Since 2011, the sales department of DIENES has been working with SMARTCRM. The company chose to implement SMARTCRM in order to centrally organize and archive the complete internal and external communication. Another goal was the creation of a unique information platform, which also allows the marketing direct access to all address and contact data. Additionally, to optimize the sales processes, the major sales indicators – such as the customers, the sales territories and the product groups for the company- should be available at all times.
Requirements
- Central information management
- Field service connection with offline functionality
- Extensive sales analyses
- Bidirectional Interface to abas Business Software
SMARTCRM scorces with the abas standard interface
The cutting tools manufacturer uses abas Business Suite as ERP system. As a longtime cooperation partner of the abas Software AG, SMARTCRM was able to offer DIENES a standard interface to the ERP system with extremely low configuration work. The bidirectional interface allows a central data management. Customer, product, quotations as well as figures material are imported from abas ERP. The CRM software transfers, in turns, prospective customers, customers, contacts as well as orders to the ERP system. Additionally, SMARTCRM impressed during the decision process with its structured design and its higher usability.
Project goals
- Central organization and archiving of the complete internal and external communication
- Creation of a unique information platform
- Direct access to all address and contact data from the marketing employees
- Optimized sales controlling
Strong in field service and back office
SMARTCRM supports sustainably DIENES in controlling sales. Before visiting a customer, the CRM system ensures a thorough preparation by providing the employees all important customer information, such as a complete activity history or the current customer turnover. Using the offline capability of SMARTCRM, the field service team has also access at customers’, with his notebook to the complete CRM database. After the visit, the employees write their reports in the CRM system and send the related tasks to the competent colleagues.
At trade fairs, leads and reports are also added in SMARTCRM and follow-up activities such as sending of information material automatically created. Currently, the offers are still created in abas ERP and stored in the respective project files with the automated transfer to SMARTCRM. This is used for prioritized projects orders as central archive of the complete customer correspondence. In the near future though, DIENES plans to carry out its quotation tracking completely using the CRM system, as the project interface to abas ERP will be accordingly extended.
Evaluations “at your fingertips”
The interface simplifies sustainably the generation of reports for the employees. SMARTCRM imports from abas ERP the current figures such as sales, orders, order backlog, open items and special prices and provides them to DIENES. So, the company benefits from, for example, the product group evaluations or cumulative turnover evaluations of all the customers belonging to one group. Annual and daily target-performance comparisons help detecting early changes. This also applies to the sales targets, since SMARTCRM shows the employees at any time their actual target achievement. In addition, the evaluation of all opened quotation is possible. A filter limits, if necessary, the selection to the quotations of a given account manager, for instance. The most important evaluations can be found on the SMART Board, the CRM start screen. Thus, the relevant employees are informed about current incoming orders or sales figures for individual product groups, right after the start, and can act accordingly.
Customer actions reach the right recipient
The marketing uses also the diverse functions of the CRM system to inform customers about product innovations, for instance. Extensive selections options provide a targeted dispatch of mailings and the significant reduction of spreading losses.
Conclusion
Before the implementation of SMARTCRM, the sales representatives at Dienes worked with various Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, Access databases and various software products such as address database systems. SMARTCRM led all information centrally in one system and thus optimized numerous sales processes. So, the acceptance of the CRM system is very high among the sales staff.
After the positive experience with SMARTCRM in the sales department, Dienes soon plans to expand the CRM utilization to the shipping department and technical department to centrally store and fully document all customer communication of these departments.
Our employees were very quickly convinced by SMARTCRM and from the advantages of the CRM system in their daily work. This makes the active use of the software clear: we record on average 100 to 200 activities a day in SMARTCRM.
Alexander Hachen, Sales and customer care manager at Dienes Werke for Maschinenteile GmbH & Co. KG