Customer success story
Recommended by Salesforce, chosen for the Dynamics NAV depth
Milestone Systems had valuable data in Salesforce and valuable data in Microsoft Dynamics NAV, and no connection between them. Salesforce recommended Rapidi. What settled it was that the alternatives did not know NAV nearly as well.
Milestone Systems A/S is a Danish developer of open platform IP video management software, whose XProtect platform runs in more than 35,000 installations worldwide and is sold through authorised partners in 90 countries. It adopted Salesforce in mid-2008 and needed it joined to NAV. Rapidi keeps customers, products, invoices and credit notes current between the two, and supplied a SalesHistory add-on so that history is visible in Salesforce. The webshop and licence system are the next step. More about the company at milestonesys.com.
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The business need
The problem is stated plainly in Milestone’s own words: before Rapidi they had valuable data in both Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics NAV, but the systems were not connected, so sales people had no real-time access to what they needed.
That mattered because of what the company wants to become. Milestone has a vision of a fully integrated business, in which the webshop and the licence systems are joined to NAV and Salesforce as tightly as the CRM and ERP are to each other. The test it sets itself is concrete: an account executive should see a new account, its invoice and its licence in Salesforce straight away.
The requirements followed from that. A stable and secure interface between the two systems. Flexible two-way integration. Data reachable by sales people, partners and anyone else in Milestone who needs it. Consistency across systems. And room to extend the same integration to a Microsoft SQL-based webshop and licence system later.
Why Rapidi
Salesforce recommended Rapidi. That is worth stating plainly, because it is a different kind of endorsement from a customer’s: the CRM vendor pointing at an integration partner for its own platform.
Milestone still looked around, and the comparison is where the decision was actually made.
We chose Rapidi because of their large experience with data integration and Microsoft Dynamics NAV. We looked at other data integration solutions for Salesforce, but these people don’t have nearly the same experience or the same deep support for integration to Microsoft Dynamics NAV as Rapidi.
Peter Grandt puts the same point more briefly elsewhere: “I was impressed by the large data integration experience and Microsoft Dynamics NAV knowledge the Rapidi Team has, this made the choice of Rapidi easy. We knew we were in good hands.”
What moves
Accounts are created in Salesforce. If an account is of a particular type, Rapidi picks it up and creates it in NAV; updates then flow in both directions.
Products and prices are maintained in NAV and kept current in Salesforce automatically.
Invoices and credit notes are created in NAV and transferred to Salesforce, where they appear under the corresponding account. Rapidi also supplied the SalesHistory add-on that holds this data inside Salesforce, which is what makes the history usable rather than merely present.
The next step extends the same approach outward: orders from the webshop reaching NAV for invoicing, then appearing in Salesforce under each account, with the licence system joined in.
Take it with you
The whole story as a PDF
Five pages: why a recommendation from the CRM vendor is a different kind of endorsement, what the comparison actually turned on, and the SalesHistory add-on that makes the history usable rather than merely present. Yours after one short form.
The results
Fewer manual steps. Linking the systems saved a lot of time and freed people, because the same data no longer has to be typed into two places to keep both correct.
Sales data where sales people are. Account executives can see the total and the detail of sales to each customer, directly in Salesforce.
Having been able to integrate Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Salesforce, all the needed information is now visible to all our account executives. This makes it easier for our sales people to get an overview of the sales and make statistics without having to switch to other systems. This translates into better customer and partner relationships and in the end, more sales.
The thing Grandt keeps returning to is not the integration that exists but the ones that will follow.
Rapidi has a very flexible solution that easily can be extended to integrate other systems like our webshop and our license systems, which we plan for the near future. Rapidi can support our vision of a fully integrated business.
Planning more than one integration?
Tell us which systems you want joined now and which you expect to add later, and we will tell you whether a standard Rapidi template covers you.