Altium adopts Force.com as complete business platform, delivering innovative applications and services to boost internal processes and customer satisfaction

In March 2008 Alan Perkins, CIO of Altium Limited, a leading developer of electronics design software, implemented Salesforce CRM and took his first tentative steps with the Force.com platform.  The early success was notable.  In just four weeks Altium had completed the initial deployment as well as a further six applications either developed in house or taken from the AppExchange.

Since then, Altium has exploited the power of Salesforce CRM and the Force.com platform to such a degree that Altium won an Enterprise Innovation award from IDC, with Alan Perkins shortlisted for the APAC CIO of the year award.  He now views salesforce.com and the cloud as essential to his businesses operations and a key platform for product innovation.

When evaluating salesforce.com, no other systems met the high standards of Altium's own solutions or could address the urgent need to implement the solution, transfer hundreds of thousands of records, and train hundreds of users within four weeks.

Alan Perkins, Altium's chief information officer said: "At one stage, we looked into installing an ERP (enterprise resource planning) system, and the implementation fee alone was more than $450,000, with ongoing maintenance fees and upgrades. We simply couldn't justify spending millions on a system such as Oracle, SAP, or Siebel."

"But I discovered that salesforce.com and the AppExchange were philosophically aligned with our business in many ways. It's a simple yet highly sophisticated platform, and we quickly saw that it could be customized to fit our needs without the pain, cost, and timelines of the traditional solutions we considered."

Since the initial deployment, Salesforce CRM and Force.com have become central to Altium’s operations, so much so that Perkins described salesforce.com as “the company’s complete business platform.”  It’s allowed the company to integrate all its sales and marketing processes, internal business processes and customer facing applications and services into the cloud - saving money, increasing flexibility and delivering a platform for innovation.

“We realised early on that Force.com is a simple yet highly sophisticated platform and I got increasingly excited, confident and ambitious about what we could achieve.  Since we deployed Salesforce CRM and Force.com we’ve done so much with it – it’s amazing what we’ve achieved and it’s become central to our business operations.”

Altium has deployed a huge number of custom developed applications utilizing over 300 custom objects.  They fit into two areas: delivering innovative services to customers and improving internal business operations.

Some of these applications that utilized the power of Force.com and integration into other cloud applications include:

Innovative customer facing services

• Customised Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system
  To help Altium’s engineers understand the viability of their designs, they need to know which components are available, how much they’ll cost and the specific parameters of each.  Altium’s application applies rules and workflows to the design requirements and automatically integrates with supplier databases to source components.  It allows designers to easily and quickly check if their designs are commercially viable and estimate costs, all delivered on Force.com.
• Automated product history
  Each of Altium’s circuit boards is fitted with a chip that is connected directly into Salesforce CRM.  The system automatically finds all the information relating to that board including test history, manufacture date, serial numbers etc. as well as pulling in pictures from Altium’s Amazon S3 database.  It allows Altium and customers to track each and every product shipped and respond quickly and informatively to queries and customer requests.  Because everything is in the cloud, this can be accessed from anywhere in the world.
• Digital learning systems
  This application allows customers to receive targeted training programs, suited to their specific needs.  They enter their requirements online, which gets transferred direct into Salesforce CRM and then pushes out relevant training videos and content automatically.  It can even overlay subtitles on the videos specific to their language requirements.

Improved internal business processes

• Complete HR management system. Altium developed its own cloud based HR system on Force.com that allows managers to see their entire reporting structure and sub structures, manage costs, salaries and budgets.  It allows them to view package and salary history as well as calculate the impact of outstanding leave on department profits. The system is contextualised for a specific role, creating the security and privacy required for such sensitive information. It also includes an individual development planning tool detailing objectives and actions for each employee and integrating into daily task to-do lists and notifications.
• Dispatch and logistics systems. Altium’s various distribution centres and warehouses all connect into Salesforce CRM for realtime information on what to ship, to whom, by when, as well as relaying stock information back into the database.
   

Speed of development is one aspect that particularly impressed.  Perkins explains: “Developing on Force.com in the cloud is immensely powerful.  I asked another software company owner to guess how long it took to develop one of the applications; he guessed four months, it took just one hour .What we have been able to achieve in the time we have has been phenomenal.  It’s allowed us to be very creative and innovative and we have so many new projects in the pipeline.”

The entire cloud based solution has made life easier for Perkins and his staff. "Hosting the entire solution in the cloud with salesforce.com cures many of my headaches as a CIO.  It reduces the stress of keeping our systems up and making sure there's no downtime. It gives us a strong platform for growth and lets us focus our attention on getting our products to market.  Also, there is no way that we could make our systems as secure as salesforce.com’s - that’s their business.”

Going forward Altium plans to launch a development ecosystem, effectively subleasing salesforce.com’s cloud to its customers.  According to Perkins, “the possibilities with that model are enormous.”

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