STOPA Anlagenbau GmbH

Since 2011, SMARTCRM has been supporting STOPA sales employees. The goal of the CRM implementation was the central management of all customer information in a system and the possible access to the needed data at any time. In addition, the CRM system should have brought a greater transparency in project business. Another important criterion was to provide many and varied analysis options in the CRM software, for instance, for creating forecast evaluations.

SMARTCRM stands up with abas Interface
SMARTCRM’s great interface competence was, among others, a key argument in the decision of the plant engineering enterprise. Indeed, in addition to SMARTCRM, STOPA uses the ERP system abas Business Suite. As a long-time partner of the abas Software AG, the CRM manufacturer could provide a bidirectional standard interface between SMARTCRM and abas ERP.

Long-term Support in Project Business
In order to guarantee efficient sales management, SMARTCRM optimized, among others, the project business of the plant engineering company. Thanks to the documentation of all activities belonging to the project, the sales staff keeps track of the current state of the project at all times and is informed about the full communication with the customer or the prospective customer. A major advantage for the employees in case of substitution: time-consuming handing over before vacations and the tedious work of collecting the necessary information in case of sick leave belong to the past. SMARTCRM rapidly brings the substitute up to date regarding agreements and upcoming tasks. Before the CRM implementation, an employee had no direct access to the locally stored e-mail communication between colleague and customers, now he always has the customer and project file in SMARTCRM along with the complete activity history with e-mails, documents and further information. Since STOPA manages customer and supplier addresses as well as invoices in the CRM System, these will be linked using the relationship function in SMARTCRM. A single click shows which addresses in what way are interrelated.

Complete Quotation Tracking in the CRM System
All quotations created by the sales staff are archived in the corresponding project file. So that a complete quotation tracking is guaranteed and the project flow stays transparent at all times.

Extensive Evaluations of the Figures
SMARTCRM imports the current figures from the ERP system and evaluates them in detail on different levels. The time-consuming preparation of analyses belongs to the past. Today, the evaluations are accessible to the employees at the press of a button in the CRM system. SMARTCRM provides two additional evaluations designed to meet the needs of STOPA: one analysis shows the pure sales figures and in the other analysis, the CRM system includes the payments of outstanding invoices in the calculation. These and many more standard analyses, for instance the turnover per customer or sales territory as well as the yearly comparisons, allow STOPA a sound planning and control of the sales processes.

Conclusion
At first, a certain skepticism prevailed amongst the employees of STOPA regarding the implementation of a CRM system in the company, after a short time of use, the advantages of SMARTCRM were convincing. In the near future, the company plans to use SMARTCRM for marketing campaigns. Using the many filter options and the freely definable features for addresses and contacts, the marketing staff can define targeted selections of recipients and to limit the waste. In addition, the plant engineering enterprise wants to expand the sales functionalities in SMARTCRM. So, SMARTCRM will provide STOPA with specific evaluation possibilities – also in form of charts – in the CRM system.