Nimbus Partners Builds Key Business Applications on Force.com

Lucy Mills would be the first to admit she’s not a technology specialist. In fact, she says that if she went for a job in IT, she probably wouldn’t get it. But none of that matters when she’s creating custom, enterprise-class applications for Nimbus Partners. This non-technical Salesforce administrator—Nimbus’ Business Excellence Manager—is creating bespoke, software-as-a-service applications using the Force.com platform as a service (PaaS) at this leading process management software company. As a result, Nimbus is leveraging its global Salesforce application as a hub for managing and sharing information that drives all sorts of business processes—from sales, marketing, and customer support, to recruiting and expense tracking. For Mills, creating, accessing, and sharing software-as-a-service applications is as easy as ordering goods online. And, she says, it’s fun too.

One of the UK’s Fastest-Growing Companies

Since its inception in 1997, Nimbus has helped more than 700 organizations drive transformational change through process management, making it one of the UK’s fastest-growing companies. Headquartered in the UK, the company’s software and service solutions enable the consistent adoption of strategic initiatives throughout organizations, from the CEO to the shop floor.

Nimbus was one of the first salesforce.com customers in Europe. A visionary, early adopter of technology, the company was looking a customer relationship management (CRM) system to replace a reliance on contact management systems based on Microsoft Outlook and Exchange. According to Adrian King, chief operating officer (COO) at Nimbus, Salesforce fit neatly with Nimbus’s approach to pioneering new technology. “Salesforce was ideal for a dynamic, fast-growing company like Nimbus,” he explains. “It offered low cost of adoption, rich functionality, and fast, easy customization. And of course the on-demand model didn’t require a large up-front investment in a technology infrastructure.”

The multi-tenant system was initially deployed to provide a unified, shared view of sales opportunities and contacts. Over time, Salesforce SFA has been extended to support all aspects of sales management, sales information, and analytics and forecasting worldwide. That real-time, detailed and accurate view of the sales environment has been instrumental in helping Nimbus grow its turnover from $2 million six years ago, to $18 million today.

It doesn’t stop with sales; in fact, Salesforce now underpins almost every facet of the business. Nimbus has deployed Salesforce service and support applications to empower its customer support team to deliver responsive, efficient, and rewarding service. And Salesforce Marketing enables the Nimbus marketing team to execute, manage, and analyze the results of multichannel campaigns. Plus they can easily measure the return on investment of their campaigns and make adjustments in real time.

Creating New Applications Without Software

But here’s the catch. The person responsible for managing this real and durable CRM system, customizing it to meet operational objectives, and generally making this CRM vision a reality, is not an IT specialist, a programmer, or a developer. By her own volition, Mills is not a technology expert, but simply a talented member of staff who has capitalized on Force.com to create and deliver new business applications entirely on demand and without software. For most customizations, Mills simply used Force.com Builder, the salesforce.com point-and-click configuration tool that requires no programming. Working with the metadata framework and a series of simple point-and-click wizards, she can design custom user interfaces and modify the structure of the data model and the application’s business logic.

“If I went for an IT job, I probably wouldn’t get it,” she explains. “But that’s the great thing about Force.com: you don’t need to be an expert developer in order to quickly produce critical business applications. It’s fun to work with and the return on your personal investment is very fast—you can instantly see the fruits of your work. The Force.com keeps simple things simple and makes complex things both possible and accessible. And of course, all the customization work we do is automatically upgraded when we upgrade our applications.”

The first and most important application Nimbus built on Force.com was the company’s Human Resources (HR) management system. The success of this system was immediate, with all users having access. Employees are now driven to Salesforce to request leave, raise training requests, capture reviews and objectives, manage non-conformances and provide feedback. There was good reason for targeting HR first. “We picked time-off management as the first application; it was an incentive to get everyone in the company to login to salesforce and start using the system,” Mills says. “Once they started using the app, they were enthusiastic about switching all their other apps to Force.com, too.”

The pace picked up from there. Mills applied Force.com to plough through the backlog of applications needed by the business: from creating an IT asset management system and partner contracts, to an employee suggestions forum and a fully customized training system tailored to employees’ needs. She even taught herself basic HTML programming so she could do custom help S-controls for her custom tabs. And in the interests of everyone, Lucy created an automated Purchase Order workflow system before the request from the business came in.

“Our end goals for Force.com are to streamline Nimbus’ business processes, minimize our administrative overhead, eliminate delays, and improve accountability and response times,” she says.

Collection Times Reduced From 75 Days to 24 Days

Reporting has not escaped her attention. On the software maintenance side of the business, Mills customized a system to manage the maintenance charging process and track the outstanding expiry dates for contracts. For example, using automated workflow, the Nimbus Support team receives notification to email a customer 90 days ahead of contract expiry, notification to send the customer a quotation at 60 days, and notification to chase the customer at 30 days. As a result, collection times have fallen from 75 days to 24 days.

In the customer support environment, a self-service portal is helping to boost customer loyalty. Nimbus is delivering relevant customer information based on data from any source and share any application built onForce.com. Moreover, customers can log, view, edit, and close cases entirely online through the portal. They can also search through the knowledge base and previously resolved cases for comprehensive customer self-service. Indeed, this online self-help solution base is now resolving one in three support enquiries concerning Nimbus solutions.

As King concludes, “Salesforce has become the core Nimbus operational system, with every employee worldwide having user access. The Force.com platform has allowed us to recognize operational problem areas within the business and fix them quickly and effectively. We have used the Nimbus Control 2007 process management suite to define and manage our processes and Salesforce to turn our vision into a real and durable CRM system.”

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