With Y2K looming in 1999, CRM took a backseat to replacing legacyback-office systems. The company did, however, have to pick softwarefor the tech service help desk - and did so with CRM in mind, says JohnFottrell, vice president of IS. Upon evaluating several products, hesays, AMF chose Applix on the basis of its strong help desk functions,strong CRM functions (the ability to keep track of contacts, maintaindetailed customer profiles and manage quotes) and its capacity formultilingual, multicurrency support.

Once the legacy systems were replaced, Walker pressed for a CRMinitiative and won the go-ahead to invest $325,000 on the SFA project.From the beginning, it was not an IT project but a businessinitiative, says Fottrell, who points to Walker's active involvementas critical to the system's success. Walker had watched a previousemployer waste $1 million developing a CRM system that users hatedbecause the project was driven by what management and IT liked ratherthan what users wanted. To avoid that trap - and to address theskepticism of veterans of the ill-fated Notes system - Walker andFottrell involved sales reps from the start. In October 2000, theyconvened a kickoff meeting, which included six sales reps, SystemsArchitect Harsha Nagaraj and an Applix project manager. Walker set thetone by making it clear that it was the reps' opinions that countedmost.

Reps were encouraged to be frank about what they hated about previoussystems and what they wanted from the new one - and they didn't alwaysagree. "We grunted it out for an entire afternoon - after which I wassure we were not going to be successful," says Fottrell. "It shockedme that they didn't have consensus about what they wanted."

During three or four sessions, the reps, with the help of IT, hammeredout specs for the system and gave feedback on rough prototypes. Andthe reps themselves came up with the idea to use PDAs; putting Applixon Palm devices would let them collect customer data in the bowlingcenters easily and discreetly.

But using the Palm meant overcoming some technical hurdles (such asgetting the data to sync with headquarters) and upgrading to thePalm-enabled version of Applix. The system is also limited by thesmaller screen size, the amount of information that a Palm can holdand the need to minimize sync time.