SMARTCRM convinces with abas interface and satisfied customers

AZ Armaturen GmbH:

• Manufacturer of industrial valves and accessories 

SMARTCRM at AZ Armaturen:

• 24 licenses
• In use in sales field and back office

Requirements and project goals: 

• Standard interface to abas ERP
• Extensive sales analyses
• Mapping of group hierarchies and relationships
• Field staff integration with offline access

In the future, SMARTCRM will support the field and office staff in the sales department of the AZ Armaturen GmbH.
The family-owned company, founded in 1963 and with headquarters in Mönchweiler, Germany, manufactures industrial valves and accessories with around 500 employees in four plants and one foundry.

AZ Armaturen has already been using the ERP system abas. For this reason, the goal was to introduce a CRM solution that can be easily implemented and linked to abas ERP. For more than two decades, we have been a cooperation partner of the abas Software GmbH and can fall back on extensive ERP know-how. In addition, we offer a standard interface to abas ERP which can be set up with low effort but which can be adapted to the individual requirements of the customer. With this expertise, we scored at AZ Armaturen GmbH during the decision-making process. Moreover, the company was convinced by the positive feedback from some of our customers following direct discussions.

SMARTCRM will import among others addresses, contacts as well as figures such as turnover, and orders on hand items such as open items over a bi-directional interface to abas ERP. In the opposite direction, our CRM solution will transfer addresses as well as contacts to the ERP system.

Our CRM software analyzes the imported ERP figures at different levels, such as per customer or product and provides the employee with the evaluations at the press of the mouse. The mapping of hierarchies and relationships was an important CRM requirement of the company. Many of their customers are large corporations with several subsidiaries. SMARTCRM not only allows such multi-level hierarchies to be clearly depicted but the analyses can also be called up both at group level or for the individual company. This means that in the future, AZ Armaturen will be able to visualize at any time which products are purchased by the group or by the subsidiary or which product have not yet been purchased.

The field staff will also benefit from the central bundling of all customer-related information. Before the CRM introduction, they only had access online to the company network. Without Internet connection or when archiving data locally, they were denied access to important information. This will change with SMARTCRM. Since the field staff can now access the entire CRM database offline and thus access it at any time and from anywhere via their notebooks. Once an Internet connection is available again, the newly created data such as visit reports or appointments are synchronized with the main installation. Received e-mails are automatically imported from Microsoft Outlook into the corresponding CRM customer file and are thus also promptly available to other colleagues. Time and effort required to obtain information is thus significantly reduced for all sales employees.

Alternatively, the sales team can access SMARTCRM using the SMARTCRM.App on their smartphones or tablets for iOS and Android and for instance they can make use of the convenient voice input function to document visit reports.

Our CRM solution supports AZ Armaturen in planning visits as well. Due to the integrated area search, the appropriate customers located in the vicinity of an address can be easily found. They can be visualized with a click in Bing Maps and the optimal route can be planned.