrative backend provided the facility to manage data entries, territories, and access to all franchise, customer data as well as all invoicing and payment history
- Franchisee owners was provided online access to all their customer data, invoice and payment history
- Customers were provided with online access to view status on all invoices, make online payments, leave feedback
- Integration with QuickBooks Online
- We then focused on creating an Online Help Manual for users to have an easy reference on how to access and use the application features. The online help manual offered:
- detailed explanation with screenshots for each section of the new system
- expand/collapse capability to view more details.
- links to pages in the system (wherever applicable) that opens help manual page in new tab with respective topic expanded with details of that page.
- compatibility with mobile devices.
- Once the basic features were put in place and the online help section was implemented to get users familiarized with the new system, we proceeded with implementing the workflow needed in purchasing U.S. Lawns services online.
- The administrator was provided with the facility to:
- create a services master list for Core and Additional services.
- configure a variety of services using the master list.
- The Franchisee was provided with the ability to:
- assign the recurring services to customer
- configure the contract/agreement
- create enhancement using the excel sheet of calculations of margins
- create enhancement estimate, send for internal approval.
- create enhancement estimate, send for internal approval.
- Customers are able to
- View, select and approve contracted services, estimates
- The administrator was provided with the facility to:
