Projects of the Month - September 2006

Introduce you and the other team members

Cendien is a small consulting company providing services to clients in the ERP space. We focus primarily on the big ERP packages like SAP, Peoplesoft, Oracle and Lawson. Basically we provide resources and deliver solutions to our clients. We do anything from implementations, upgrades, and customization to support and project management. We compete with companies like Ciber, Hitachi Consulting and a few of the bigger players. We differentiate ourselves not only in price but also in expertise since we recruit the best consultants in the field. And our tendency is to be allot more flexible and knowledgeable then our competitors and to focus on building long term relationships to help our clients succeed.

Talk about why you decided to embark on these project

We decided to embark on these projects because we saw the potential of having an integrated staffing solution with an open source CRM application. In our business, the CRM application is just as essential as having a way to track and manage our consultants. So we decided to develop a module we could use to track consultants and assign them to accounts as we placed them with our clients. It was a natural extension of Sugar in our business model as I am sure it is for many in the consulting/staffing business.

Does the word Cendien mean anything in particular?

YES. Cendien was derived from the word ASCEND - which means to rise. We took off the first 2 letters "AS" and added the "ien" at the end to create an embedded subliminal one. So the word CENDIEN, in short terms means, to rise to be number one. Out of several marks and names that we developed, we felt this was the brandname that resonated most with our message. Hence, the brand allows us to get a clear message about what we do, what we strive to be, and what we help clients do. Its definitely part of our culture and its totally embedded in our marketing strategy.

Describe your offerings – who uses it, target market, etc.

This is difficult because we created the module for an internal need but soon realized that it could be utilized by most consulting/staffing businesses. We started with just the candidates module but we are now working on things like timesheets, expense reports, and even job postings. Hence the module is slowly maturing to be part of a suite that helps just about anyone streamline recruiting and HR functions. We see it as an extension of Sugar for companies who wish simplified and integrate their business with just one application. It fits the 80/20 rule - in that it fills 80% of all the immediate HR needs of small companies.

Our current target market is small companies with 10-50 employees in the staffing/consulting business wishing to integrate operations with a web application. However, we believe our module will naturally progress with Sugar to provide bigger clients the HR solution they need to make things more efficient. We would like to lead the HR space in the Sugar market and we think we have the understanding and expertise to do so. We just need funding to make things more visible.

How long did it take you to do the integration?

The integration took us about a month to do but the testing and design were the hardest and longest. We wanted to developed something that would leverage the existing sugar infastructure and architecture so we could easily use things like the normal notes and emailing capabilities. We also wanted to easily integrated into projects and opportunities so we used the same relationship model currently in place in the architecture.

We want to design and bill a billing module which integrates quotes and invoices with timesheets to track how much billing a consultants has accross accounts, projects, and opportunities. We also want to be able to do scheduling so we can schedule resources ahead of time and manage resource availability.

On thedevelopment side we have learned that Sugar is very modular, flexible, and uses a simple architecture so its very easy to extend beyond its CRM scope. However, we've also seen that it needs better standards and more documentation for developers. The Wiki will be a great addition once its mainstream.