Building Industrial Engagement and Income: Digital Systems

Project overview

This Digital Systems project is part of the Building Industrial Engagement and Income Transformational Initiative and had two key objectives: 

• To implement the customer relationship management (CRM) tool Salesforce, within teams in Research, Innovation and Knowledge Exchange (RIKE) in order to streamline processes, improve communication, and build profitable relationships with external organisations and partners. 
• To replace the current training course management tool, Administrate, with a new solution which can support the University’s selected payment provider. 

Salesforce is the University’s chosen customer relationship management tool (CRM), its implementation within teams in RIKE replaced  manual methods (Google Sheets, email inboxes) of tracking communication with external partners.

This project also created a CRM solution blueprint and standardised set of processes which will be extended to other areas in RIKE through the BIEI Transformation Initiative.

Finally, the course management tool being used across the department was replaced to another product which is compatible with the University’s preferred payment provider, WPM.

When?

Salesforce was implemented across four teams within RIKE in Spring 2025.

If you are part of RIKE and interested in adopting Salesforce in the future, please reach out to clare.murgatroyd@york.ac.uk

Where?

This project implemented Salesforce CRM to the following areas within RIKE: 

• Business Development Team 
• Research and Innovation Development Team (RID)
• Consultancy 
• Institute for Safe Autonomy

Why?

Previously we were using manual processes such as monitoring shared inboxes and completing Google spreadsheets to track our communication with external partners. This approach limited our overall visibility of the external organisations we are working with at both a team and institutional level. By implementing Salesforce teams can now more effectively capture, share and collaborate on information. Using Salesforce reporting functionality also enables us to monitor our industrial engagement and identify opportunities for improvement.

Our replacement training course tool being implemented with the University’s payment provider removes the need for manual re-keying of information between two systems.

Benefits

Benefits of this project include:

• more efficient processes reduce administrative overheads, enabling staff to devote their time to higher value activities.
• slicker processes improve how we interact with our current and future external partners, which in turn will result in more profitable relationships.
• closer collaboration and sharing of information between internal teams.
• a new standard for how external partnerships are managed at the University.
• negates the need to manually input information into our course training tool and the University’s payment provider system.