New Anglia Growth Hub

The Growth Hub team, set up by Suffolk Chamber on behalf of the Local Enterprise Agency, aimed to support all businesses in Suffolk and Norfolk (around 30,000 in Suffolk and 34,000 in Norfolk). To do this they needed to monitor contact, potential leads and then the detail on what was delivered. In short, a CRM system that gave them considerable control and flexibility.

Free Rein had been using SuiteCRM to manage their own client contact as well as that for the Events Finder projects for the English and Welsh Government. SuiteCRM at the time offered an open source, self-hosting solution closely matching the functionality of Microsoft Dynamics at a tenth of the cost.

Initially set up by Free Rein, the ability to add fields and new modules was extended to the Growth Hub senior management and supported by Free Rein's custom reports.

Running from 2014, the solution was hosted on Free Rein's secure main hosting and Free Rein initially just supported the Growth Hub Manager in building a suitable system with reports and workflows. In 2016, Free Rein took greater responsibility for the system, managing all system administration work and extending the data schema and views for specific EU and BEIS requirements.