Situation Headquartered in Findlay, Ohio, Plumbline Solutions is a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner that provides software engineering and consulting services to other Microsoft partners, including independent software vendors and channel partners. The company has particularly deep expertise in business portal solutions, the latest Microsoft .NET Framework development tools and technologies, and Microsoft Dynamics™ SL (formerly Microsoft Business Solutions–Solomon®). A majority of Plumbline staff are former Microsoft employees and were also employees of Solomon Software, the original publisher of Solomon, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2001.
EHTC Technology Solutions, also a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, is an example of the type of business that readily benefits from Plumbline services. Headquartered in Grand Rapids, Michigan, EHTC is a long-time Plumbline customer that helps companies use technology to improve their customer relationship management (CRM) and other enterprise resource planning (ERP) processes. In particular, EHTC develops productivity tools that extend the value and functionality of Microsoft Dynamics business software.
In late 2004, EHTC saw a market opportunity for a product that would integrate key business processes in organizations that use Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Dynamics SL. Specifically, this integration product would:
Synchronize customer information between the two Microsoft Dynamics applications, eliminating duplicate data entry.
Provide an automated ordering process between the two applications, including continuously updating customer status information.
Allow both applications to work from the same pricing and product catalog data.
EHTC wanted to create and market the integration product right away but didn’t have the necessary resources to complete such a large development effort on its own. “My staff just didn’t have time to work on such a complex project while still taking care of our current customers’ needs,” explains David Echelbarger, Director of EHTC Technology Solutions. The company needed to find trained developers, get the project up and running, and get a finished product into customers’ hands-and do it all quickly and cost-effectively.
Solution In January 2005, based on its previous positive experiences with Plumbline Solutions, EHTC sought assistance from the partner on the new integration product. “Plumbline has years of experience with Microsoft Dynamics and knows the core technologies inside and out,” says Echelbarger. “I was confident they would understand what we needed to accomplish in this project and could help us reduce the time to get the product out the door.”
Plumbline reviewed the proposal and agreed that the new product, now known as Infuse, would offer compelling business value to current Microsoft Dynamics users. The company provided EHTC with comprehensive expertise and services to get the Infuse development project under way and also to see it through to completion. “We are the ‘partners’ partner,’” says Ruth Ann Ellerbrock, Chief Operations Officer at Plumbline Solutions. “We provide a diverse range of services so that we can help partners on projects from start to finish-and even beyond, as the needs of the partners’ customers change.” For EHTC, these services included:
Project management. Plumbline worked closely with EHTC to define the scope of the project, allocate resources, and define and meet scheduled milestones.
Product design. The company refined some of the features of Infuse that EHTC had already extensively defined.
Workflow consultation. Plumbline has expertise in the organizational workflow processes that Infuse supports.
Development resources. Programmers from Plumbline augmented EHTC staff, providing specialized skills for the custom development that the new product required.
Training. The company taught EHTC programmers how to access specific entities and attributes in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Dynamics SL software so that code could be written allowing the two applications to communicate with each other.
EHTC and Plumbline built Infuse on the .NET Framework using the Microsoft Visual Studio® development system. The development and testing environment was standardized on the Windows Server® 2003 Enterprise Edition operating system. Infuse works with Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Dynamics SL information that is stored using Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 or Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database software.
Development work on Infuse was completed in early 2006, and EHTC was very pleased with the results. “The disciplined development philosophy and skilled development practices of Plumbline made this project possible,” says Echelbarger. “We had a very solid concept of what Infuse should be, and Plumbline helped us actually make it happen.”
Plumbline continues to assist EHTC by supplementing services for solution implementation, training, and technical support that customers may need after purchasing Infuse, other EHTC add-on solutions, or Microsoft Dynamics SL.
Benefits By working with Plumbline Solutions, EHTC gained Microsoft Dynamics SL resources and expertise that allowed it to complete a complex project and deliver a high-quality product to market quickly. EHTC customers now are benefiting from the improved productivity the company’s solution offers. More generally, however, Plumbline and EHTC demonstrate that when Microsoft partners work together in ongoing business relationships, they can each extend their technical and market reach, and they are able to cost-effectively create innovative solutions for customers.
Resource Savings through Shared Expertise As the “partners’ partner,” Plumbline maintains deep expertise in specific Microsoft technologies so that client-partners like EHTC don’t have to consume valuable resources developing that expertise themselves. “When the Infuse project began, we didn’t have to train Plumbline staff. Instead, they were able to teach us,” says Echelbarger. “It would have taken a long time to recruit and train developers, and it would have been costly to relocate them to our Grand Rapids office. Using resources from Plumbline Solutions easily saved us six months of development time.” Echelbarger continues, “If I had chosen to hire my own staff, we would have been limited to their individual levels of expertise. Using Plumbline staff gave us not only dedicated experts, but also access to specialists back at the Plumbline office who could be consulted, as needed, to resolve issues and keep development running smoothly.”
“We helped build credibility for EHTC, and they helped build credibility for us,” adds Ellerbrock. “Customers don’t know whether EHTC built its Infuse solution on its own or with partners. We’re a kind of silent partner who helps companies like EHTC extend their reach and accelerate time-to-market.”
Repeat Business from Lasting Partner Relationships Plumbline believes strongly in cultivating long-term relationships with other Microsoft partners and with Microsoft itself. The result is increased business and a better understanding of the market. “We achieve service excellence by understanding what our partner-clients want,” says Joe Young, President of Plumbline Solutions. “And we learn what they want by building relationships—lasting relationships like the one we’ve had with EHTC over the years. Delivering quality and excellence is what keeps our customers coming back to us.”
“The key to a good partner relationship is finding one that has a solid understanding of the reseller channel,” says Echelbarger. “Plumbline really knows its market—what ISV products are available and who makes them, who the resellers are and what they specialize inand they’ve got great connections to all these parties. That core understanding makes Plumbline an effective and helpful partner to work with.”
Innovative Solutions through Microsoft Partnering and Technologies The result of partners working together is creating innovative solutions that directly help customers achieve their business goals. “We start with core Microsoft technologies, such as the .NET Framework, Visual Studio, and Microsoft Dynamics,” says Ellerbrock. “We apply our rich, deep history of expertise in these technologies to bring them together, and then we help our partner-clients bring them together to create their own solutions that add value for their customer base.”
Infuse is an example of such a value-adding solution, and it’s already helping customers improve business. “One of our customers takes about 500 orders a day,” says Echelbarger. “Before deploying Infuse, employees had to key in the orders into their CRM and financial systems separately. Now, the systems share order information automatically, saving about one full-time labor position a day. And this is just a small example.”
Young concludes, “The technology comes from Microsoft. The products come from the partners. The services come from Plumbline. It’s the customer who benefits from the innovation. With this kind of partnering, everybody wins.”
