Preterion

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Matrix Support Services Pty Ltd was established in 2010 to assist Telstra telephony dealers in collecting financial information from their customers to submit to a financier for approval.

Since that time, starting from a zero base, we have processed and settled over 26,000 credit applications worth a value of $200 million. Matrix services approximately 200 Telstra telephony dealers throughout Australia.

What challenge were you trying to address with Preterion?

As the program started to quickly grow, we needed a CRM system that would allow us to capture the customers’ information and manage the workflow for the applications as they were received.

What was the scope of their involvement? Specifically, what were the services they provided?

Cris [Director at Preterion] met with the management team at Matrix on numerous occasions to understand the workflow processes that we had and look for ways to improve and develop a CRM solution which would be easy to implement and use.

Our processes were unfortunately predominately manual due to the way in which information was delivered from the vendors (which we had no control over and could not change).

We identified what options we had, taking into account various operating systems (Windows, Linux, etc), cost effectiveness, and ease of implementation without having any downtime.

How did you find Preterion, and why did you decide they would be the best fit for you?

Preterion provided a number of alternatives for the CRM which included open source and proprietary. As we were unable to automate the collection of the financial information provided through the sales channels, we needed a simple but robust solution that would provide the reporting we required and allow multiple access to the Matrix team.

We tested the stability and ease of operation in a test environment for 2 weeks before agreeing to migrate all our existing data (in Excel spreadsheet). The solution became known as MAD (Matrix Administration Application).

How much did the project with Preterion cost?

The total cost of the project was $26,000.

What was the month and year you started working with Preterion? Is the engagement still ongoing or has the project been completed? If the latter, what was the month and year it was completed?

We engaged Preterion in April 2013 and the MAD program was fully implemented and operational by August 2013.

Preterion continues to provide IT support for the MAD solution as well as day-to-day support for the business.

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement? If you do not have any specific metrics, please share your general feedback on the quality of the work.

Cris is very conscious of costs and the impact on small businesses as they grow. He was keen to share ideas and look outside the conventional costly solutions that would provide a suitable outcome.

Regular meetings were held to ensure the project was progressing as per agreed and within costs. Changes to the source code and any specific requirements like reporting, structure, etc., were addressed and were done quickly.

What did you find most impressive about Preterion? Was there anything particularly noteworthy about the services they provided and experience they gave you?

The implementation of the program encountered a number of issues around the way Matrix used shared mailboxes in Outlook, which impacted the existing workflow and the access to up-to-date synchronized mail. Cris from Preterion continued to look for solutions to these problems using Cloud solutions, and ultimately installed a dedicated mail server to solve our issues.

Are there any areas Preterion could improve?

No.