DeVere, one of the Mid-Atlantic’s largest commercial insulation contractors, learned the hard way what happens when you take a DIY approach to Salesforce and miss opportunities to take advantage of updates. They had modeled Salesforce after an earlier system they liked, but when clients do that, such over-customization often limits the ability to effect modifications in the future. So now, a decade later, working with their VAR to integrate Intacct with Salesforce, hidden structural problems of their own doing began to manifest and multiply.
Because DeVere is a high-volume, high-value company, the ERP problems they were now experiencing were dominoing, and the struggle to manage the onslaught of daily issues was damaging morale. Clearly, they couldn’t operate this way.
After protracted attempts to make the integration work trouble-free, the original service provider lost DeVere’s trust, and, in the back-and-forth, their management team grew weary of the finger-pointing and condescension. Facing a deadline to re-sign with this organization, they did some quick research and decided to bring in Cargas, an Intacct Top 100 VAR, for a third-party assessment of the situation they believed they could trust.
“I can’t express how stark the difference was between the original folks we began the process with and our experience with Venn. We went from the company we fired berating and looking down their noses at us, to Venn coming in and saying: ‘Relax. Stop beating yourselves up. We’ve seen this before and we can fix it,’” says Thea Dudley, DeVere VP Operations.”
If you’re wondering where Venn fits in—wait for it—the story’s about to get good.
It was in the midst of that assessment process that DeVere gave their original VAR their required 60-day termination notice. And it was then, that they discovered that in the absence of that relationship, whatever Salesforce/Intacct integration they had, would terminate at contract end. It was at this juncture that DeVere asked Cargas to step in and turn things around within that 60-day window.
That aggressive timeframe might have scared others off, yet, Cargas committed. However, soon after that, reality hit. As Cargas peeled back the layers of the problem, they realized that in order to ensure the project’s success, additional help was needed.
That’s when they turned to Venn. They had never collaborated before, but Cargas was well familiar with Venn’s reputation as preeminent Salesforce/Intacct integration experts. They also were aware that Venn was highly regarded for their relationships with customers. Cargas’ introduction of Venn to the mix was a bit of a surprise to DeVere, but once DeVere’s team began working with Venn, any unspoken concerns evaporated.
“We had thought Intacct was the culprit behind our integrated system suddenly not working. However, the truth was, the way we had band-aided Salesforce was the issue. At the time Venn came in, our Salesforce implementation was essentially held together with baling wire and spit. Venn listened. They ‘got us.’ And we know we couldn’t have done it without them,” added Dudley.