Tour de Force
Proficient Solutions to Overhaul CRM

In today's business, a wealth of untapped potential has been created by the growing popularity of big data. Companies are failing to extract this data from their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or transaction-based systems and convert it into an understandable format that can drive activity for marketing organizations and sales people. For the last 15 years, Tour de Force has dedicated themselves to turning this over abundance of seemingly useless information into profit growth by making it the foundation of their product. Now they offer more than a flat feature set and a basic architecture: Tour de Force gives its customers a maintainable, manageable piece of customer relationship management (CRM) software with a low cost of ownership and easy user adoption.

But how's that possible? "Over the years, we realized that to be as active with CRM and get adoption, we have to drive information and value out to those users," says Tour de Force Founder and CEO Matt Hartman. The company reshaped the development of its product so that it was created under the assumption that it would always be implemented as an extension of an ERP system. As a result, Tour de Force's CRM extends from over 45 different ERP systems, meaning that it calculates what Hartman likes to call "over a thousand points of interest" based on raw, standardized transaction data from an ERP. With their Business System Integration (BSI) connector, they create meaningful data points for sales and marketing organizations to drive business with.

While one of their product's greatest strengths is being an extension of an ERP system, another is its collaboration with other popular platforms like Microsoft Outlook, Google Mail and Lotus Notes. Tour de Force has additionally created its own workflow manager to replace Microsoft Project, which allows them to manage project, production , and sales workflows while identifying key milestones and work list items. These tools allow clientele to manage major production cycles and get things out to their customers. “They’d have to pay tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in customization for those other solutions that they get out of the box with our product," says Hartman.

Conveyer & Caster - Equipment for Industry (CC-EFI), distributor of material handling solutions, might feel inclined to agree. CC-EFI felt the need to upgrade after having used the same CRM system since the early 1990s, and began researching multiple replacements. Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Salesforce. com didn't fit their needs, but Tour de Force did, and with that began the integration of Tour de Force's CRM with CC-EFI's Infor Takestock ERP system using the BSI connector. Tour de Force integrated directly and imported over 1000 pre-calculated data points into the CRM database, additionally granting CC-EFI access to business intelligence, analysis, and reporting that allowed them to analyze sales performance and a multitude of trends across different levels of their organization. They even created a centralized email logging system, which largely improved CC-EFI's internal communication.

Organizations would have to pay tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in customization for those other solutions that they get out of the box with our product

Tour de Force is an achievement that will never be replicated – a definition that holds true for the company that has claimed the word as their namesake. Following great success and innovation, Tour de Force is building their administrative functions to be web-based and supported in a Software as a Service (SAAS) cloud-based solution. They also plan on expanding beyond their customer base in the U.S., Europe and Canada, and have introduced a new partner program where they are making a major effort to get their product to other partners who focus on the manufacturing sector. "For an organization of our size, we’re constantly overachieving, and that’s what people expect of us," concludes Hartman.