One of our clients sells and manages complex and expensive medical equipment and as part of their sales process they may place a loaner or long term demo unit into a medical clinic. They needed a way to reserve, schedule and track these company owned resources in SalesLogix. We considered several approaches to solving this problem including building a custom solution from scratch but that would have been expensive and overly complex. A SalesLogix user has the ability to include a resource in a scheduled activity but if that user included a resource that would be left at the prospect location for several weeks, their calendar would look constantly full which would make it confusing and difficult to manage. A separate user just for the purpose of scheduling a re-occurring meeting with the resource included seemed like the ideal solution however, an expensive user license is required to do that.
Ultimately, a $95 SalesLogix Web Viewer license turned out to be a very clever and inexpensive way to accomplish this. We discovered that even without actually installing the SalesLogix web components, a Web Viewer license and user could be added to the system. Whenever a real user needs to schedule a resource, they create a meeting for the “Resource” user, link it to an opportunity and then add the resource from the resources tab. Now, whenever a user needs to see the status of the companies demo equipment they can just look at the “Resource” users calendar or the standard SalesLogix Manage Resources screen.
The result is that company demo equipment is now effectively managed within SalesLogix and users have instant access to information about where a piece of demo equipment is currently located and when it will become available for scheduling.
