Easily done for SMARTCRM: Connecting to proALPHA in the data center

The LENZEN Group:

• System provider for strapping technology

SMARTCRM at LENZEN Group:

• CRM introduction
• 50 licenses
• Use in field and office sales, marketing, service, management

Requirements and goals:

• Standard interface to proALPHA operated in the data center
• Up-to-date analyses of the ERP system at the press of a button
• Mapping of the international locations as clients
• Optimal field integration even without Internet
• Tour and route planning in the CRM

The LENZEN Group has decided to implement our CRM solution. From now on, SMARTCRM supports the employees company-wide in sales, service, marketing and management.

The company manufactures all components necessary for strapping technology in three production facilities in Germany. These include hand tools, strapping aggregates and entire systems, plastic and steel straps as well as an extensive range of accessories. In addition, the LENZEN Group offers services related to training, maintenance and repair.

Improving the sales force integration is an important goal that the LENZEN Group is pursuing with the CRM introduction. With the implementation of SMARTCRM, processes are to be optimized and made more efficient. Indeed, all customer-related information is available there, centrally bundled in the electronic customer file. This includes not only the address and contact data, but also the complete activity history with visit reports, telephone calls and e-mails automatically imported from Microsoft Outlook. This ensures a 360° view of the customer.

SMARTCRM also impressed with the ERP connection. The LENZEN Group uses the ERP solution proALPHA. However, this is not operated directly in-house, but in a data center. This was absolutely no issue for us. With a test installation, the LENZEN Group could realize that our standard interface to proALPHA – taking into account individual company requirements – could be set up in an uncomplicated way. In the future, SMARTCRM will transfer addresses, products, product groups, sales and order backlog items as well as open items from proALPHA and evaluate them on different levels. For example, executives and sales management can call up the current sales development at company level or view sold products per customer at any time. Trends and changes can be identified at an early stage and potential that has not yet been exploited can be easily uncovered.

In a near future, all this information will also be available to field staff outside the office, regardless of whether an Internet connection is available or not. Employees can access the entire CRM database offline via their notebooks. The LENZEN Group can access SMARTCRM using their smartphones and tablets with Android or iOS operating systems – via online access using the app or browser.

SMARTCRM will also support the sales force in planning their tours, e.g. with the simple assignment of addresses to tours as well as the automatic creation of appointments and activities per tour. In addition, prospects and customers within a certain radius can be conveniently filtered. Employees can transfer all addresses to Bing Maps with just a click in order to visualize them and plan routes.

The LENZEN Group has several sales offices worldwide, which should also access SMARTCRM. These are mapped as clients and work with an English interface in SMARTCRM. The multi-client capability of our CRM system ensures that the international employees have access only to addresses and additional information they need for their work.

In a second step, the LENZEN Group will connect the service department to SMARTCRM. On the one hand, all purchased systems will be documented in the CRM system, including their technical data, the corresponding location and much more. This important information is then available to the service staff on their notebooks or smartphones during maintenance or repair work at customers’. On the other hand, tickets should be documented from the request to the solution and linked to the affected system and to the customer. In this way, all tickets remain traceable even in retrospect and can be evaluated, for example, according to error frequency or runtime.

Furthermore, SMARTCRM should support project management as well as quotation follow-up by bundling all important information in a project file: involved contact persons, activity histories, the quotations imported from proALPHA as well as follow-up tasks.

In the second step, the LENZEN Group is also planning to connect proALPHA DMS to SMARTCRM. With the help of the standard interface, documents in the CRM system could then be transferred to the document management system with a click, or files already archived there could be opened directly in SMARTCRM.