Summary
Founded in 1990, ABS Capital Partners (ABS), an American private equity firm, focused on investments in companies across a range of industries, including business and education services, information and communications technology, and health care. The firm has raised approximately $2.5 billion since inception across several funds.
ABS, which is focused on helping organizations by providing growth capital, had to connect their Salesforce CRM, which contained vital secure client information, to their Office 365 and SharePoint cloud document management platform where they stored related client documentation and metadata. ABS tasked Creospark, a Microsoft Partner, with integrating these systems in a fashion where source system data and documents would be accessed from each system to increase employee productivity and ease of use.
Challenge
There is an increasing need for financial capital companies, like ABS, to stay attuned to the latest technology trends and use best-of-breed cloud software platforms to efficiently and effectively optimize their organizational business needs. They are, at the same time finding the need to transfer content and data amongst these disparate and disconnected cloud platforms.
For ABS, there didn’t seem to be an easy way to do this without spending enormous amounts of money to bring in a specialist for each individual system.
With a significant portion of ABS’s workforce constantly updating account, opportunity, and deal data within their Salesforce CRM, it was vital that there would be a seamless experience derived from the CRM for accessing documents and related content for collaboration within their SharePoint platform. Furthermore, it was a tedious process to update both systems with customer and deal information. Ancillary benefits anticipated by engaging in this project was a reduction in operational costs for storage of customer related documents in the cloud.
Fortunately, modern cloud services with the Microsoft cloud and content services stack facilitate connecting these systems to allow access to the information needed from their cloud software platforms.
Strategy
ABS selected Creospark as their systems integration partner due to an existing partner relationship and expert qualifications. Working together to define requirements, as well as selecting the best-in-class Microsoft enterprise cloud-based middleware, workflow tools, and content service technologies, the team derived an implementation plan as well as a technical design for the best solution to meet the company’s needs and reduce operational costs.
Creospark designed a solution that eliminated the need to manually transfer account, opportunity, and deal data to SharePoint from Salesforce. Once in SharePoint, Power Automate flows are initialized to perform further refinement on library content and data based on business requirements. Furthermore, this solution allowed capabilities to open SharePoint document libraries directly from the Salesforce CRM interface with the appropriate security being added on the SharePoint libraries.
The solution involved using the following components:
- Modern Cloud Content Services such as SharePoint and Power Automate within the Office 365 stack for document management and workflows to meet business requirements
- Security and compliance management for auditing and information protection
- Microsoft Azure App Services to facilitate triggered metadata transfer from the Salesforce CRM environment to the SharePoint environment
Results
As a result, ABS reduced operational costs on the manual transfer of account related metadata on both systems. There has also been significant savings on the costs of document management by using their existing SharePoint document management system, which provides an ample amount of space with the subscription. In addition, they satisfied their governance policies of storing all account related documentation within SharePoint and made their workers more productive by automating workflows by using Power Automate. ABS is now expanding its adoption of Office 365 and Azure in terms of security and compliance, as well as workflows within SharePoint, given the cost savings benefits.
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