Hilco

Hilco, a leading financial services firm, came to Highland Solutions with a significant challenge: Provide relief to the organization by streamlining its business processes through the use of technology. This platform would help Hilco employees work more efficiently, provide the business with better visibility into how the business is tracking, and ultimately support its aggressive growth initiatives.

Business Challenges

Hilco, a leading financial services firm, came to Highland Solutions with a significant challenge: Provide relief to the organization by streamlining its business processes through the use of technology. This platform would help Hilco employees work more efficiently, provide the business with better visibility into how the business is tracking, and ultimately support its aggressive growth initiatives.

Hilco faced a number of challenges in managing its sales and project delivery process, causing significant inefficiencies and duplication of effort across the organization. There were multiple systems within the business that independently housed and tracked essentially the same customer and project information. As CMO Jim Glickman states, “We might enter the same information into 10 or 15 different places. That is not an efficient way of doing business and it takes our people away from serving customers.”

Hilco used an older implementation of SalesLogix to house customer information, a separate marketing system to nurture prospects, and a separate, non-integrated project management system to track and schedule projects. At the end of the day, this multitude of systems and the inability to integrate caused Hilco a lack of visibility around individual clients and deals within Hilco Appraisal as well as across the different units of Hilco’s business. Consequently, its highly skilled workforce gravitated to other means to get jobs done, including numerous Excel spreadsheets. There was no “one source of the truth” for information on customers and deals. Furthermore a lack of a single source of data, along with hoards of stand-alone spreadsheets, caused a significant concern on the data accuracy.

The Solution

Starting with a comprehensive eight- week business analysis, Highland Solutions partnered with the Hilco team to document and develop an approach that would provide Hilco with a path to efficiency and positively impact the bottom line. As a result, ESSTER was born. ESSTER, which stands for Engagement, Set-Up, Scheduling, Tracking, Evaluation and Reporting, is a system that was built using SugarCRM’s core functionality coupled with customizations that support and manage Hilco’s unique business requirements.

From the beginning, the goal of delivering ESSTER was to automate Hilco’s entire customer life cycle from marketing efforts on the front end to their operational efforts on the back end. As Glickman puts it, “From the time we met a prospect all the way through identifying, proposing and delivering a deal for that customer, and ultimately invoicing them we wanted all of that to flow through one system. That was the big requirement, and that’s what we’ve been able to achieve utilizing a combination of Sugar and our trusted advisor Highland Solutions.”