Company: Navantis
City: Toronto
Province: Ontario
Provide a brief description of the Solution, Service Provided, or Initiative.
One of the largest chemical distributors in North America, The client needed help modernizing an aging CRM solution. In order to improve efficiencies, reduce repetitive work, consolidate data and create dynamic business intelligence, The client needed a partner who could provide excellence in business strategy and processing along with superior skills implementing complex technologies and data migration. The client elected Navantis to navigate multiple and distinct lines of business, understand complex processes and eradicate duplicate data residing throughout the organization. The client is a charter member of the Canadian Association of Chemical Distributors and the leading specialty chemical distributor in Canada. They boast a proud history of providing premium quality chemical products and keen market intelligence with an enviable service ethic to brand name clients in food, plastics, adhesives and the oil industry. For the past four years, The client has been named one of the Best Places to Work in Canada – a testament to remaining true to their founding principles of integrity, honour, trust and respect. The client was running several distinct aging Lotus Notes solutions that had been highly customized and developed for individual lines of business (LOBs) in disparate databases. No longer supported and with valuable client data contained in several places across the organization, staff were often required to enter the same data several times. Finding information was even harder. This meant ineffective processes, lost productivity, employee frustration and difficulty obtaining reliable business insight. The client began the process of understanding the effort to migrate their Lotus Notes environment into a more agile, flexible and current CRM solution. They quickly realized that to get this project right, they needed to complete an in-depth requirements gathering that would address the many LOBs along with an extensive plan for data migration, training, and continuous support. Achieving stakeholder consensus would also be a critical success factor and very challenging. “It’s my pleasure to recommend Mark Aucoin, Sales Technical Lead from Navantis. From the clients perspective, Mark’s contribution to the presales cycle was a key factor in us engaging them in the partnership. Mark displayed the unique ability of packaging together listening, observing, analyzing, assessing and solution mapping skills together with the product’s capabilities. He was also excellent at producing pointed and applicable demonstrations and solutions that we could see would benefit our business. Mark clearly understands the technology behind CRM and this enabled him to speak confidently, clearly and concisely on which technical functions could marry with our business functions. Mark was also an extremely responsive, professional and “can-do” type of representative that ensured timely and pertinent communication throughout the process. The Navantis proposal team was excellent and Mark was clearly a big part of their offering. The client After reviewing other CRM solutions and solution providers, The client selected Navantis to deliver a state-of-the art CRM solution built on Microsoft Dynamics CRM. A solution built specifically with future growth in mind. Certified CRM technology and business process experts at Navantis used their collaborative approach to understand the challenges, needs and goals that The client demanded to remain competitive and a leader in the industry. Using Dynamics CRM as the platform, Navantis addressed the unique elements required within each line of business. Ultimately, allowing The client to finally reach the “one record” mantra by combining all their data into a single integrated system. Navantis worked with The client through a series of live Proof of Concepts (POCs) during the process. POCs are important because they test that the rules, data migration, business logic and reporting requirements are sound prior to investing in a full-scale roll-out. Navantis helped the The client team understand how to work more efficiently with the technology which eased user concerns and assisted in the adoption process. As users became familiar with the system and its intuitive nature, it was trusted that the data was sound and this helped improve user adoption. Now that everything is connected in an efficient and consumable way, The client has new insight into their business that was not available before. Deeper knowledge of company and customer activities has enabled the business to make more informed decisions and forecast in a more efficient and reliable manner. “Navantis provided expert guidance and support throughout this complex project. With multiple lines of business affected, there was a need to be extremely detailed and thorough in addressing a vast array of what appeared to be sometimes competing goals. By ensuring all of the business was represented, clarifying goals and responsibilities along with building a consensus-driven culture, we were able to rapidly move from design to POC to roll-out in record-time. User adoption is high and our clients are reaping the benefits of our ability to serve them better.” The client
Describe what makes this Solution, Service Provided, or Initiative original or innovative.
This solution encompassed much more than technology changes, it included radical cultural and corporate changes as well. Prior to this solution being rolled out, all of the Lines of Business within The client operated independently as their own P and L centers. Data was decentralized and customer information was not shared across the enterprise. Each customer was profiled and managed separately by each Line of Business. Mapping out all of the existing business processes from the multiple point solutions and then creating a Master Overlay Business Process Map was extremely complex but a necessary element so that no critical steps that any one LOB relied on would be missed once the old solutions were replaced by the new single CRM. This project dissolved the walls between the Lines of Business and switched the internal thinking so that a customer would now be viewed across its entire relationship with The client. This meant massive changes to business process, internal team dynamics, customer ownership and cross-team collaboration. There was significant internal resistance to the shift in thinking and success required a technology partner who could manage the politics and cultural changes as well as the technology challenges. In addition to replacing several customized point solutions sitting on Lotus Notes, the project required tight integration to the AS400 system running the The client ERP so that client financials could also be accessed seamlessly through executive dashboards or other interfaces. Navantis was honoured recently at the Microsoft World Partner Conference with a win for the best Pre-Sales Technical Specialist for his role with the The client engagement as well as a finalist (one of 3) for the The client CRM implementation. There were over 3,000 submissions from around the globe competing for these awards.
Describe the improvement this Solution, Service Provided, or Initiative made to the customer’s sales or revenues. What changed?
Provide evidence of measurable improvements in sales, revenues, cost reduction, etc.
The client has not publically released sales figures but has advised that revenues are improved because they have deeper insight into the customers’ needs overall. For example, a customer who has had a strong relationship and purchasing history in the speciality chemicals division can now be penetrated more successfully by other divisions such as plastics and adhesives because: • Sales teams have visibility across the entire purchase history of a customer • Account planning is now accomplished as cross-functional teams rather than in silos • Teams can leverage strong relationships that have been built in one LOB to successfully grow business with the customer in other LOBs.
Describe the improvement this Solution, Service Provided, or Initiative made to the customer’s efficiency. What changed?
Provide evidence of how customer efficiency was increased.
The client has realized: • Improved reporting and levels of intelligence about the business; • Eliminated redundant work processes; • Automated many manual processes; • Customized dashboards providing new perspectives and insights; • Changed its culture from a product perspective to a customer focused perspective. As a result The client has: • Reduced admin support and improved productivity by 25%; • Created a connected and real time view of the business; • Improved profitability through better management of time and data; • Improved revenues through deeper insight into customer needs; • Improved ability to plan and forecast for the future.
How did this Solution, Service provided, or Initiative improve the customer’s ability to serve its internal and/or external clients?
Provide evidence of the improvement.
The client has completed shifted from product-focussed to client-focussed with this technology roll-out. As described earlier, this means that a client is viewed across the entire relationship that it has with The client – not as a separate entity with each product group. This simplifies how a customer buys or services product from The client. With all customer data unified across multiple LOBs, it is much simpler for a client to get answers from the right people, have problems addressed quickly and work seamlessly with cross-departmental account teams who understand the full impact of the The client relationship with the customer.
In what ways does this Solution or Service Provided go above and beyond industry norms and expectations?
User buy-in is a critical component of any new technology project. This project was exceptionally unique in that IT was driving corporate change across multiple lines of business. Each LOB was controlled by a Senior Vice President so buy-in across all of the product teams at senior levels was critical. Competing agendas and shifting of control meant that each member of the executive team had to be assured that their ability to influence and manage their business units would not be impacted. This required senior resources who understood business strategy, business process re-engineering as well as the subtleties of the undocumented power-bases and politics within the client environment. The ability to guide senior leadership teams to reach consensus throughout the life-cycle of this project was a critical factor in project success.
How does this solution further your customer’s green or environmentally friendly plans?
The client founder, was an avid conservationist and the company has always been conscientious about making choices that are good for both the business and the environment. Their website chronicles several initiatives that they have spear-headed across the years. This solution reduced the number of servers required by consolidating multiple point solutions onto a single virtualized environment reducing power and energy requirements. Dashboards that can be accessed from any device reduced the need to print out reports on paper – business intelligence is available online at a glance.