Ten years without a major change, then an upgrade in three months

Why not just buy one vendor’s everything

Some companies solve the ERP-and-CRM question by buying both from a single vendor. Jeroen Weijts, senior operations manager at Movella, has looked at that option and declined it.

“Although they are powerful, they are much more expensive, and less flexible,” he says of the single-vendor suites. “We have been very happy with our combination of NAV and Salesforce, connected by Rapidi, and have had no need to change to a completely different architecture.”

That is the honest trade. Two best-of-breed systems plus a connector cost less and bend more than one suite, provided the connector holds. Movella’s decade is the evidence that it can.

What crosses, and what deliberately does not

Most of the traffic runs from NAV into Salesforce, to give the sales team a full view of the customer.

“They want to know about the status of orders and payments, as well as historical sales information,” Weijts says. So products, quotes, orders, payments and sales history move to Salesforce whenever they change, and accounts synchronise in both directions.

Contacts do not synchronise at all, because most of them relate only to the sales process. That omission is the part worth copying. Every field you sync is a field somebody has to reconcile forever, and the discipline of deciding what stays on one side is what keeps an integration small enough to survive ten years.

The upgrade, and the ripple

When Movella moved to NAV 2018, the change did not stop at the ERP. New NAV capabilities and changing business needs led to changes in the Salesforce implementation, and Rapidi sat in the middle of both.

Since work was needed anyway, they took the opportunity to move the connection off C/Front and onto the interface based on NAV Web Services. “We made the decision to upgrade to NAV 2018 in August of 2018, and by November we were live,” Weijts recalls.

Three months, for an ERP version change, an interface change and the CRM adjustments that came with them.

Support when the schedule is tight

With most internal resources pointed at NAV 2018 itself, there was no slack for the integration to go wrong.

“We had good support from Rapidi’s team,” Weijts says. “They were critical in helping us with the changes needed with the new web interface, and they reserved time for us when we went live, to make sure that any problems at this critical time could be resolved quickly. In the end, the most significant issues were just fine-tuning schedules, to make sure that the data was synchronized in a timely and efficient manner.”

“Reserved time for us when we went live” is the operative phrase. A go-live is a scheduled event, and the vendor either books the day or does not.

Rapidi is intuitive when designing schedules. We also love the visibility that it provides, that assists us when a problem does occur. If a schedule gets stuck, we can go into the log, see what and where the error is, quickly fix it, and then things will go back to normal for a long time.

Jeroen Weijts, Senior Operations Manager at Movella

Looking back over the decade

Weijts was at Movella ten years earlier when the original decision was made to implement Salesforce and connect it with Rapidi. They looked at other connectors; Rapidi stood out as the best, and it took two or three weeks to get Salesforce and NAV talking.

What he did not expect was that a system so quick to implement would then run without major changes for ten years, which in software is a very long time.

Rapidi proved its worth to us over a decade, and I would definitely recommend it to other companies. In fact I recently did just that to a colleague. It is excellent value for the money, it works, and Rapidi service is good. It’s a success story.

Jeroen Weijts, Senior Operations Manager at Movella

Asked what he would tell a company implementing Rapidi for the first time, he pauses before answering: “Set the right expectations, plan ahead and then the actual implementation should be painless.”