Regnan – an SMB with a tall order

By Adam Gosling

The IT dream of many small organisations is to have the sort of big corporate systems available to workers in large enterprise. Many can aim to develop that over time. For Regnan though, it was a matter of already enjoying the benefits of big business solutions and being faced with losing access to those IT departmental resources that calls for a different type of solution.

Once part of the Westpac-owned BT Financial Group and accustomed to relying on the large enterprise IT infrastructure in place, Regnan was going to find itself in an entirely new environment – spun out as a small five-person business with some very big clients.

Once the BT Governance Advisory Service, Regnan came into being as an independent organisation operated as a collaboration between eight major institutional investors and Monash University.

That meant, though, that the fledgling company would lose its access to BT Financial Group’s extensive IT solutions and the IT support infrastructure.

“Sitting within BT Financial Group’s IT environment was a very comfortable place for us,” said Nicholas Brischetto, manager, Corporate Governance at Regnan. “If we needed support, we just had to raise our hands and someone would show up within five minutes. We suddenly went from being surrounded by a complete, well-supported IT architecture, to having just an office, five people and a telephone.”

“We didn’t like the fact that we were losing a lot of IT support, but at the same time it wiped the slate clean,” he said. In fact, it was an opportunity to implement a solution that perfectly matched the needs and size of the organisation. As part of a larger organisation, the group had adjusted its processes to the systems available.

While they were advanced, well-supported solutions, they were not tuned to the sort of work the small team were performing. Implementing its own solution meant the new company had no legacy systems and could make sure the new system fully accommodated the way it wanted to work.

Regnan meets a need in the market for long-term investors (such as superannuation funds) to understand where an organisation might be in 20, 30 or 40 years time. By their nature super funds often invest for the long-term, but the companies they invest in tends to view their business in much shorter time frames with strategic and fiscal plans focusing on just three to four years.

The Sydney-based company evaluates the risk profiles of Australian companies according to the environmental, social and corporate governance (ASG) risks they face, so investors can make informed decisions about their risk profile.

Regnan has another role, that of engagement. It pro-actively campaigns and also visits candidate companies it sees most at risk, to help them re-align their practices to provide a more attractive investment and to ensure their future viability.

At BT Financial Group, the team made use of the disparate customer relationship management (CRM), email and document management systems. It worked, but it was not ideally suited to Regnan’s activities.

“It was a great CRM system,” said Brischetto, but it was developed for a large group and it wasn’t practical for just five of us. We were a strange business unit and we were always going to have trouble fitting in.”

Fortunately for Regnan, Brischetto had a background in IT and was assigned the task of securing a more customised solution. Although his career has focused on the finance industry, Brischetto had a double degree. One related to finance and the other in IT, majoring in Information Systems.

In fact, one of the major projects he undertook as part of his study was to design and build a basic CRM from scratch. “I had the fun job finding tech companies to help us with a solution,” Brischetto noted dryly. He contacted a number of potential solution providers, but generally wasn’t happy with their proposals. They tended to want to “go down a different path, or they didn’t have the time to deal with such a small business,” he said. “Some tried to make it more complex than I thought it needed to be.”

Brischetto had a clear vision of where to take Regnan’s IT infrastructure. “Ultimately, we wanted to centralise our research knowledge and data and to integrate it with engagement activities triggered by our research results.” Westpac had been conducting SharePoint trials and Brischetto said the team had had some early successes with it as a document repository.

“The old system of organisation was ineffective. If I needed to get hold of a document with details of a past meeting with a company, I had to discover who had saved the document, and then get them to find it and send it to me,” he said. “This was time-consuming and prone to error.”

Ultimately one solution provider understood what he was looking for and, although he couldn’t help Regnan himself, he suggested they speak with JayThom.

A Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, JayThom has been pioneering hosted CRM solutions using Microsoft Dynamics.

Regnan engaged JayThom to install, integrate and host Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 for the new site.

The CRM and email solution would help Regnan staff with their engagement schedule, while SharePoint could help it manage Services 3.0, so Regnan’s staff could manage and access the growing body of research assets in the document library through a single portal.

The fact that the solution was fully hosted meant Regnan could get up and running quickly and rely on an outside resource to maintain the system.
“Nick is the guy who started the whole thing with them,” said JayThom’s managing director, Brett Yorgey. “He is tech savvy and had a good understanding of the business process.

“One of the things he was talking about was that they wanted to be able to get access to the latest technologies even though they were a small outfit.

“JayThom sorted out everything we needed in about two weeks – desktops, laptops, Internet access, email, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0,” said Brischetto.

As Yorgey points out, the advantage of the hosted CRM solution is that you can get a server up and running with a template for the business in a few hours. Then you can start to look at the business processes and users can get in and start having a play with it.

“Rather than forcing everyone to work in a different way overnight, we’re introducing new features gradually so people get used to them.”

Regnan pays a monthly fee to JayThom to host its new infrastructure, an approach that means it didn’t have to spend a lot of cash upfront to install its own server and it doesn’t have to think ahead about future upgrades.

“One of the advantages is that we don’t have to deal with a server,” said Brischetto. “We will likely always be a small company, I don’t think that is going to change. We don’t want to spend our time focusing on the IT systems or juggling multiple suppliers.”

Once the server was set up, Brischetto worked with JayThom to roll out more complex templates and customisations over the next two to four weeks.

“The configuration of the database wasn’t your normal template. It wasn’t like it was a sales process or a financial services, they had specific requirements, but Nick was quickly able to start doing those things himself,” said Yorgey.

Key to the system’s success for Regnan is the integration of the CRM with SharePoint. “The integration means Regnan now has one central repository where all its staff can view, access and act on the same data,” said Brischetto.

“We’ve tweaked the CRM software so that has become our new research housing facility, where all our research documents are stored,” said Brischetto.

“Since it’s all integrated, anyone can edit these documents within Outlook, and some areas of it can be accessed through Windows SharePoint.”

Next, the two partners are already trialling the multi-tenanted feature of the latest Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 (code-named Titan). This latest version is designed with a single code base for on-premise and on-demand deployment.

By allowing multiple customers per server, JayThom should be able to reduce the cost to customers such as Regnan.

Ross Dembecki, lead product manager for Microsoft CRM, said the new multi-tenant architecture is important for hosting SaaS in a cost-effective manner.

“Regnan started without multi-tenancy, so JayThom had to amortise the cost of the hardware on such a small user base. With the multi-tenanted architecture, it allows them to get more creative about how and when and where they can offer the notion of software plus service”.