Customer Case Studies

American Marketing Association

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© 2019 Sage Intacct, Inc. All rights reserved. www.sageintacct.com 877-437-7765 Company Overview The American Marketing Association (AMA) is a nonprofit national trade association that provides an essential community for marketing professionals seeking education, networking and professional development. Nearly five million people a year turn to the AMA for exclusive content, scholarly journals, national and regional events, training courses, local chapter networking, and certification opportunities. Executive Summary Previous So ware: • Microso Dynamics Great Plains Results with Sage Intacct: • Increased ease of access for reporting, creating a "zero clicks to information" environment for managers that sped decision- making • Eliminated need to extract and manipulate data in Excel, saving about one hour each week • Increased productivity and lowered labor costs by approximately 25% by with an all-cloud technology stack • Automated journal entries from Personify Association Management So ware (AMS), saving 5-10 hours monthly • Gained real-time visibility into gross margins for events, enabling the events team to restructure or cancel unprofitable events Challenges Digging into Data to Deliver Be er Services When chief operating officer, Jeremy Van Ek, arrived at AMA, the association had technology issues which hampered its mission. AMA's technology was aging and most systems were not well integrated. "As a membership association, how we serve members is critically important to us. The more we know about them, the be er we are able to provide the right services and resources," He explained. In order to drive a be er membership experience, AMA wanted to replace its legacy association management system, Personify, with new cloud-based CRM and content management systems (CMS). The move to an entirely cloud-based technology stack also created the need to replace Microso Dynamics Great Plains, an on-premise legacy accounting system used for nearly 20 years. AMA operates five lines of business: memberships, publications, live events, professional certifications, and corporate sponsorships. The organization functions both as a B2B and B2C in terms of payment transactions—making things like data integration and reporting complicated. "It was difficult for me, the accounting team, and our business managers to access financial information in Great Plains, so it was not looked at as frequently as we would have liked," Van Ek recalled. "For example, some of our events lost money and this was not fully realized. With Sage Intacct, we can access real-time information about gross margin on events, so we've restructured or cancelled unprofitable events and scheduled more successful ones." Solutions A "Big Bang" Approach to a Cloud-Based Future The goal for technology innovation was to drive an improved member experience, so seamless integration between major business systems was critical. AMA adopted an entirely new, cloud- based technology, starting with Salesforce CRM. "We wanted a modern, cloud-based financial platform that integrated easily with Salesforce," said Van Ek. A er reviewing Oracle NetSuite and Accounting Seed, AMA chose Sage Intacct, because "it works like a financial system should. With zero clicks, managers are presented with departmental budget vs. actuals on their home screens." The AMA IT team no longer has to support hardware infrastructure or perform upgrades. "Comparing the licensing cost of cloud-based applications versus premise hosted systems, Digging into Data to Deliver Be er Services American Marketing Association C A S E S T U D Y

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