Business Cases are Tough Challenges
Many organisations fail to exploit the amazing benefits of Saleforce.com because they need help to create the business case to upgrade to the more powerful Enterprise Edition of the platform.
In the last year, the Professional Edition functionality has been extended to include some of the feature included in EE, but there remain powerful reasons to invest in the full upgrade to Enterprise Edition.
This note proposes subjects to be included in your business case to invest in a more powerful edition of the world’ leading SaaS platform.
Any business case must ideally attempt to quantify the benefits and reduced risk exposure to an investment to estimate a projected return on investment.
It requires some serious effort to quantify the benefits of the extended functionality of the Enterprise Edition, because most organisations:
• do not have a true understanding of their cost or revenue inefficiencies
• lack the knowledge to see how the upgraded edition can transform these inefficiencies.
Consequently most cases are going to be qualitative rather than quantitative.
Business Case Foundations
The Enterprise Edition permits the centralisation and automation of any business process.
The cost inefficiencies of any business process come from the errors of Omission, Delay, Duplication, non-compliance, and lack of integration and automation.
Risk liability is reduced through compliance to regulation and users not diverging from efficient processes or procedures.
Your business case must therefore be written in the context of your current and future enterprise business processes.
Xenogenix specialises in mapping and analysing processes, but if you have the resources to ensure that your current processes are properly documented and costed, you will be well positioned to prepare a quantifiable business case.
Critical Features of Enterprise Edition
The full list of features additional to Professional Edition, are listed later in this note, however the most advantageous EE features include:
• Workflow and development code to enable customisation and automation of any Business Process.
• An API to enable 1000’s of plug and play application packages and Integration with other systems
• More efficient record layouts and user interface
• More control over users and data security.
• Enhanced Business analytics
Process Centric Business Case Benefits
As your business case can be easily made in the context of your current enterprise processes, we advocate the installation of a powerful, free, application called Elements, into your Salesforce system.
This application allows you to map, streamline, control and communicate all your business processes. and business systems.
If you would like to get a sense of this application, please click this link (Link to be provided) to view an example interactive ‘Quote to Cash’ process map.
We use the following Generic B2B Enterprise process model which we adapt to map many of our clients business processes.
Enterprise edition permits installation of this application. Many clients are using this application to
• design, execute and control their GDPR compliance processes which become mandatory from May 2018.
• Document the configuration of their Salesforce.com system
Once your other processes have been mapped you can make them visible to any specified employees or partners, and for those processes that are running on Salesforce, users can see the process within the context of the relevant Salesforce record.
For example, our Purchase Order record contains our Purchase to pay process as shown:
The more processes you operate and automate in Salesforce, the higher the benefit of Enterprise Edition features.
For example, if you consider extending your Salesforce operated and automated processes to include any of the following:
• Marketing automation and communication
• Enquiry to Quote, or CPQ – Configure complex product pricing quotes
• E- contract signature
• Quote to Order
• Order Project Management
• Manage inventory
• Order to Invoice
• Invoice to Cash
• Forecast Sales
• Pay People
• Manage Sales Performance
• Manage Commission
• Purchase to Pay
• Manage Finances
• Integrate with financial Accounts
• Customer Service request to resolution
• Business Performance analysis and Intelligence
Then, you will need Enterprise Edition functionality for most of these solutions.
Many Organisations are surprised that Financial Accounting applications can run on Salesforce.com. Xenogenix is a certified consulting partners of Sage Live which has been designed to operate on the Salesforce platform. Many clients attach a significant benefit to having their accounts system hosted on the same cloud platform that runs their business critical enterprise processes.
The introduction of the ‘Lightning’ user experience transforms the users experience of Salesforce. This interface is available in Professional Edition, but has some limitations. In Enterprise Edition, these limitations can be overcome and complex records can be simplified and made specifically relevant to the users job role and profile.
The more data you use within Salesforce, the greater the benefits of the enhanced Business Analysis and intelligence features within Enterprise edition.
EE vs PE Features List
Finally, here is a detailed list of the additional features that are Included in Enterprise Edition. Our consultants or your Salesforce.com account manager can explain the potential benefits.
Analytics
• Joined Reports
• Bucket Fields
• Cross Filters (e.g. Accounts without Opportunities)
• Dynamic Dashboards
• Scheduled Dashboards
• 50 Custom Report Types vs. 200 in Enterprise Edition
• Compatible with Salesforce Einstein AI
Marketing
• 250 emails sent in a single mass email blast vs. 500 in Enterprise Edition
• API for Salesforce Pardot marketing automation
Sales (Sales Cloud)
• Account Assignment Rules
• Territory Management
• Sales Teams
Configuration / Security / Administration
• > 2 permission sets
• > 2 Custom user profiles
• > 3 Object record types
• > 2 page layouts
• 100 Validation Rules per Object
• 500 Custom Fields per Object
• 100 Custom Fields on Activities
• 25 Custom Tabs
• 200 Custom Objects
• Apex development code
• > 5 Process Builder Workflows
• Automated Record Approvals
• Visual process workflow
• Data Export for data backup
Customer Service and Support (Service Cloud)
• Service Cloud Console
• Salesforce Knowledge (Note: Knowledge is available at an additional cost in Enterprise Edition, and included in Unlimited Edition)
• Live Agent (Note: Live Agent is available at an additional cost in Enterprise Edition, and included in Unlimited Edition)
Extending Salesforce / Community / Portals
• Partner or Customer Portal
• Websites (aka Site.com / Force.com Sites)
• Salesforce Communities
Custom Development and Sandboxes
• Change Sets (which are needed to deploy custom code)
• API – to build custom integrations or deploy onclick Java Custom Buttons
• Partial Copy Sandbox
• More development sandboxes
If you would like some help to develop your investment plans and build your business plan for upgrading from professional to enterprise edition of Salesforce, please contact us by calling 08456 525 625 or filling in the form.