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Case Study: Inland
Integration
 The Challenge: Establish a completely integrated operational process
Sure, it’s your job to ensure that client systems stay up and running – all day, every day. It’s what you do. In fact, you might even say you’re responsible for the overall health of your clients’ technology ecosystems; the trusted family physician seeing to every need. Eric Hanson does.
As CEO of Upland, Calif.-based Inland Productivity Solutions, Eric likes to think of his business as one similar to that of a general physician’s practice, performing a wide range of services from startup to upgrade. “We’re a cradle-to-grave provider,” says Eric. “We do it all.”
But with only nine employees, Eric increasingly noticed that healing his clients’ IT ailments was far less daunting than running an efficient IT services business. As the business grew, invoicing clients became much more time consuming than it should be. Systems weren’t connected, making information-sharing tough. The prognosis? Inland needed to integrate and automate their business functions.
The Solution
It was about two and half years ago when Eric caught a tradeshow demonstration presented by ConnectWise CEO Arnie Bellini. That’s when he got a glimpse of what ConnectWise could do for his company.
In what might be a bit of “doctor-heal-thyself” irony, Eric was initially attracted by the prospect of ConnectWise eliminating the “pain” associated with invoicing. Since then, Inland has fully embraced all of ConnectWise’s features — tools which go far beyond compatibility with Inland’s favored applications QuoteWerks and QuickBooks. “We use every part of ConnectWise,” Eric says.
ConnectWise PSA allows tracking of actual and work-in-progress hours against invoiced hours, support of exception write-up or write-down, and numerous billing arrangements. For Inland, which prides itself on providing timely response to service calls, ConnectWise makes it easy to accurately measure performance and report results to customers.
The Results
“ConnectWise has allowed us to build a completely integrated business process from sales and service through project management and invoicing,” Eric notes. “It brought order to our internal chaos.”
Eric credits ConnectWise with helping him and his staff better grasp “what’s going on” at Inland. Not coincidentally, the now more efficient internal business processes also enable Inland to better serve its customers and meet their service-level agreements.
Still, like any entrepreneur, Eric has his eyes on growing the business that was founded in 1988. He’s anticipating 15 percent business growth in 2008 and expects ConnectWise to play a big role there, just as the solution has already helped Inland quadruple net profits.
“ConnectWise has afforded our employees with the additional bandwidth to grow our business without adding staff,” Eric observes. “It is the primary tool for growing our profitability.”
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