When construction industry giant' Concor Technicrete' needed to manage increasing local demand, it looked to customised Microsoft CRM, delivered on a mobile platform.
Concor Technicrete specialises in the production of concrete products for the mining and construction industries. The division also conducts product development and specialist contracting projects for mining and commercial clients.
The situation
South Africa is experiencing huge growth in the construction industry. Companies within this sector are under increasing pressure to keep up with local demand and ensure maximum revenues are achieved from this growth.
In an effort to improve services to Concor Technicrete clients, and effectively position the company to take advantage of the industry boom, the company identified the need to implement a customer relationship management (CRM) solution. Given that the Concor sales team is mobile and often in remote regions, it was imperative that this solution would enable the team to generate quotes from the customers' sites and provide the manufacturing arm with tools to effectively plan for orders.
The solution also had to:
* Provide a common platform where all customer and prospect information can be captured, stored and retrieved for analysis.
* Ensure the sales team is able to collect leads routed to them, track prospects from initiation to sale and maintain information about existing customer relationships.
* Ensure consistent execution of a sales methodology by applying workflow.
* Provide accurate sales reporting and forecasting.
* Allow management to manage the sales teams' activities and have access to their customers' information.
* Enable the sales team to view customers' credit or account information from within Microsoft CRM.
* Integrate with JD Edwards to ensure quotes generated from CRM take into account stock availability and delivery.
* Allow for case management.
Sales people in the field also needed the proposed CRM client to allow them to:
* View, edit, and delete accounts, contacts, activities and opportunities.
* Open and close sales opportunities.
* Capture information and initiate quotations to customers off the CRM server.
The solution
IS Partners, Concor Technicrete's IT partner, suggested a Microsoft CRM 3.0 solution. For the first set of system requirements, IS Partners suggested the MS CRM system be configured for customised contact management, sales force automation and case management. Customers' contact information, entered primarily by the sales team and used by both sales staff and managers, would be captured on MS CRM.
As part of the sales force automation, a sales process for Concor Technicrete was also incorporated, comprising qualification, action and follow-up. Quotes are captured in MS CRM and then sent to JD Edwards, which generates a quote number and sends the quote out via email or fax. The quote number is returned to MS CRM. The South African Rand is the only currency used in Concor's CRM solution.
Basic complaint management ensures that queries and service-related issues are captured against a customer and assigned to a responsible person. Businesses, business units and products are taken on from JD Edwards. Product pricelists and contacts are obtained from each of the areas, and populated into Excel templates, for data take-on. These templates are provided by IS Partners and populated by Concor Technicrete.
The results
Microsoft CRM Mobility is a thin-client version of Microsoft CRM that is limited to providing the core functionality required by sales people on the road. Product and pricelist maintenance is not viewable or editable within the mobility client. IS Partners therefore customised the Opportunity Entity for Concor Technicrete's sales people to capture quote information, thus generating quotes directly off pocket PCs.
This required manual selection of the branch plant, entry of an item number (for each product), quantity, transport costs and an option to generate a quote. Product price and total price is calculated on synchronisation with the MS CRM server (this may require multiple synchronisations before it is reflected on the mobile device).
Manufacturing also benefits from this customised version of Microsoft CRM, which allows orders loaded on the JD Edwards system to be adequately planned for.
Share