Quotex has developed an interface with the Salesforce tool at the request of a major player in finishing works.
Origin of the project: harmonization of practices
This company of 800 people works mainly for administrations, ministries and social landlords by responding to public contracts known as tenders. In other words, a call for tenders is launched for a period of 3 years for services ranging from changing an opening (door, window) to installing a false ceiling.
Requiring different know-how in the finishing work, the company is made up of departments which each have their own costing tools and operating methods.
The electrical department naturally chose to work with OPTIMA, software specializing in the costing of tertiary electricity services. Other services worked with Multidevis and Onaya, but it was mainly Excel that was used for costing and customer reports.
An analysis is thus carried out by an external consultant to standardize practices. None of the vertical software in place can respond favorably to the varied demands of other professions.
After unsuccessful tests on ERPs like BRZ or other NAVISION, a project was launched with SalesForce solutions on the commercial management part and QDV7 on the price study part .
Cohabitation of SAAS software and Windows software package
The choice of solutions is confirmed, so all that remains for the integrators is to bring them into dialogue.
The thing gets complicated because we are dealing here with different technologies. Indeed SalesForce is SAAS software while QDV7 is a software package installed on a Windows server to which users have access via Citrix. Having to deal with confidential and sensitive data on the prices charged by the company in particular, the interfaces must guarantee a maximum degree of data protection.
The choice therefore falls on a SOAP webservice call from the QDV7 application. So the user opens the QDV7 software and makes a call via a custom-developed application to find their list of quotes to be processed. He chooses the right quote and the figure. When the quote is encrypted, the user requests validation and pushes information into SalesForce via another webservice. Only authenticated users can have access to Salesforce data.
Complementarity of solutions, a user-oriented choice
Rather than choosing simplicity with a single solution, the IT department relied on representatives from each department in order to select complementary and efficient tools, each in its area of expertise. Salesforce, for its part, allows fine-grained management of commercial activity and the production of periodic reports on the company's activity.
For its part, QDV7 allows precise management of production costs and various databases: each contract with the schedule (BPU) represents a specific database. QDV7 also allows the creation of customer editions specific to each market and the import of consultation files, whether DPGFs or PBUs.
The project also involves the invoicing service which finds in SALESFORCE, used to invoice, the data from the QOL quotes and imported automatically when a quote is placed on order.
