Our Engine Upgrade: Accelo

As you can probably imagine (and may have experienced yourself), while it’s awesome to leverage the great SaaS products out there, it means your data gets quite separated.

Like many service businesses, our day to day workflow at D6 moves across numerous applications to get the job done. After trying (and failing) with tools like Zoho, Harvest, Salesforce, and TeamUp, we realized we needed to automate and integrate our business processes to get the efficiency we were looking for in terms of user experience. By the end of 2017, we were getting to the point where we felt it was no longer an option to continue with the combination of disparate tools we had, so we made a big change that would help us scale and operate smoothly.

Driving our business forward

We realized we had two options: either do the custom integration work with Salesforce and continue using our full suite of SaaS products or purchase a broader SaaS product to reduce the number of tools in use. We carefully analyzed the pros and cons of each option...

How much time was it really going to take to do all the integration? What would be the user experience once all the custom work was done? How much does it cost to subscribe to all these SaaS products when you add it all up? What were the broader options out there? What would the user experience be like? How would the cost compare to our current subscriptions? What would be the internal time needed to migrate from our current systems?

On paper, it was clearly worth pursuing a broader solution so we embarked on a system selection process. We selected ~100 things that we needed the winning system to do and gave each a priority weighting - this gave us a clear matrix to assess the systems against. We then scoured the internet, discovering a multitude of options, from the far too simple, to the scarily complex and everything between. We giggled at some amazing 1998 interfaces and 'oohed and aahed' at some beautifully designed ones.

But it’s about more than just looks, right? In the end, we chose three systems, plus our current suite, and assessed them closely using our matrix. It sounds easy in writing but to truly assess a system you need to really roll up your sleeves and get intimate with all its moving parts. We sat through sales pitches from Estonia, San Francisco, and the UK and gently let down a few keen salespeople along the way. In the end, there were two clear leaders that made sense for our business needs – Scoro and Accelo...

And the winner is?

After a full-on assessment, Accelo won in the end, due mainly to its superior contract management functionality. We were also impressed by their thorough sounding on-boarding process and easily accessible, Aussie-based support. The upshot is that we will be replacing five separate SaaS tools (Salesforce, TeamUp, Harvest, Harvest Forecast and Zendesk) into one – Accelo. We will continue to leverage a suite of tools to run our business (Jira, Xero, Slack, G Suite etc.) and use Tuttio to integrate these but we have significantly reduced the number of integrations required with this decision.

We are currently in the peak intensity of implementation, which essentially means we are midway through pulling apart our company engine whilst still driving the car. Minimizing impact on our customers and our team are top priority, but there is inevitably going to be some impact of completely turning the way you operate on its head! We will update our thoughts on Accelo and the impact it has had on D6's blog so stay tuned.