I'm looking for some advice about how best to handle contracts that are won - that is, where do we go after the sales process has been successful. We installed the Community Edition and it looks like this will work great for sales and marketing. But after that we need to manage the actual project and I would prefer not to create multiple data silos - we already have to get the CRM data into QuickBooks for accounting. I definitely want the salespeople to have reports comparing things like the lead source and date, quoted price and quote-won date, and the ultimate project completion date and cost. Profitability and time from lead to billing are pretty important metrics.
In our case we are dealing with construction projects where most of our cost is labor. We have about 50 workers and managing the job assignment calendar can be a nightmare. Weather delays, materials not being delivered on time, illness, accidents, etc. all require constant juggling of the calendar.
In the office we need an easy way to see the "big picture" calendar - maybe even on a big screen TV to replace the current marker board. We also need a way to send the daily/weekly assignments to the workers by email, or by handing them a printed sheet in the morning. Finally, we need to enter the actual hours worked to match our cost to the original quote, and to prepare payroll files.
Obviously it would be best to keep all account/contact/opportunity information in a single database (Sugar CRM) and add a module or custom code to manage the workers, hours and jobs. Is there a Sugar CRM module we should look at? Is this kind of thing built into the paid versions of Sugar CRM? Some other way to keep all the information together in one place?
Any advice appreciated.
