Background

We are a $250M subsidiary of a $11B Japanese conglomerate that designs, develops, manufactures and distributes electrical construction materials, home appliances, residential building materials, automation control products, wiring devices and electronic materials through an infrastructure consisting of 47,000 employees, 63 manufacturing sites, 14 R&D locations and a global sales/service network consisting of 200 locations. We have a direct sales and marketing team of 30 people and sell through 17 rep companies in 24 rep locations and another 11 authorized distributors in the U.S and 3 independent distributors in Canada.

Situation before NEHANET

We use an ERP/MRP system from Oracle for resource planning but were using Excel spreadsheets to keep track of opportunity and forecast information before switching to NEHANET. Our challenge was to bring about a visibility into the activities that were happening in the team. It was not such a simple task, since the information had to be collected from different reps to regional managers and from people higher up in hierarchy, the excel documents involved used to get obsolete in no time. We didn’t have a real time visibility into the opportunity and did not have a status of the current stage and how to focus our efforts to move to the next stage. We were not sure of by when would the opportunity would come to close and by when to expect revenues from it.

Communicating this information seemed to be something that required a lot of time to manage and it required our sales people to spend 2-3 days at the end of each month (the reporting period) trying to collate the information into the given format.

Once we got the information, it was very hard to summarize this information for sharing it with our parent company in Japan. In addition to the time spent in doing this we found that the data at times was not worth the effort because of the different formats and nomenclatures used by different sales teams. This was despite our efforts to simplify and standardize the spreadsheet templates.

It was a very cumbersome and a tedious job for the team to manage the actual backlog and forecast data in the excel sheets since we were tracking the order from the point when it was going in for booking till it was shipped.

In the absence of a CRM system, a practice that was seemingly prevalent in the organisation was that employees were using different systems from ACT to Outlook to keep track of their customer and contact information. So, if one of our direct sales people left the organisation then we were ill equipped to transfer the existing accounts, opportunities, contacts and action information to the new joinee.

Benefits realized with NEHANET

In order for us to be successful in the competitive market, we really needed a integrated communications tool, where at the grassroots level there was an immediate identification of the opportunity, identification of who had the next action item and a focused method to drive closer to the action item.

NEHANET’s system allows multiple people from sales, marketing, applications engineering, reps and distributors to work on a opportunity simultaneously. Marketing, sales, operations, planning etc can all get access to different updated data and reports as and when it happens.

It allows us to create very simply the data and reports that our parent company requires from us on an ongoing basis.

Quote

“We needed a unified communications tool in order to be successful in the competitive market”

VP and GM

Products Used and Specific Benefits