FAQs
ZOHO
Zoho CRM is such an easy-to-use CRM, that it’s an ideal pick for startups and small businesses that need to implement client and contact management along with sales forecasting and marketing automation features within its business infrastructure.
- Secure and reliable: ZOHO has in-built, advanced security features such as encryption, audit logs, etc. This ensures data protection and keeps your business free of security threats.
- Mobile accessibility: Stay on the move with ZOHO. Its cloud storage and mobile applications allow your team to effectively stay connected and updated and close deals while keeping everyone in the loop.
- Quick onboarding: Zwitch is the migration system that ZOHO uses. Zwitch is a very convenient tool that brings all your existing data into the ZOHO CRM solution with just a few simple clicks.
- Customer support: ZOHO has a dedicated Enterprise support system. This gives you access to a highly skilled support system of engineers that are available to you every hour of every day for the whole year.
- Not suitable for manufacturing concerns or larger enterprises with high turnover
- Not cost-effective: ZOHO implementation runs on a subscription model that requires renewals every year. Your business will also have to pay additional fees for each new module added to your product. Because of the cost, the ROI on using ZOHO becomes ineffective in the long run.
- Segregation of information is difficult: A business with multiple branches, ideally, would like to ensure that information related to each branch is maintained separately to ensure control over its data. However, ZOHO does not segregate effectively between branches. This may cause data tampering between branches due to human error.
- One ZOHO per organization: Companies with subsidiaries, for example, will have to subscribe to ZOHO separately to implement the CRM effectively between parent, associate, and holding companies.
- Sales Force Automation: ZOHO can automate routine sales, marketing, and support functions that take up valuable work time, giving you more time to concentrate on your customers. Create optimized workflows that help you speed up your overall process.
- Analytics: Zoho CRM’s reports, analytics, and forecasts can measure the performance of every sales activity, and break quotas down into achievable targets.
- Customization: ZOHO can combine various features to mold your CRM to fit your business, the information you collect, the way you view your information, and even the language and currency that can be tailored to meet your needs.
- Team Collaboration: ZOHO can create groups, tag other reps, share sales updates, or simply leave behind helpful notes for other teammates. Your team can connect and work from anywhere with ease.
- Integrations: Zoho Marketplace offers a host of integrations for third-party applications you use every day, like Google Drive, DocuSign, MailChimp, Google Ads, and more.
Zoho Corporation offers more than 50 business applications to handle everything from inventory management, and business intelligence, to marketing automation and so much more.
Accu360
Accu360 is a Cloud-based ERP solution for solving many business challenges. These challenges include providing data confidentiality, reducing costs, and more depending upon your business’s unique infrastructure and environment. It also helps optimize many ancillary functions like financial functions, including payroll and inventory management.
- Data Confidentiality: Industrial information is highly sensitive and confidential and the procedure of placing them in file folders or storing them on your internal network is long gone and outdated.
- Reducing Operational & work order costs: Keeping operational costs and work order costs low and profitability high is key to any successful organization. Every industry needs to improve operational efficiencies while also reducing the value of material, labor, and outsourcing.
- Streamlined integrated control: At any given timeframe, there are hundreds of individual functions taking place within a typical organizational setting. And with Accu360, monitoring and controlling these functions are just fingertips away.
- Localisation: Accu360’s inbuilt localization system, allows you to easily extend your business into global markets by providing features like Diverse currencies, Multiple languages, and Tax regulations techniques across different countries.
- Real-time accuracy: The real-time accuracy of Accu360 accompanied by its easy customization and operational efficiency makes it a solid competitor in the business process automation marketplace. It has a proven track record in the global market and boasts an extremely cost-effective approach concerning its deployment.
- Modular Design: Accu360 has a wide array of modules that can be customized for your business’s beneficial use and automation. Its modular design allows you to pick and choose what is right for your growing business.
At Cascade Headway we have developed a Standard Operating Procedure for implementing ERP solutions within an existing infrastructure. The steps are as follows:
- Step 1: Identify the pain points of the organization: We study the business and its workflow so that we can determine the points where the workflow has the highest chance for breakdowns and inefficiencies.
- Step 2: Implement workflow: We take time to redesign the business workflow to eliminate these weak points. In doing so, we reduce weak points, breakdowns, and inefficiencies to a minimum.
- Step 3: Proof of Concept (POC): We set up a walkthrough of the entire system to demonstrate how the newly implemented workflow has positively impacted your business process. This will illustrate the implementation of the entire redesign including the integration of third-party plugins and applications as requested upon initial engagement.
- Step 4: Get it up and running: The redesigned workflow is implemented, in its entirety, into the business. We then provide training to your existing staff so they can learn to operate the newly implemented ERP in their day-to-day activities within the enterprise. During this transition period, we can provide temporary manpower to run the new ERP system while your staff is being trained.
All of this is included as a package in the initial implementation charge.
- Step 5: Routine follow-up and advisory: Our team will be on standby to ensure that the implemented system runs smoothly. We shall provide constant monitoring for breakdowns and inefficiencies. Our advisory team will also be available to aid with business decisions regarding scaling up your business and modifying your implemented ERP design and workflow.
- Not suitable for small businesses: Accu360 is not a required investment when it comes to the smaller MSME sector. Its implementation cost can be a burden to a smaller business.
Excessive features: Accu360 requires only a one-time payment for implementation. However, this means that your business gets access to features that may not be required at present for the business.
SAP
SAP is used for facilitating information flow and data processing across your business. There are SAP modules designed for different aspects of an enterprise, ranging from finance to supply chain management. Listed below are some of the most common uses for SAP:
- Accounting and Finance: SAP’s Financial Accounting module helps you manage financial transactions in real time. It also connects with other SAP modules such as sales and distribution, payroll, and human resources, leaving you in total control of your financial management.
- Supply Chain Management: SAP’s Supply Chain Management (SCM) module enables you to design, build, and manage a sustainable supply chain. It seamlessly connects with your suppliers, customers, manufacturers, etc. This connectivity makes it possible to plan production, assess demand fluctuation, and create market forecasts with ease.
- HR Management: Your HR department will function efficiently with SAP’s Human Capital Management (HCM) module. This module can facilitate various HR-related processes such as payroll, promotions, employee performance tracking, handling compensations, etc.
- Materials Management: Control vital aspects of the management and production of the material within your enterprise with SAP’s Materials Management (MM) module. Some of the common uses of this SAP module include consumption-based planning, purchasing, inventory management, and invoice verification, among others.
- Sales and Distribution: SAP’s Sales and Distribution (SD) module is designed to manage all aspects of sales and distribution. This module can manage inquiries, proposals, quotations, transportation, billing, credit management, pricing, and many more.
- Financial Management: Financial management is a key aspect of SAP. Utilizing SAP for all Financial needs can ensure improved margins, reduced errors, and more profitable decision-making with a complete set of tools for streamlined financial operations.
- Sales and Customer Management: Oversee the entire sales process and customer lifecycle more efficiently from initial contact to final sale, after-sales service, and support. SAP can manage all aspects of sales from lead generation to marketing, customer management, etc.
- Purchasing and Inventory Control: SAP can help with managing costs and implementing controls on all purchase-related activities with ease. From procurement, data management, warehousing, accounts payable, etc; SAP can handle it all.
- Business Intelligence: SAP has a wide array of intuitive tools that can generate a wide array of customized reports and analytics to aid in your business decision-making.
- Mobility: SAP can be enabled on all your mobile devices for better access and control on the go. Designed for busy sales teams on the move. Manage leads, and customer accounts, view the stock, and place an order with the SAP Business One Sales mobile app for iOS and Android.
- Not Cost Effective: SAP is not a required investment when it comes to the smaller MSME sector. Its cost of ownership can be high, even for larger businesses. Implementing SAP is only sustainable if your business has a large profit margin that can justify high expenditure in business process automation. For larger sector businesses looking for a more cost-effective solution, Accu360 is a more suitable option.
- Resource coordination: SAP requires a large amount of technical knowledge to operate effectively. The supply of skilled manpower does not meet the current demand, so finding suitable manpower can become difficult and expensive.
- Rigid process: The time required to get the software up and running is quite long and tedious.
At Cascade Headway we have developed a Standard Operating Procedure for implementing ERP solutions within an existing infrastructure. The steps are as follows:
- Step 1: Identify the pain points of the organization: We study the business and its workflow so that we can determine the points where the workflow has the highest chance for breakdowns and inefficiencies.
- Step 2: Implement workflow: We take time to redesign the business workflow to eliminate these weak points. In doing so, we reduce weak points, breakdowns, and inefficiencies to a minimum.
- Step 3: Proof of Concept (POC): We set up a walkthrough of the entire system to demonstrate how the newly implemented workflow has positively impacted your business process. This will illustrate the implementation of the entire redesign including the integration of third-party plugins and applications as requested upon initial engagement.
- Step 4: Get it up and running: The redesigned workflow is implemented, in its entirety, into the business. We then provide training to your existing staff so they can learn to operate the newly implemented ERP in their day-to-day activities within the enterprise. During this transition period, we can provide temporary manpower to run the new ERP system while your staff is being trained.
All of this is included as a package in the initial implementation charge.
- Step 5: Routine follow-up and advisory: Our team will be on standby to ensure that the implemented system is running smoothly. We shall provide constant monitoring for breakdowns and inefficiencies. Our advisory team will also be available to aid with business decisions regarding scaling up your business and modifying your implemented ERP design and workflow.
Microsoft Dynamics 365
Dynamics 365 is an ERP solution that delivers superior operational efficiency and customer experiences enabling businesses to become more agile and reduce complexity. It’s a modular solution, that allows organizations to choose the specific apps they need based on their industry and business requirements. Dynamics 365 offers a wide variety of applications, ranging from CRM, Finance, Supply Chain, and Project management. The solution can be integrated with other software solutions such as E-commerce and more.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a robust ERP solution. When it comes to logistics management, Microsoft Dynamics 365 has cornered the market with its ERP innovation. This ERP is well crafted and designed to support warehouse management and manufacturing on a large scale.
- Integration: MS Dynamics 365 has seamless integration with other Microsoft tools. There is also the AppSource which is a growing marketplace for apps and solutions that you can pair with MS Dynamics 365. In AppSource you can find third-party software like CTI tools, email automation solutions, and time management apps.
- Flexibility: MS Dynamics 365 flexibility allows you to tailor the tool depending on your specific needs. It allows you to add capabilities if needed, plus it has customization tools that can be used in introducing new fields or objects in the system.
- Data Consolidation: The usual goal of most companies that implement an ERP system is data consolidation. And this is one of the strengths of MS Dynamics 365. It centralizes your data by integrating a lot of important applications for a business. It also minimizes barriers between teams and departments which, in turn, lets you put your data to good use.
- Lead and Opportunity Management: This lets you collect, analyze, and nurture your leads and quality to Opportunities. Can track all your Opportunities and revenue from each of your opportunities.
- Marketing Management: Conduct marketing campaigns, track the performance of the campaigns, and then collect the campaign responses. Lets you conduct email marketing campaigns right from within the Dynamics CRM and can also calculate the ROI of your marketing campaigns using inbuilt reports.
- Customer Service: Dynamics CRM enables you to perform your customer service operations better with more accurate data. You can keep track of all your customer issues in a single place and serve them better. Knowledge Base (KB) in the application will help customer service agents to pull issue-related information and troubleshoot issues faster.
- Contract Management: It can define and keep track of contracts for customer service projects for both B2B and B2C types of businesses. Businesses can manage their customer contracts and update customers to renew contracts easier.
- Heavily Industry based solution: MD365 is an industry leader when it comes to Warehouse and Fleet management. When it comes to logistics and storage requirements they are unmatched and continue to innovate. However, this has made it a highly specialized ERP solution that is too rigid to meet the needs of industries that do not rely heavily on their Warehouse and Fleet management capabilities.
- Data storage sold separately: Other leading ERPs offer unlimited storage in their cloud-based environment. However, using MD365 incurs additional costs for storage after a certain point, and this provides a lack of control over storage for the business.
- Not cost-effective: MD365 is not a required investment when it comes to the smaller MSME sector. Its cost of ownership can be high, even for larger businesses. Implementation of MD365 is only sustainable if your business has a large profit margin that can justify such a high expenditure. For larger sector businesses looking for a more cost-effective solution, Accu360 is a more suitable option.
Freshworks
Freshworks is a leading provider of software that specializes in customer engagement, marketing, sales, and support. It is a cloud-based software that aims to offer a wide range of features that help businesses increase productivity and better serve their customers.
- Sales Force Automation: Freshworks employs technology that automates and manages sales processes, such as tracking leads and customer interactions, and generating reports.
- Marketing Automation: Marketing automation pertains to automating and streamlining marketing tasks, such as social media marketing and lead generation to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of marketing efforts. Freshworks offers competitive functionality that can benefit more than a few organizations.
- Customer Service and Support: Customer service and support refer to the activities and processes that a company uses to help customers before, during, and after a purchase, be it answering questions, providing assistance, or addressing complaints, to ensure customer satisfaction and retention. Freshworks earns an exceptional score in this module, outperforming the CRM industry average by an appreciable margin.
- Analytics and Reporting: Analytics and reporting are about collecting, measuring, analyzing, and interpreting CRM data to inform business decisions, improve performance, and present data in meaningful ways.
- Extended CRM: Extended CRM is a broad module that can encompass everything from email handling to workflows to capabilities for specific industries that include financial services, healthcare, oil and gas, and pharma. In this module, Freshworks edges the average CRM product in this aspect.
- Product Technology: This module refers to the technical architecture of the product and the technological environment in which the product can run successfully. The Product Technology module yields the largest gap of all six modules, with Freshworks boasting a comfortable lead over the CRM industry average.
- No finance module: Freshworks offers no finance module within its CRM. It is focused solely on sales and customer relations. Because of this limitation, the user will have to rely on third-party integration with software that provides Finance functionalities which incurs additional costs as well.
- Constant updations: Freshworks undergoes constant updation which can be both a blessing and a curse. Constant updations ensure that the CRM always stays at the top of its game to its users. However, this also means that the personnel that is trained to use Freshworks must always be retrained to keep up.
- Complicated User Interface (UI): The User Interface is not easily understandable unless the user is technically skilled. Thus, it requires a learning curve and training to be utilized effectively in your business.
- Incompatible with certain plugins and applications: Freshworks is not fully compatible with certain plugins and applications available in the market. This makes Freshworks quite rigid as a CRM solution in certain business environments. Our advisory team will be available to help you determine if Freshworks is right for your business.