Business Challenge

This large insurance company invested more than €10 million in a new CRM system based on HCL Domino. This application is used by their external sales force to enter customer data, track sales activity and lookup customer information. The sales staff were experiencing delays up to 13 minutes while working with the system. The client had narrowed down the performance issues to be in LotusScript, but with thousands of lines of code, it would be very difficult to isolate the trouble spots manually.

Troubleshooting application performance was costing the client significant hours of lost sales time. Furthermore, the sales people were beginning to walk away from the application, creating a situation where the customer information and sales call tracking was no longer documented in a centralized location. The developers spent several weeks trying to isolate the Lotus Script performance issues without success. The situation had become dire enough that management was considering moving onto another CRM application, in spite of their recent €10 million investment.

The Teamstudio Solution

The client was already using several Teamstudio products across the company. As such, they contacted Teamstudio to see if we could help them identify the specific LotusScript performance issues. The Teamstudio representative was able to recommend Profiler, a Lotus Notes developer tool that helps identify performance issues in LotusScript. Furthermore, the representative discovered that the client was already using Profiler within another department.

The client contacted the other group to find out what their experiences had been using Profiler. After a glowing reference, the client obtained a second copy of Profiler to use with the CRM application. They immediately installed the product and began looking at the performance of the CRM application’s LotusScript. Since the solution does not require the temporary insertion of timing statements into the LotusScript code, it was easy for them to implement.

Results

After running Teamstudio Profiler for only a few days, major improvements to LotusScript were made, providing them with the high performance CRM system they thought they bought to begin with. The sales staff re-engaged with the CRM system after it was proven that the performance challenges had been resolved. The IT organization is once again living up to its IT strategy by providing support for the overall business objectives, controlling costs and minimizing risks. What had been a very difficult challenge for the client turned out to have a simple solution.

This saved the client weeks, if not months of development time in working through the performance issues. The client estimates that they had already invested more than €15,000 in trying to resolve the performance issue without success. Additional cost savings were realized by retaining their €10 million investment in the existing CRM solution. Re-training costs for a new application would have added to the cost burden. Finally, lost sales staff productivity during the process of obtaining a new CRM system would have likely had a significant and negative impact on the client’s customers, investors and employees.