How SugarCRM Is Helping One Firm Manage Through RecessionHow SugarCRM Is Helping One Firm Manage Through Recession

Is adopting open source in today's economic climate a money-saver? ThyssenKrupp, the big German producer of steel and capital goods with 200,000 employees, thinks so. It recently adopted SugarCRM for its system engineering unit.

The unit designs specialized assembly lines for vehicle manufacturers, such as a transmission assembly line for a car manufacturer or a motor assembly line for construction equipment supplier. It has designed assembly lines for Cummins Engine, Caterpillar, Ford, and General Motors. Despite the downturn in the automotive and construction industries, those companies can't wait for the next uptick to start their next generation of production lines, said Richard Trahey, an account manager with the unit.

Before joining the sales side of the business, Trahey was an engineering project manager, with the usual problems of trying to track dozens of interrelated changes to design specifications, workflows, and quality issues related to getting hundreds of moving parts to work together. His main tools for managing a project were Microsoft Word and Excel for spreadsheets.

"SAP ERP performs very well for purchase orders, inventory control, item tracking," and other fixed, well-defined tasks, said Trahey, pausing to talk for a few minutes during SugarCon, the recent SugarCRM user group meeting in San Francisco. But he was trying to design new assembly-line systems, with all sorts of conflicts and quality issues that had nothing to do with fixed procedures.

Each project generated thousands of documents and reports. Early on, Trahey understood he would be ahead of the game if he could build a system that would manage them in some cohesive order. He struggled to do so, working evenings and weekends at a task that was not his primary job.

"Issue management or specification management -- there's no database tool that's flexible enough" to contain the information he wanted to capture, said Trahey. Word and Excel performed as expected for him, but he had no way of making the documents for a particular project available for easy sharing on a company-wide basis. He also found he couldn't search them three years later to pull up a discrete group of documents related to a particular problem, when he needed to review the lessons learned.

He needed a system that could report on the activities of different parties, both inside and outside his engineering group, and keep them arranged in a workflow. Commercial CRM would do it for him, but his unit had no budget to purchase a CRM system.

He went to SourceForge and starting combing through open source projects.

"I looked at a lot of projects," he recalls. It was the summer of 2007, when he found SugarCRM, the open source customer relationship management system, and in light of what he wanted to do, decided it was "totally awesome." With SugarCRM, he could identify issues and track quality concerns and store-related information in an underlying database. "It had 100 modules, more lines of code than I could write in a lifetime," he said. Meanwhile, he had been transferred out of engineering project management into sales. His new sales manager had no interest in a project management system for engineering but could see how the same system might be useful in managing sales force processes.

In two weeks, Trahey had customized a copy of SugarCRM for the System Engineering sales force, creating categories and fields in the reports that reflected how ThyssenKrupp does business. He and fellow account managers use it to capture information and set up workflows associated with each account. "We didn't have to shape our business to the software tool. We were able to shape the tool to our business," he said.

Two years ago, the system engineering unit determined it would cost $40,000 to $50,000 to hire someone to write the requirements for an assembly line CRM system. Instead, Trahey's research prompted them to adopt SugarCRM. "We haven't had to spend that money yet," he said with some pride, nor would the money be there to spend under ThyssenKrupp's current operating conditions.

SugarCRM is now used in production to manage sales force processes, with about 10% of the system representing customizations. After operational data is collected, it's sometimes categorized, labeled, and added to a knowledgebase. Reports done on a customer's specifications, for example, can be tagged and moved into the knowledge management part of SugarCRM for future reference.

He's been able to connect the sales system to executive dashboards that offer key performance indicators and graphs. When his boss mouses over a piece of information, an Ajax-based connector pops up related information. "It shows you the big changes going on in a live way. Here are the opportunities that lie closest to the bottom of the funnel," he said.

A second SugarCRM system is being built for the engineering side, but it's still in development and will require more extensive, perhaps 40% customization, Trahey said.

Despite the dire condition of the U.S. automakers and layoffs at heavy-equipment manufacturer Caterpillar, Trahey knows there's work waiting to be done by him and his new SugarCRM system. No matter how bad the economy he gets, he said, people "are still going to need to get in the car and go to work, to Grandma's house, or to get the kids."

He looks too young and too optimistic for the experience he has just been through, trying to hand code his unit's automation system, but he remains unfazed as long as the outcome lends itself to ordering to what was a previously disordered and chaotic process.

He may be in sales now, but he maintains an attitude that shows his roots: "I'm an engineer. I believe in structure."