Great Lakes Power Case Study
Project at a Glance
About Great Lakes Power Products:
With proven excellence in the distribution, custom manufacturing, and repair of internal combustion engine parts used in marine and industrial applications, Great Lakes Power Products (GLP) has 14 sales and repair centers throughout the eastern United States. With over 22,000 separate clients to support, having a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System is a critical tool in facilitating Great Lakes Power’s success and growth.
Industry:
Service Delivered:
ERP Consulting
ERP Implementation
ERP Custom Development
Location:
The Challenge:
The company had a 20-year-long history of CRM Systems that failed to achieve their desired goals. In some cases, the CRM’s features were not a good fit for the company’s business processes. Their prior CRM systems were also cumbersome for the sales and management teams to use consistently, so enthusiasm and participation decreased over time.
About The Visionary:
Adatasol was approached by the company’s VP of Sales to implement a new CRM solution that is “simple, clean, and easy to use”.
The Vision:
The vision of the VP of Sales was to create a customized CRM solution that would answer all the company needs with the goal being broad participation by both the sales team and management
Solution
Adatasol’s Solution:
The CRM system created and deployed by Adatasol created efficiencies for Great Lakes Power Systems. It significantly reduced company overhead and freed over 80% of valuable management staff time, which could be applied toward other important activities, including business growth.
Services We Delivered for Great Lakes Power
This project required Adatasol to succeed where previous CRM implementations had failed — delivering a system that was simple enough for consistent daily use by a distributed sales team across 14 locations, while providing management with the visibility they needed.
ERP Consulting
We worked with the VP of Sales to understand why previous CRM systems had failed to gain adoption identifying feature bloat, poor workflow fit, and cumbersome interfaces as primary causes. We then designed a CRM architecture focused on the VP's requirement for a system that was "simple, clean, and easy to use.
Custom Development
Our team built a customized CRM solution tailored to GLP's specific sales processes covering customer relationship tracking across 22,000+ clients, sales activity management, pipeline visibility for managers, and streamlined reporting that eliminated the manual overhead of previous systems.
Implementation
We deployed the CRM across all 14 sales and repair centers, managing user setup, data migration from previous systems, sales team training, and management dashboard configuration. The focus throughout was ensuring the system was easy enough that sales team participation remained high long-term.
ERP and CRM for Manufacturing Companies
Great Lakes Power's 20-year history of CRM failures is a pattern Adatasol sees frequently in manufacturing and distribution businesses. CRM systems fail not because of technology limitations but because of poor fit between the system's complexity and the team's daily workflow. A successful CRM deployment requires deep understanding of how sales and management teams actually work — and the discipline to keep the system focused on what matters.
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