Technology - Altai Systems

Think about this: The average association integrates between 8-10 third-party applications, which is costly and hard to manage. The Microsoft Power Automate platform allows us to connect to almost any system with no or minimal code.

Altai Systems’ AMS has been successfully providing solutions to associations for more than a decade and has been a true cloud solution built entirely within the Office 365 cloud for seven years, longer than any other Dynamics CRM vendor.

Compare that with how other Dynamics CRM vendors market their add-ons, their solutions are pushed into unspecified clouds. In addition, Altai has no off-standing priority SQL processing or any other processes that are not native to Dynamics 365. Why is that important? Because the more systems you add, the more proprietary you become.

Built Within Dynamics

Altai Systems’ AMS is a non-proprietary solution using the Microsoft PowerApp platform. What does that mean to you? That there’s no overhead interface or architecture to hold you back or make you accountable to Altai professional services.

It also means your association can maximize our platform’s use and extend and scale quickly or slowly based on your needs.

We’ve seen the effects a heavy dependence on proprietary frameworks has on associations. We know this dependence drives customizations that make platforms unmanageable and drives the total cost of ownership beyond what is reasonable and sustainable.

Proprietary frameworks:

Make you beholden to the vendor and their solution
Negate the benefit of an open platform when you want to extend the system
Add a complex layer between your systems’ upgrades, support & performance.

99.9 Uptime Guarantee

Microsoft delivers high availability 24/7/365 for all of its services. 99.9% uptime means self-healing networks, automatic failover, and robust security policies and compliance.

Microsoft SLA’s provide credits for outages past 99.9%. Other vendors are hard-pressed to guarantee uptime because of their dependence on subcontractors to host and deliver their services.

We have not seen Microsoft down for more than 2 hours in our 7-year history on the platform. We have not seen ANY downtime in the last year. But what is behind the curtain?

System changes. Microsoft delivers changes to the systems during off-hours so if there is an issue it is discovered during non-typical work hours.
Microsoft does not make changes to data centers at the same time. They stagger updates.
Your system is in multiple data centers. If one has an issue, you are switched automatically to another data center and you will not know, i.e. there is no switch over or blip, it’s all immediate.
All systems are geographically separate. If California slides into the sea, your data is on the east coast.
Security….

Automatic Updates

You will love this! You’re probably paying a premium for upgrades but haven’t taken advantage of them yourself. The vendor is likely charging you a hefty price tag for developers to upgrade your highly customized AMS, plus you may even be using an even pricier third-party professional services company.

Microsoft employees work every day to improve the platform and bring innovation. Office 365, Azure, The Power Platform are continuously improved. You’ll notice new features, and we’ll bring the capabilities that benefit your association as soon as they are released.

Microsoft releases two major CRM and PowerApp platform releases per year. Altai releases our features quarterly, but we package our updates to match the Microsoft Cycle.

Each April and October, you will get a notice that you need to accept and schedule your upgrade within the next three months. The updates happen during non-business hours. We have clients that simply allow the upgrades, and we have clients that want to run tests first. You can click one button, and your production data will push to a “sandbox” where you can test everything before accepting the upgrade. In two or three years, we have not seen an upgrade break the system.

Azure

Roughly 95% of Fortune 500 companies rely on Azure to power their business. Think of it as an on-demand infrastructure for your association. It has all the services you need to run your business today but gives you the future-proofing your association needs to grow in ways you haven’t thought about yet.

Azure is an ever-expanding set of cloud services designed to fit your organization instead of the other way around. Azure provides you with cloud services that are easy to deploy, always secure state of the art, and that works. Think of Azure as a utility company, use as little or as much as you need and only pay for what you use.

Azure contains hundreds of services that fall into any number of buckets: AI, analytics, data, identity, media, web, storage, networking, mobile, development, integration, governance, and so on.

Reporting and Analytics

There are many ways to get meaningful data out of the Altai Platform for improved business decisions.

PowerBI allows you to get meaningful data from your AMS, your website, your financial systems, your community, and over 200 other sources.
Customer Insights allows you to use AI to capture data from the AMS and layer it with data from the web, outlook and other sources to prediction “churn” or “non-renewals”
You can use Excel to dynamically create reports from CRM that refresh the data in the spreadsheet. We deliver all of our accounting reports with export to Excel options.
You can create any report as XML. These reports can be used for invoice’s, statements and your typical legacy reports
You can create transactional invoices and receipts in HTML so members can be emailed “click and pay” objects that are delivered in email or on the web.
Any data can be summarized in system dashboards.
Any data in the system can be viewed in a window as a drill-down list of data. You can add and remove columns and set up your favorite views so that your day is automated
Artificial Intelligence (AI) can review your CRM data, your opportunity data, and your email and create lists of virtual data that helps you organize your day.

Altai Performance Implementation

Altai Systems has been successfully delivering the Microsoft Dynamics platform to associations since 2006. We’ve implemented large enterprise solutions (400 plus users) as well as 5-user systems. We’ve refined our implementation approach and have developed implementation as a product through a controlled cost, rapidly implemented solution created to meet all your core association management needs.

We call this our “Altai Performance Automation Implementation” and what makes it different is:

1. The installation of our solution is script-based, so it is complete in an hour, not days.

2. We provide a set of standard questions that our clients fill out and this leads to the initial setup of the system.

3. We’ve developed data import templates that are used for data migration. This significantly reduces the amount of time associated with data migration and there is auditing built in to ensure accurate data.

4. On larger projects, we look to follow a phased implementation approach where we bring aspects of the system up in an agile fashion and get our clients using the system as part of the implementation.

The benefits our client’s see include:

Faster implementation time. We can bring a new system up in under 8 weeks.
Reduced cost for implementation as we’ve automated a number of tasks.
Upgrades are also automated reducing the time associated with this work.
Our phased implementation approach leads to quicker user adaption, early “wins” and a less stressful go-live as the users have been in the system and have been using it. This is also a much less risky approach as our clients have been involved during the entire implementation, know the system, and avoids some of the pitfalls associated with a Waterfall / Big-Bang approach to go-live.

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Altai Enterprise Implementation

The Altai Enterprise implementation methodology is based on the Agile approach. It’s an accelerated project implementation focusing on the key strategic and tactical areas that must be addressed to minimize both Altai Systems consulting investment and our client’s business risk while facilitating successful delivery and completion of our client’s solution. The Altai Systems implementation is comprised of processes and activities logically grouped into four distinct phases, which Altai Systems believes will make it easier to provide management and control during the lifecycle of a project.

The Altai Systems Implementation methodology has also been optimized to eliminate the traditional project lifecycle model in which one phase cannot start before the previous stage is completed. Instead, the Altai Systems project approach allows project phases and processes to begin before the previous ones are complete as long as a pre-review shows that all required steps have been taken and inputs are available.

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Built Within Dynamics

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99.9 Uptime Guarantee

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Automatic Updates

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Azure

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Reporting and Analytics

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Altai Performance Implementation

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Altai Enterprise Implementation

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