Aplicor Review - Discontinued

Aplicor entered the software as a service industry in 1999 and has since earned several notable ERP and CRM software awards and earned a positive reputation in the marketplace. In our review of the Aplicor hosted CRM software system, we intended to identify and focus on those unique areas, capabilities and benefits which separate this hosted CRM software system from the rest of the software as a service pack. It didn’t take long to surface five unique capabilities.

First, Aplicor’s software suite is wider than most. The company hosts CRM and ERP for a complete enterprise wide online solution. Having noted that, it’s also clear that the Aplicor system is intended for high growth, middle market and larger organizations. While the software depth and flexible tool kits are appreciated by larger companies, they are possibly a bit much for small businesses.

Second, the system’s ease of use is very strong. Aplicor is the only hosted application with the many-to-one accounting viewing and one-click-to-anywhere navigation. We really liked this and suspect this is a big driver for user adoption.

Third, the Workflow Designer empowered us to create triggering events based on several types of business conditions and then string together sales and support related activities. This is a powerful tool to automate business processes, reduce cycle times and increase staff productivity.

Fourth, the Business Intelligence suite provided more information analysis than we’ve previously seen in hosted applications. The drag and drop report variables and drill-down reporting really helped us transform volumes of data into meaningful information. The one-click export to Excel, XML, PDF and several other file types is useful for getting different types of reports to different users.

Fifth, we liked having the ability to customize the system in non-technical way (and certainly without programming or modifying source code). Aplicor provides a suite of tools – including Forms Designer, Menu Designer and View Designer – which permit system administrators to modify any of the Aplicor pages in a visual drag and drop interface. These design tools really allowed us to adapt the system to accommodate both our users and our business processes.

While not necessarily ranked in the top five benefits, the AXIOM (Aplicor XML Integration Object Model) is a straightforward and useful XML-based web service to facilitate system integration to back office legacy systems or other information system over the Web. There are also a handful of tools, such as the Merge Accounts function and the Mass Modifier, which can really save a lot of time for system administrators. Lastly, for organizations with potentially complex security requirements, we noticed the security model in Aplicor was extremely flexible – permitting security assignments by virtually any criteria (e.g. role, territory, seniority, type of account, type of sale, etc.) down to individual permission levels if necessary. Aplicor is not the most inexpensive online CRM software solution (at $89.00 USD per user per month) and many of its capabilities may be overwhelming for some smaller businesses, however, the product clearly provides several unique capabilities not found in other online or hosted CRM software applications.