Delivers modernisation project 3x more efficiently to onboard more customers at a lower cost
✔ Massively increases capacity by enabling technical support staff to build data integrations on their own
✔ Enables client’s digital transformation to meet tight deadlines for Brexit logistics regulations
✔ Expands integration solution offerings with greater speed, power, and flexibility
Industry Technology, Software, Agency
Location Dublin, Ireland
Employees 50+
Solution Tray Platform
“Since implementation, the solution we provided has been flawless. Not only were we able to help them meet an incredibly tight customs deadline for Brexit, but we did it 3x more efficiently.”
– John Malone, CEO & Founder, Provident CRM
Provident CRM is a leading business and technology service consultancy. We work closely with hundreds of organisations across Europe to deliver cross-functional CRM implementations, custom marketing automation integrations, and BPM services. With offices in Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Mullingar, London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Barcelona, Lisbon, and Porto, our team prioritises customer satisfaction and fit.
“We work with a broad range of customers across government, finance, healthcare, tech, retail, professional services, and more,” says our CEO John Malone. “Each industry has unique concerns when it comes to regulatory requirements, data privacy, reporting, and customer needs. As a result, we’ve become highly adaptable, pairing the right tools and processes to deliver incredible results for our customers.”
At Provident CRM, our clients include leading logistics conglomerates that have served the UK and Ireland for decades. Unfortunately, the advent of Brexit-related customs regulations in the UK presented a unique roadblock.
“Brexit created a massive headache for logistics firms,” explains Malone. “The legislation caused significant customs changes at the British border virtually overnight, which could’ve been crippling for businesses trading across the Irish Sea. A single, 40-foot truck with 4-5 vehicles on it needs 40-50 manifests, and if a single piece of paperwork is incorrect, it won’t ship. When you have thousands of trucks with different countries of origin, that adds up to an incredible amount of processing and a high chance of error.”
“Until this point, none of our clients’ existing software vendors had any customs features. The team relied on five different legacy systems to manage manifests and other data. Paper forms were an option, but for multinational shipping companies, they weren’t a viable alternative.”
“To make matters worse, Northern Ireland was revising its customs legislation up until the last minute. We received the final draft of the protocol on December 24th and needed to go live on January 1st, meaning we had to act fast over the holiday period.” In other words, we needed to provide mission-critical IT modernisation for a key strategic client, and quickly.
Luckily, we had the experience as a trusted IT implementation partner and solution provider to support this business-critical dilemma. What we needed was the technology to move fast and ensure compliance before the start of the year.
“We needed to deliver a solution quickly and efficiently in a pretty dynamic environment,” remarks Malone. “We’d been using a popular data integration vendor to work on similar projects in the past but had found that it wasn’t really suitable for connecting to cloud applications. On the other hand, we noticed that many cloud integration tools didn’t connect to on-prem or legacy systems. The Tray Platform ticked both of those boxes so that we could support the migration from on-prem to the cloud.”
“Another consideration that was top-of-mind during our evaluation process was choosing a solution that was easy enough for anyone on our developer team to use. With the Tray Platform, we didn’t have to allocate all of the work to Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) specialists, but could spread the project across our developers that were proficient in standard coding languages.”
Using a General Automation Platform (GAP), our team could move quickly and deploy adaptable solutions that kept pace with the changing customs legislation in Ireland. “Even after Ireland released its protocols, it continued to release major revisions, so we needed to deploy a flexible solution that could stand up to frequent changes,” says Malone. “Many trucks sat on both sides of the Irish Sea for months because other large shipping companies couldn’t keep pace with the new policies as they went into effect.”
Our larger logistics clients comprise as many as five separate divisions, which only added to the complexity of the use case. “Our clients needed a single frontend platform to manage customs. We were able to deploy a solution that synced data from the company’s five different legacy systems into a single, cloud-based application where logistics teams could easily manage customs data.”
“After implementing our initial solution, we were able to train support staff rather quickly. Now, our team can offer high-quality, 24-hour support, while we can refocus our developer’s efforts on deploying more solutions.”
“Since implementation, the solution we provided has been flawless. Not only were we able to help our clients meet an incredibly tight customs deadline for Brexit, but we did it 3x more efficiently,” remarks Malone. “The Tray Platform offered the flexibility and ease of use we needed to rapidly train our team to support the account.”
Supporting the journey from legacy tools to the cloud has also opened new doors for us. “Now that we’ve seen just how efficiently we can solve these fundamental challenges for enterprises, we’re confident that we can deliver more solutions to customers at their price points. We don’t have to solely rely on our ETL experts to deploy these solutions, but can distribute work to anyone who has experience with workflow automation tools.”
Moving forward, our team at Provident CRM has big plans to harness the power of automation across more accounts, and to potentially facilitate new modernisation projects for other businesses struggling with Brexit-related integration challenges. “Our tagline is that we’re passionate about customer happiness. Now that we’ve successfully deployed our solution with our current clients, we can look to engage with more clients in less time while still providing the same exceptional experience.”
“Beyond ETL, we see a lot of demand for custom integrations between popular sales and marketing tools. Interestingly, the market for these solutions is pretty open, and there isn’t an incumbent service provider in that space. With the Tray Platform, we’re able to capitalise on this opportunity and expand our offerings with greater speed, power, and flexibility.”
