Tammy Ven Dange of Roundbox Consulting chats with Patrick Northcott, the Founder of Ecleva, a Microsoft Business Application Solution Partner.
Topics from this interview with Ecleva – a Microsoft Business Application Solution Partner
In this interview, we learn about:
- 00:00 About Ecleva, a Microsoft Business Application Solution Partner
- 02:26 Patrick Northcott and how he got involved with the company
- 03:57 More about their work with Not for Profits
- 06:16 The ideal Not for Profit client for Ecleva
- 10:28 Solutions for Volunteers
- 11:29 Their future roadmap
- 12:51 How to find out more about Ecleva
Links & Resources:
- Learn more about Ecleva on their website – https://www.ecleva.com/
- Baptist Association case study
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Tammy regularly helps Not for Profits make IT investment decisions. Let her know if you need some help.
Tammy Ven Dange is a former charity CEO, Association President, Not for Profit Board Member and IT Executive. Today she helps NFPs with strategic IT decisions as an independent consultant. She does not take commissions nor sign partnership arrangements with vendors.
Video Transcript (minor modifications have been made for clarity)
Tammy Ven Dange Today I’m welcoming Patrick Northcott, founder of Ecleva, a Microsoft business application solution partner. Patrick, welcome.
Patrick Northcott Hi, Tammy. Great to be here.
Tammy Ven Dange Thanks for joining me today. I know you’re a Microsoft application partner. Tell me more about the business.
About Ecleva, a Microsoft Business Application Solution Partner
Patrick Northcott So Ecleva is the trading name. We were founded in 1996. So, we’ve been in business now for 27 years, which is a huge amount of time in the IT industry. The amount of digital transformation and change we’ve seen in technology across that time is quite phenomenal.
We founded the business, really to help people focus on achieving more with their business applications. We rebranded to Ecleva in 2015, and redefined our purpose.
Our purpose is the enterprising use of technology to improve people’s lives. And I’m really passionate about that purpose. Because enterprise means showing initiative and respect, resourcefulness. So, it’s really about taking the technology and making that technology work as much as possible for organisations to really improve their lives.
But also, we do a lot of work in the Not for Profit space. So, it really is to improve people’s lives, who really need it, like children in Asia and Africa.
Tammy Ven Dange Well, it started over 20-something years ago, and Microsoft has certainly changed. Have you been a Microsoft shop the whole time?
Patrick Northcott We’re very much focused on business applications. We used to implement things like Act! and Goldmine from a CRM perspective. And back in 2003, when Microsoft released (it’s CRM), it wasn’t called Dynamics in those days, but they released the Dynamics CRM, the Version 1 days, I saw that it was a really hopeless product, but had a really good vision.
And you know, if Microsoft are putting a lot of money behind something, then chances are it’ll go somewhere. So, we started adopting and implementing the Microsoft platform back then in 2003. And it went really well. So, we’ve been one of probably one of the longest standing Dynamics partners in the industry, a lot of big players started joining the crowd in Version 4. So before then, we were pretty much out on our own.
About Patrick Northcott and how he got involved with Ecleva
Tammy Ven Dange And that was quite insightful. But what is your personal background? Patrick, how did you get into the business?
Patrick Northcott I’ve had my own company, pretty much ever since high school. At high school, I was the nerd of the school. I had an office next to the principal’s office, and actually developed an education school management system. So, keeping the database of all the schools, the students, grades, and as well as academic management system, which they’re now called the Student Management System.
Then on from there, I left high school and started my own IT consulting business. And that was in South Africa. I grew up in South Africa, born in England. When I moved to Australia, in 1993, it’s the only three years from 93 to 96, that I haven’t had my own business.
There I worked for a company called Select Ticketing System, where I was the client services manager. I really learned the value of always offering supreme and excellent customer service. And then I moved on to be the national IT manager for Borel Bricks. When in there I learned a lot of about the manufacturing process.
And my last job, I had a job with Brambles Industrial Services, which was around cleaning up and waste management and industrial. There we did a consolidation where we actually took seven disparate different kinds of systems and businesses. And we merged into a shared service with one ERP servicing the whole organisation. So, there I learnt about implementing business applications in ERP.
More about Ecleva’s work with Not for Profits
Tammy Ven Dange Now, I know you do a lot of work with Not for Profits. So, can you tell us more about that kind of work and the kind of clients that you have?
Patrick Northcott We have a range of Not for Profits. We do a fair amount in the donor management, fundraising space. And that’s really around supporting child sponsorship type programs and aid programs in Africa and Asia and around the world.
Those programs are really around reducing the admin overhead as much as possible so that the donation impact can be better. The more admin costs, the less the dollars are making it to where it’s really needed. So yeah, we try to reduce things as much as possible.
Client example with Transform Aid International (TAI)
An example there would be in one of our clients, Transform Aid International. They have the child sponsorship program. They need to take photographs of children year on year and send out development reports of those children.
And what we did is, Lois, who was the one of the administrators there used to have to compare 10,000 photographs. They have the directory, and they had a drive dump of up to 10,000 photos, and she would compare these photos year on year and say yes, that’s the same child.
So ,what we did is we use Microsoft’s Cognitive Services, and have an application where we have an interface and a field service app where the partners out in the field actually take a photo and attach it to the child profile. And that automatically gets sent to the Microsoft Cognitive Services for facial recognition and sentiment recognition.
It compares those year on year and then comes back with maybe 200 or 300 exceptions that Lois has to compare instead of 10,000. We’ve used AI there, and we’ve automated a field app that to help collection of the data and streamline that whole end-to-end process.
We’ve been working with TAI, I think, almost for the whole time that I’ve been a Microsoft partner. So since early, early 2000s. We like to be working with clients for decades, rather than in and out projects.
Tammy Ven Dange It’s great example of using new technology as well. So, is that all stored in Dynamics?
Patrick Northcott Yes, most of that stored in Dynamics. Again, to reduce cost and overhead, we don’t store the photographs in Dynamics, we use a more cost-effective storage mechanism for digital file asset management.
The ideal Not for Profit client for Ecleva
Tammy Ven Dange What other kinds of clients would you consider your ideal client in the Not for Profit space?
Patrick Northcott We have a very, very broad client range. So, from like the three-person organisations up to huge multinationals. For me, I think the sweet spot would be 20-30 employees up to the sort of 250 kind of model.
It gets to the stage where you can’t keep everything in your head and use Excel to keep everything. That’s a good application but the enemy of great because it’s silos everything and it doesn’t have an end to end process management. So, bringing in business applications like Dynamics, CRM, and the Dynamics ERP systems really benefits organisations.
Tammy Ven Dange Now, the example you gave us was more around case management for a charity. Do you also use Dynamics for fundraising purposes?
Nonprofit Cloud and Microsoft Dynamics
Patrick Northcott Yes. So, Microsoft have got what they call the Nonprofit Cloud. We’ve implemented in Dynamics, a full donor management, and grant management suite.
It integrates with web portals so that they can do fundraising and the data flows directly into the back-end applications, and does the receiving and the tax proceedings, using workflows to send out automatic thank you notes and reminders around child sponsorship and automatic deduction. So, they’ve got a month to month, subscription sponsorship, it manages all of those kinds of processes.
Tammy Ven Dange Is there anything else that you’d like to share that may be slightly different from a Not for Profit perspective, from that use case that you just mentioned?
Patrick Northcott Microsoft have a few core parts of the Dynamics suite. So, they have Dynamics, which is the business applications and in the Power Platform. We used to use Dynamics as a power platform for building things like this donor management system.
But the core modules that Microsoft have – a sales automation. So, that’s around the Opportunity Management and pipeline management. The case management as you mentioned, there’s some other ones, which is the Microsoft Dynamics Marketing. That’s a full lifecycle marketing engine, which can do customer journeys and customer insights and lead scoring around which donors or major donors or sales pipeline are most likely to give.
Field Services Use Case for Royal Botanical Gardens of Victoria
We implement that the Dynamic Marketing Suite as well for communications and collaboration. Then they have the Field Service application. Typically, field service would be used in a commercial sort of operation where we have quite a lot of clients that do part manufacture and servicing of parts out in the world.
We’ve taken that and we’ve used that in the Not for Profit space. So, another one of our clients, for example, is the Royal Botanical Gardens of Victoria. We’re just working on a project at the moment where we’re taking field service to do scheduling of school bookings.
They have schools that need to come through and do tours through the gardens. And there’s a lot of specialist requirements. So, each of the sort of courses or classes of those tours can have special characteristics. We might have to have an indigenous Aboriginal skills or lineage to be able to work on certain courses. You might have to know certain botanical botanist type information.
What we’ve done is we’ve used Field Services, to classify and manage all of the staff that actually work there. And then we schedule and book the events of the schools through the system. So that’s a different use case for Field Service than what you might use.
Event Management Use Case with the Quality Teachers Academy
We did something similar for the Quality Teachers Academy, QTA, they’re an organisation that works with the University of Newcastle. And what we’ve done, there is a whole event management portal. They go into schools and do upskilling of teachers and in the school system to try and get better skilled teachers. They have teams that go around.
We did a whole event management using Dynamics Marketing and event management, and having an event booking portal where the schools can go in and book their own events, and they get certain credit.
They get a certain number of free events per year if they register. So, we’ve managed to some unique use case out of event management that’s not quite the same as what Microsoft would traditionally be using the Microsoft Dynamics Marketing for.
How to reduce license costs for volunteers
Tammy Ven Dange I’m curious, one of the major issues a lot of charities and Not for Profits have is around volunteers needing access to parts of the system? Do you have a solution that can reduce the number of licenses you actually require for volunteers?
Patrick Northcott Yes, so Microsoft’s got a very cost effective program. What I mentioned before is that they have now what they call Power Apps. Power Apps actually, is Dynamics. There’s really nothing different about Power Apps and Dynamics, what they’ve taken as the underlying engine, and they pulled that out.
The Power App license in the Not for Profit space is between $3 and $4 per user per month, which is really cheap compared to the $130-$140 from a commercial perspective. So, we’ve taken the core and then the functionality that you need out of Dynamics. And we built a specific app in Power Apps, which can be used for volunteer management and for the type of work that volunteers need to do.
So, you can allocate them specifically what they need to do in that app. And that’s a very, very cost effective way of Not for Profits running.
Tammy Ven Dange All right, Patrick, is there anything you’d like to share about what you guys are working on now? Or are some things in the roadmap that you’re excited about?
Digital Transformation in the Baptist Association
Patrick Northcott Yeah, so I think digital transformation in organisations. We have quite a lot of Not for Profits. One of the recent ones is the Baptist Association. Working with associations, they have slightly different requirements to the child sponsorship, Not for Profit.
Around that association management, membership management, the renewal cycle of members and things like that. In Baptist Association, specifically, all the churches are member bodies of that association. And there’s a lot of sensitive information that might be flowing backwards and forwards between the churches and the association.
So, we built using the Dynamic Security Model, a really good security system so that that information is protected and only available to the people who actually should be seeing it. The current project we’ve just gone live with. We’ve actually quite proud of that. We did a case study with Rhipe and Microsoft on our implementation there, and it’s just been launched onto the Microsoft website.
Tammy Ven Dange Well, make sure we put a link in the show notes so people can actually find it.
Patrick Northcott Thank you. We’re really passionate about helping organisations not performance, achieving more, so anyone we can work with, we’re keen on it.
How to find out more about Ecleva – a Microsoft Business Application Solution Partner
Tammy Ven Dange If people want to know more about you or the company, where’s the best place to send them?
Patrick Northcott Our website, ecleva.com. You can reach out to myself or I have business development managers in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. We don’t do much in Perth, but I’m heading out there on Saturday to see what we can bring there.
Tammy Ven Dange Right. Patrick, thank you for your time and thank you for telling us more about Ecleva.
Patrick Northcott Thanks a lot. Tammy. It’s been great talking to you.