Métier Marries Project Management With CRM

Métier, a provider of project portfolio management software and services, will be introducing a new offering called WorkLenz+CRM at Salesforce.com's (NYSE: CRM) user conference next week in San Francisco.

This is the Washington, D.C.-based software company's first foray into CRM, Amy Vaccari, vice president of operations, told CRM Buyer.

WorkLenz+CRM integrates Salesforce.com with the company's preexisting portfolio, she explained. The company, which offers its applications on both on-demand and on premise platforms, plans to partner with at least two more CRM vendors by first quarter of next year, Vaccari said, to offer similar integrations.

These companies could be either on-premise or on-demand vendors, she said. "We chose Salesforce.com for our first partnership because they are the leader in this space."

The first offering of WorkLenz+CRM is targeted to commercial organizations and government systems integrators. A customized offering for the government is expected to be released at the end of the year.

Supply Chain Orientation

WorkLenz project management applications focuses on a project's resources, services and sales prospects, as opposed to the traditional factory-based supply chain concept, the company said. WorkLenz+CRM, by extension, was developed to optimize the project portfolio's CRM "supply chain," by tracking opportunities throughout the entire sales and project life cycles from lead management to project delivery to project closure.

The system also provides transitions from the CRM life cycle to the project life cycle with data for decision-making shared in both systems. It uses past performance data to alert sales professionals of risk, resource capacity and schedule issues.

Automating a Verbal Process

This offering was developed in part because so many of Métier's customers were asking for it, Vaccari said.

"There is nothing comparable on the market," she added. Either companies integrate their project management applications with their CRM operations themselves using a system integrator, or, as is more often the case, take care of such overlapping functions verbally.

A typical use case for this integration, Vaccari said, would be a company that wished to measure how a particular project performed as it begins to evaluate similar opportunities in a new project. "Perhaps the company might find that when it executed that type of project before there were cost overruns or supply chain delays. So the profits were not as high as originally anticipated."

Such final deal information is not usually provided to a sales team, which might erroneously assume that future sales opportunities and leads will be equally as profitable as they had originally expected. With the integration of the project management application and the CRM function, she said, "a sales rep can see that while the firm wins a lot of these deals they are not necessarily good for the company's bottom line by the end of the project."