Blog

Microsoft has introduced an integrated framework to enable health insurance plans to use Microsoft Dynamics^® CRM. Known as “Health Plan Sales Solution”, this new framework will allow health plans to quickly and easily move their marketing and sales processes online to better manage and monitor sales, member service and retention. As a result, health insurance plans will be able to better compete in the individual and small-group market; reduce multiple points of failure in their current sales, service and retention processes; and operate in conjunction with state health insurance exchanges.

In addition to this new framework, Microsoft Dynamics CRM also helps healthcare providers overall by improving the delivery of care, lowering costs, and assisting patients in managing their health by streamlining these six critical areas in the Healthcare Industry:

1. Information Management
   Manage patient information that eliminates the need for patients to fill in the same information repeatedly. Provide quick, efficient care delivery to provide better service and satisfy your patients as you ease work for administrative staff.
2. Referrals Management
   Maintain consistent processes and strong communications channels to support referrals between clinicians, specialists, departments, and facilities.
3. Business Processes
   Microsoft Dynamics CRM gives you the ability to improve service and proactively respond to patients by eliminating manual processes and breaking down silos of information.
4. Business Intelligence
   Efficient operation of your healthcare facility is critical to your success. By providing administrators and others with access to comprehensive, real-time information, you can manage business more effectively and respond more quickly to changing conditions.
5. Clinical Trial Management
   Furthering medical research is essential for improving treatment and prevention. Microsoft Dynamics CRM gives you the tools to streamline operations to more easily manage clinical trials and serve your patients better.
6. Recruiting
   Meet the challenge of recruiting high-quality healthcare professionals with tools for automated communications and analysis.

Delivering high-quality care may be the number one priority for you as a healthcare provider, but reducing costs is also an important factor. Overall, Microsoft Dynamics integrated healthcare management solutions make it easier for you to share patient information for clinical decisions and cross-organizational case coordination, as well as access the financial data required to drive business decisions.

Sandeep Walia is the Chief Executive Officer of Ignify. Ignify provides design, consulting and implementation services for CRM and ERP initiatives for mid-market and enterprise businesses. Ignify is a Top-tier Microsoft Gold Certified partner ranked in the Microsoft Partner of the Year in 2010 and both the Microsoft Dynamics Inner Circle and the Microsoft Dynamics Presidents Club in 2009 . Ignify offers Dynamics CRM to retailers, banks, insurance companies, contact centers and to several other businesses. Ignify has offices in Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, Nashville, Chicago, Toronto, Manila, Pune and Bangalore.

According to the Microsoft Dynamics^® CRM Blog, the CRM team was able to run over 100,000 Microsoft Dynamics CRM users concurrently over several organizations. This is the largest real-world business application workload ever seen on a Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V system and it proves the scalability of Microsoft Dynamics CRM in private cloud deployments. Using virtualization they were also able to consolidate 20 servers down to just two, which means that if you deploy Microsoft Dynamics CRM using this configuration, you can reduce the power consumption, required rack space and management overhead all while maintaining a high level of performance with your CRM system.

Just the reduction of management overhead alone will save your company millions of dollars and resources a year. Some Microsoft Dynamics CRM competitors have in the past argued, "Dynamics CRM doesn't scale as well as our stuff." With a benchmark like this, that argument doesn't hold water. It scales to at least 100,000 users and that's pretty impressive while giving you the highest level of performance possible.

Ignify has deployed Microsoft Dynamics CRM at companies with over 5,000 users. Our experience is that scalability is not an issue with Dynamics CRM. As an example, one of our customers handles over 100,000 claims a day across 5,000 call center agents that all use Microsoft Dynamics CRM. CRM does complex claim processing business rules, has workflow that runs across multiple systems and finally integrates an order into Microsoft Dynamics AX when a claim is approved. Another is a $7 billion organization that has rolled our Microsoft Dynamics CRM for marketing, sales, repairs and customer service. The United States Air Force runs on Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Another customer recently purchased Microsoft Dynamics CRM for over 25,000 users. If anything, Microsoft Dynamics CRM wins on scalability over the competition hands-down.

To get the full benefits of virtualization, you will need to learn a few new tricks, but overall, companies deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM for multiple departments or using the xRM framework to deliver multiple applications using a private cloud approach can be confident the scale, economics and performance of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 when using Hyper-V. The complete white paper with details on the tests can be found here.

Sandeep Walia is the Chief Executive Officer of Ignify. Ignify provides design, consulting and implementation services for CRM and ERP initiatives for mid-market and enterprise businesses. Ignify is a Top-tier Microsoft Gold Certified partner ranked in the Microsoft Partner of the Year in 2010 and both the Microsoft Dynamics Inner Circle and the Microsoft Dynamics Presidents Club in 2009 . Ignify offers Dynamics CRM to retailers, banks, insurance companies, contact centers and to several other businesses. Ignify has offices in Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, Nashville, Chicago, Toronto, Manila, Pune and Bangalore.

Ignify has a phrase we live by in our consulting practice: "Effectiveness with Efficiency for our most valued asset, our clients."  Effectiveness means being experts in our field and doing things right. Efficiency means being frugal with our clients' consulting dollars on the hours it takes to implement. This is why Ignify developed RAPID: Ready-to-use And Proven Implementation Deliverables.

RAPID leverages the already proven Microsoft Sure Step Implementation Methodology by adding additional value. The basic premise behind RAPID is that every implementation has some Deliverables, both in configuration and documentation, that are similar. RAPID has taken these Deliverables and pre-built these to save as much as 30-40% in consulting fees on every implementation Ignify does.

For example, every Retail Industry implementation needs to have zip codes imported. Ignify has taken this process and automated it so they can deliver it ready to use in a matter of minutes. The point being, "Why should our clients pay for repetitive deliverables as if we are recreating the wheel with each implementation?" Believe it or not, that is the approach most other consulting practices take: billing every client the same amount for these Deliverables simply because they have not automated the processes. They literally are "recreating the wheel" with each implementation.

How do I know this? Because I have done Project Management or Management Consulting for most of the Microsoft Dynamics AX Partners when I was a freelance agent. I was also intimately involved in the development, training, and delivery of Microsoft Sure Step when version 2.0 came out. I trained the MCTs (Microsoft Certified Trainers) on how to teach the Sure Step class, and I co-authored the first day's training material. So I had the opportunity to see nearly all the Microsoft Dynamics AX Partners out there, up close and personal.

That is why Ignify caught my eye. They were different. During the recession they were growing and profitable! This intrigued me; I wanted to find out how they were doing it. The answer is simple-Ignify is doing what other Partners only talk about, which is seeing an implementation from the client's viewpoint and asking key questions: "How can we bring more value? How can we save our client's money on implementations?"

Thus, RAPID was developed, demonstrating genius in its cost savings for Ignify's clients. I was so impressed, I joined Ignify after years of owning my own businesses (17 years of building Microsoft practices and selling them or doing freelance consulting). Ignify had what I was looking for: great core values and a focus on delivering to their clients. Now, with RAPID, I am sold. Ignify is going places, and I am going with them. It's good to be part of something special. Something you believe in.

In future blog posts I'll be sharing more about RAPID. Stay tuned!

Scott Mertes is a Senior Project Manager in the Microsoft Dynamics ERP practice at Ignify. Ignify is a Global Microsoft Dynamics Inner Circle Partner headquartered in California specializing in Dynamics AX for Retail, Distribution, Manufacturing, Sea Port and Chemicals verticals. For help on Microsoft Dynamics ERP email us at dynamics@ignify.com

Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a core application, but many of you may not know that it also has a powerful and flexible application development capability that allows for customized tools built on Microsoft Dynamics CRM, better known as xRM. A broad range of companies around the world are using xRM to accelerate the development and deployment of high-impact business applications — whether on the premises or in the cloud via Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online.

Customers like you are benefiting from using Microsoft Dynamics CRM in new ways and realizing their full potential through the use of flexible business applications, like xRM. Here are some examples from the Microsoft News Center:

• The Arbor Day Foundation, a U.S. nonprofit organization, has designed 15 relationship management applications to organize charitable events, grant management and outreach for fundraising efforts. The foundation estimates that it reduced application development time by 300 percent, enabling more efficient and responsive interaction with partners and sponsors.
• The Product Release and Security Services (PRSS) team at Microsoft designed product release relationship management solutions that increased product release compliance to 98 percent and accelerated product time to market across the company by up to 94 percent.
• Comag Marketing Group, a U.S.-based marketing firm, has consolidated more than 40 disparate relationship management applications and is planning to consolidate another 80 applications. By standardizing on Microsoft technology, it has drastically reduced the cost of administering all these applications.

To find out more about the capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics CRM and xRM, contact us by calling 888-446-4395 or emailing dynamics@ignify.com. Ignify is a privately-held Deloitte FAST 100, ISO 9001 certified company focused on the mid-market and enterprise business space for ERP, CRM, and eCommerce implementations.

Bhavesh Ashani is Vice President at Ignify. Ignify provides design, consulting and implementation services for ERP, CRM initiatives for mid-market and enterprise businesses. Ignify is a Top-tier Microsoft Gold Certified partner ranked in both the Microsoft Dynamics Inner Circle and the Microsoft Dynamics Presidents Club in 2009. Ignify offers a comprehensive set of Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Consumer (B2C) eCommerce solutions for increasing online sales while lowering overall operation costs. Ignify has offices in Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, Nashville, Chicago, Toronto, Manila, Pune and Bangalore.

When you’re in the market to buy a CRM solution, a quick rundown of benefits is ideal in order to start on the right path of your search. Microsoft came out with a CRM Online Service Update in November of 2009 that provides customers with concrete examples of why you get more value for less money with Microsoft Dynamics CRM compared to Salesforce.com. We would like to highlight the main differences between the two products to help you compare and to make your buying decision an easier one:

1. Storage Capacity – Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online has 5 GB of storage and Salesforce.com only has 2 GB. Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online offers additional storage at $119.88/year for 1GB of data/file storage compared to Salesforce.com – $250.00/year for 1GB of data storage and $60.00/year for 1GB of file storage.
2. Mobile Access – CRM Online offers Mobile Express for free, where as Salesforce.com Mobile Edition is an additional cost per user per month.
3. Offline Access – Offline access allows users to be able to view relevant data from the CRM system when they are not connected to the Internet or corporate network. This can be invaluable to sales persons and executives that are often on the road. CRM Online offers many “offline” options that Salesforce.com does not. Offline access is free whereas there is an additional cost per user/month for Salesforce.com Professional Edition. Salesforce.com doesn’t provide an Offline CRM client; it provides a “briefcase”. You can’t view all standard objects (such as quotas, forecasts and cases) and all custom objects offline. 

In terms of functionality there is a significant difference between what CRM offers in terms of functionality and what Salesforce.com offer as shown in the figure below.

Figure 1. Functionality Coverage between Dynamics CRM and SalesForce.com
 

If you are interested in a detailed evaluation guide on selecting a CRM system see this white paper written by our CEO Sandeep Walia.

To find out more about the capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, contact us by calling 888-446-4395 or emailing dynamics@ignify.com. Ignify is a privately-held ISO 9001 certified company focused on the mid-market and enterprise business space for ERP, CRM, and eCommerce implementations. The company provides design, consulting and implementation services for ERP, CRM initiatives for mid-market and enterprise businesses. Ignify is a Top-tier Microsoft Gold Certified partner ranked in both the Microsoft Dynamics Inner Circle and the Microsoft Dynamics Presidents Club in 2009. Ignify offers a comprehensive set of Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Consumer (B2C) eCommerce solutions for increasing online sales while lowering overall operation costs. Ignify has offices in Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, Nashville, Chicago, Toronto, Manila, Pune and Bangalore. For more information, visit http://www.ignify.com.

by Bhavesh Ashani, Vice President – Ignify,  a California Microsoft Dynamics CRM Partner