Alzheimer's Society opts for 'easier' Salesforce.com over Microsoft Dynamics

Ease of use was the key attraction, according to non-profit organisation

Non-profit organisation the Alzheimer's Society has opted for Salesforce.com over Microsoft Dynamics because it was "easier to use" according to the charity's head of IT Phil Shoesmith.

Shoesmith told Computing that the charity needed to improve the way it tracked service delivery throughout the UK.

Another goal was to get greater insight into the kinds of people the charity supported, including demographic information that it could use for fundraising and campaigning purposes. Finally, Shoesmith wanted to a solution that would enable the Alzheimer's Society more easily leverage technology advances.

"We needed a system that leverages new technology that can help us drop costs dramatically, standardise ways of reporting outcomes so we've got consistent ways across all locations and prepare us for personalisation," Shoesmith said.

Changes to the way social care is funded have made a big difference to how the charity processes invoices, for example.

After launching a formal tender process in spring 2011, the charity narrowed down its options to Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce.com.

"We looked at both offerings by involving a lot of people within our front line – so we had front line service delivery workers and managers involved as part of the service decision. They had to score each option," said Shoesmith.

"From a technical perspective, there were pluses and minuses on both scores but the overall perception of front line staff was that Salesforce was much more usable," he added.

Usability was a key issue as Shoesmith wanted to keep the need for training to a minimum.

Alzheimer's Society opts for 'easier' Salesforce.com over Microsoft Dynamics

Ease of use was the key attraction, according to non-profit organisation

"We have a large dispersed user base of about 2,000 people spread over several hundred sites, so training is expensive and a critical part of the project – and a lot of the staff we have come from social care or nursing backgrounds so they were not all used to using computers before in working life," Shoesmith explained.

He added that Salesforce.com is more aligned with consumer products such as Facebook and Amazon, which are intuitive to use.

The charity did have one issue with implementation, however.

"We spent a long time in a production environment and we were using Salesforce capabilities with sandboxes to do development and testing in a separate environment. There are a few things in Salesforce you need to do manually like the web interface instead of using APIs," Shoesmith said.

"So 90 per cent of the work we can do in a very formal singleton sandbox way; compare it to production and push it all through. But there are a few steps that you have to do manually, so we just had to rehearse that a few times before we went live to make sure we didn't miss a step, which would make an impact on the business," he added.

With Salesforce.com having gone live at the Alzheimer's Society just a month ago it is too early to assess all benefits yet, according to Shoesmith, but he said that many of the advantages would not just be Salesforce-related.

"A lot of benefits are associated with implementing one nationwide CRM so not specific to Salesforce but benefiting from moving from 250 different systems to one. We won't get the full benefits until we are live in all sites, which will be within the next year," he concluded.