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Case Study: Continuing Legal Education
Society of B.C.
John McLaughlin, CA, writes:
The Continuing Legal Education Society of BC (CLE) is
British Columbia’s largest provider of ongoing
professional education for the legal profession. We
also publish legal books and operate the Professional
Legal Training Course for new lawyers. CLE’s success
is dependent on its ability to create and sell useful,
relevant products to the profession. In short, we must
know our customers in order to serve them effectively.
In 1998, CLE made the decision to invest in a new
information systems environment. The goal was to handle
all accounting requirements, while collecting and maintaining
a central repository of information about our 25,000
customers. The new system would also be required to
provide ease of access to the information from a variety
of applications to help us conduct business more effectively.
With specialized needs arising from the relationships
between customers inherent in the legal profession,
including the need to manage subscriptions, areas of
interest, and several other issues, no application appeared
immediately able to address all of CLE’s needs.
CLE looked carefully at several applications and vendors
before choosing The RSC Group (RSC) and its proposed
Great Plains Dynamics solution. Early meetings with
RSC showed us that they quickly grasped CLE’s
key concerns. We were especially impressed with the
process that RSC uses to create custom applications,
and Dynamics’ flexibility to allow the necessary
customization. Recognizing that a significant system
installation requires a strong and open relationship
to be established between client and vendor, we felt
confident that RSC was our best option.
During the several months of development and training,
we got to know our RSC consultants very well. They were
able to understand CLE’s business issues and convert
these to effective applications. CLE’s Dynamics
installation, with several customized applications,
went live in mid April, 1999. The cut-over from our
old system went smoothly. RSC was onsite to assist as
required. Now, two months into the new system, we are
continuing to fine-tune its use and are confident that
it will deliver the goals established at the beginning
of the project. We are already able to use more information
about our customers than before and look forward to
expanding the use of information further. All in all,
we are happy with the decision to select Great Plains,
happy with the selection of RSC and happy with the installation.
Suzan Riedel of The RSC Group continues:
The Continuing Legal Education Society of BC (CLE) project
required the development of robust customized features.
CLE maintains relationship information between legal
firms and lawyers, often billing one entity while shipping
product to another. The RSC Group developed a relationship
tree enabling the visual analysis of firm and lawyer
relationships and the selection of valid combinations
of billing and receiving customers from within the Sales
Order Processing module.
In addition, CLE needed a means of maintaining subscription,
book update, and course information. The Inventory module
was enhanced to track product and course details. A
new order card module was designed to track and automate
the processing of recurring orders. Deferred revenue
and subscription expiration routines were also developed.
These custom features were built directly into the Dynamics
product to provide a seamless user-interface and eliminate
data redundancy.
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Manufacturing
