Pharos Systems International is a cloud services and technology company specializing in print management software and solutions. Pharos supports many of the world’s largest global brands in financial services, healthcare, insurance, government, manufacturing, and higher education. Its services help clients make printing more secure, cost-effective, user-friendly and sustainable.
“360 was very flexible, which made it easy to quickly make changes to our requirements set during the implementation.” -Pharos IT manager
The Challenge:
Aligning Best of Breed CRM+CPQ and ERP/Financial Solutions
Pharos provides Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and some of the world’s largest global brands with cloud-based print management solutions. While its business model is geared toward helping clients reduce the cost and complexity of printing, Pharos was spending too much time and money manually processing customer contracts.
The company was managing hundreds of recurring invoices each month for SaaS licenses with service, as well as a range of associated software, hardware, and maintenance charges. Their offerings were also being optimized to adopt a cutting-edge SaaS pricing model. Because their quoting and recurring revenue reporting had been largely manual for many years – changing their pricing model would introduce more complexity and delays within NetSuite and related reporting operations. They needed a more streamlined approach for configuring, pricing, and quoting a range of options within their new pricing model that gave them better visibility to the related recurring revenue and helped eliminate some of the legacy nuances required in managing it all.
With significant new growth potential, it was clear that Pharos would need CRM and ERP changes that could better align with their newly designed business processes. The new system would not only need to help streamline sales functions around their new pricing model but also help them to better manage recurring revenue contracts and reporting while automating recurring billing and renewals.
Alignment and Sync of separate CRM and ERP platforms
To begin its journey, Pharos opted to transition entirely to Salesforce CRM for their “Lead to Order” processes, while continuing with NetSuite ERP for their “Order to Cash/Revenue” processes. They found that Salesforce CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) offered a solution that could effectively streamline their new pricing model while helping them to manage Contract renewals and amendments all within Salesforce. As part of the solution, they would also need to extend and connect the two platforms around subscription transaction management and reporting. This would allow seamless flow of lead gathering, quoting, and subscription data in Salesforce CRM into NetSuite’s robust ERP for the resulting fulfillment, payment, billing, crediting and revenue recognition.
Once implemented, the new dual platform systems would synchronize contract and subscription details to align with recurring revenue metrics while allowing for flexibility in subscription timing and service offerings. The next challenge was to design, plan and execute a dual platform systems implementation to ensure the Pharos team would soon be operating more effectively and efficiently.
The Solution:
360 Subscription Billing On-platform Apps and Connector
Pharos Systems chose 360 Subscription Billing (360SB) due to its long standing history as a NetSuite SuiteApp around subscription transaction management & automation. Additionally, they were able to leverage the 360SB Salesforce CPQ App and Connector, which were purpose built for aligning and connecting Salesforce CPQ with NetSuite ERP. With insight leveraged by 360 Cloud Solutions and Cloud Giants, Pharos was able to design a smarter, more streamlined and automated dual-platform solution for their “Sales to Cash” processes. This eliminated a significant amount of manual data entry, external spreadsheets and reminder-based activities while providing a foundation for future scalability. With this solution, Pharos would successfully join two separate platforms in Salesforce and NetSuite that are considered ‘Best of Breed’ for CRM/CPQ and ERP/Financials, respectively.
Throughout the implementation process, 360 and Cloud Giants applied an agile “train the trainer” approach to prepare the Pharos team to self-support and make continuous improvements once Salesforce CPQ and 360SB went live. This training included guidance on best practices around data, transactions, contracts, invoicing, reporting and other nuances central to successful use and adoption by their teams.
The Results:
Seamless Connectivity Affords Deeper Customer Insight
With seamless connectivity between these best-of-breed CRM and ERP platforms, Pharos can facilitate a highly sophisticated business process that can scale as their business grows. Their team has gained deeper insight through new reporting capabilities while allowing them to more quickly and intelligently quote new opportunities, transform them into incremental recurring revenue, and automate the recurring transactions there-after.
“We appreciated knowing that the engagement would not stop at a specified hourly mark, rather than upon a successful project.” -Pharos IT manager</em
With this new process, Pharos’ sales team is able to absorb more new and existing customer sales while adding less headcount as their volume grows. Expanded reporting capabilities allows sales teams to more effectively monitor customer churn and renewal rates- plus they can proactively address any patterns of customer churn or ARR reduction.
Automatic recurring billing and renewal processing prevents gaps in billing/cashflow while providing continuity and growth for recurring revenue. More automated CRM quoting and synchronization with ERP orders reduces the potential for errors in processing. It also reduces reactive back and forth between sales and accounting, which in turn helps to speed up period close plus related financial operations and reporting. The systemic improvements benefit both front and back-office teams!
What’s Next:
Identifying Future Automation Opportunities
With deeper insight and more streamlined processes, Pharos can now focus more of their time work on growing their business than working within their various systems to get everything processed.
Pharos’ Salesforce CPQ and NetSuite ERP solution is just one example of how organizations can achieve streamlined subscription transactions and operations through enhanced automation. If you’re ready to learn how to boost your subscription-based business similarly, contact 360 Subscription Billing.
