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Good CRM for industrial tech support company?
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Good CRM for industrial tech support company?

Hello,
I figured I'd ask here since there's a lot of people using CRMs here I guess.

I work in a small company where we sell and service industrial machinery for assembly lines. My boss didn't have any idea about what a CRM was and he has been working with excel sheets to manage the entire company. But when you spend most of the day on excel maybe something is wrong with how you do stuff.

I'm looking for a simple CRM that would let us (a team of 4 technicians and two sellers) do this:

Manage customers:

  • what's their legal address, where are they located, where are the factories they own located
  • have multiple contacts associated to the company (e.g. owner, assembly line manager etc.)
  • being able to share all these contacts between all the smartphones in the company and maybe even integrate them with a pbx to immediately know who's calling on the IP phones

Manage sales:

  • being able to add orders, set a delivery date
  • being able to add potential customers, and perhaps a brief description of what they need or want, the estimated return and stuff like that
  • being able to attach events to certain orders (machine x will be delivered on y and installed on z)

Manage machines:

  • be able to assign a machine to a certain customer to a certain factory (and a certain order)
  • being able to group machines together in "assembly lines"
  • being able to define model, serial number, parameters of the machines
  • being able to define accessories (which in turn have serial numbers and parameters) to a particular machine or assembly line

Manage services:

  • schedule services, assign them to certain technicians, put them in the calendar or in a queue, assign them to a particular machine, maybe even integrate it with ticketing (even though we don't use them), being able to list stuff done to the machine ("replaced part xyz...")
  • generate a report of all the services a particular machine had
  • generate a report of all the services a particular machine model had

But so far all the CRMs i found want to be an "all solution" and they integrate a lot of stuff i don't need like cloud storage, mails, phone, chat, docs... while failing in my particular requirements.

Is there anything that could let me do this, or do i need to resort in programming a custom solution myself?

Comments

  • quickquick Member
    edited January 2019

    Yes, maybe

    Thanked by 1eol
  • vpsGODvpsGOD Member, Host Rep

    I hope you have good background on development field as your question brief the requirement clearly

    Better find a developer as your requirement is unique

  • @vpsGOD said:
    I hope you have good background on development field as your question brief the requirement clearly

    Better find a developer as your requirement is unique

    I can't believe this is unique: it's full of companies doing the same stuff out there

  • edfox said: I can't believe this is unique: it's full of companies doing the same stuff out there

    Not really. There are platforms like Salesforce and then you hire a developer specializing in Salesforce to customize what you need.

    And then because you paid lots $$$ for it, you treat your custom software as a competitive advantage which you don't let your competitors use. So your competitors have to pay lots of $$$ to hire another developer.

  • @jiggawattz said:

    Not really. There are platforms like Salesforce and then you hire a developer specializing in Salesforce to customize what you need.

    And then because you paid lots $$$ for it, you treat your custom software as a competitive advantage which you don't let your competitors use. So your competitors have to pay lots of $$$ to hire another developer.

    I guess i'll just try making my own one

    Thanked by 1vpsGOD
  • AnthonySmithAnthonySmith Member, Patron Provider

    spiceworks springs to mind.

  • Hetzner

    Thanked by 2eol imok
  • Mr_TomMr_Tom Member, Host Rep

    edfox said: I can't believe this is unique: it's full of companies doing the same stuff out there

    There are things like servicem8 which may do what you need. I am working with a project at the minute to get something very similar launched (managing equipment at customers locations).

  • Dolibarr

  • eoleol Member

    @3606202 said:
    Hetzner

    This.
    And roll your own.

  • bruzlibruzli Member, LIR

    we have a solution which cover your requests, it's actually an ERP/CRM, cloud, windows app/web/mobile apps, web service. Licensing/year depending on number of users will be 5K+

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