Granicus runs entire business with Custom Cloud solutions

Challenge

• Streaming media solution provider wanted to more efficiently manage workflow
• Needed a better way to store and share information related to more than 500 government clients
• Generating new business proposals was complicated and time consuming
• Wanted to reduce IT and infrastructure costs

Solution

• Deployed a custom salesforce.com solution to every employee
• Moved operations for on-boarding, sales, marketing, finance, human resources, training, project management, technical support, and deployment to the cloud – automating almost all business processes
• Easily built 20 custom Force.com apps including:
  
  • Asset Management to track employee laptops and other inventory
  • Projects to manage company-wide initiatives; includes progress dashboards
  • Case Records to monitor support cases and internal IT requests
  • Recruiting to maintain position and candidate records
  • Volunteering to track community service events
  • G-Video to store training videos
• Built a custom Proposal Generator tool on Force.com just 1 week; the application determines client product configurations, creates proposals, and exports to them to PDFs
• Custom headlines scroll across user home screens to keep employees up to date and informed
• Integrated with Talisma knowledgebase and Mindflash online training solutions
• Will use Force.com sites to share information with clients

Results

• Proposal generation application completed 6x faster on Force.com than with a traditional platform, saving over 400 hours of development time
• Proposals are now generated in five minutes (instead of two hours)
• Easy and inexpensive to deploy new applications companywide (including remote employees)
• New applications can be developed in less time, for less money
• Workflow tools easily automate any process in the organization
• Cloud-computing model requires minimal ongoing IT support