PiSA sales CRM Support for International Sales Operations

MENNEKES Elektrotechnik GmbH & Co. KG, one of the world’s leading manufac-turers of standardized industrial plugs, uses the PiSA sales CRM solution for its office-based and field operations. The CRM system supports sales operations at MENNEKES, ultimately enabling active sales operations as part of the effort to achieve strategic market penetration and access new markets.

Customer & Sector
A factory specializing in industrial plugs, MENNEKES is a family business with a 70-year history to its name. Today, MENNEKES employs a workforce of over 720 people around the world – more than two thirds of them in Germany. The range of products offered by this company has been successively expanded over the years and now includes over 11,000 different standard and special products. These products are sold in over 90 countries the world over. In addition to selling to tradespeople and wholesalers, MENNEKES is also a recognized components supplier for industry. Its pro-duction sites are located at its Kirchhundem (Germany) headquarters, in Neudorf (Germany), and in Nanjing (China), with independent national companies also operating in the U.K., France, Italy, China, the U.S.A., Brazil, and Singapore

Initial Situation & Challenge
The company’s intention was to replace the mySAP CRM system it had been using to date by transferring all the data stored in SAP to a new CRM solution. The company envisaged a system centered on a central data-management solution that would provide support for all activities connected to the company’s sales outfit and project operations and that would also feature an appropriate mobile application for MENNEKES field staff. The company expected an optimal solution to include:

• Classification and structuring options for all information
• Mapping out of all business partners, including their legal, informal, and decision-making structures
• Systemization of sales activities
• Mapping out of project operations from initial contact all the way to contract conclusion
• Effective tools for sales management, project monitoring, and evaluation and reporting to facilitate results monitoring
• An easy to use, intuitive user interface adapted to the given workflow and closely oriented on Microsoft standards
• High degree of user acceptance achieved through simple search functions, automatic duplication checks, and close groupware links
• System operability during phoning activities, with key customer information provided at a glance

Since MENNEKES has branch offices in England and Russia which it wanted connected to the CRM system, one of its central demands was that the system should be UNICODE capable and that the user interface should be a multi-language solution. Indeed, the company’s business partners in Russia use the Cyrillic alphabet for the addresses on their correspondence as well as a Russian version of Office, while at headquarters in Germany, the same data is required in western-style script.

MENNEKES uses the SAP R/3 ERP system at its headquarters; its subsidiaries use SAP Business One. Because the company also plans to eventually transfer all operations relating to the issuance of quotes to the PiSA sales system, its CRM system needed to feature an adaptable standard interface to SAP.

Project Course & Solution
The project launched for introduction of a CRM system was entitled “MENNEKES CRM”. When the specifications for this project were issued to PiSA sales GmbH, it was quickly evident that the functional scope provided by the standard version of PiSA sales was already able to cover a majority of the company’s requirements. Subsequent to choosing PiSA sales, an initial workshop was conducted at which three project phases were defined:

• Provision of the CRM “business” module for office-based operations at the company’s headquarters and subsequently the successive in-troduction thereof to field operations.
• In a next phase, the branch offices in England and Russia will be connected to the CRM system.
• The final phase will see transference of all operations relating to the issuance of quotes to PiSA sales and the installation of an SAP inter-face.

In the first phase of this project, the project staff at PiSA sales expanded the contact-management module to include features such as the company attributes requested by MENNEKES. They modified the project-management module in the PiSA sales standard version and adapted reports to the specific requirements set out by MENNEKES. For the most part, it was possible to apply the PiSA sales standard version for the mapping out of corporate and business structures as well as other critical contact relationships.

For the integration of customized solutions into the existing IT environ-ment at MENNEKES, PiSA sales was installed on a Citrix terminal server – a scenario which PiSA sales had successfully implemented for other cus-tomers in the past.

Subsequent to providing training for administrators and key users, work began on transferring more than 100,000 data records from the old mySAP CRM system. This data migration was conducted in a particularly efficient manner using the PiSA sales CSV import function which allowed all the contact data to be transferred to PiSA sales much faster than would have been possible using the old system.

MENNEKES uses the mobile version of the CRM solution to connect its field staff to the system. PiSA sales mobile allows the field staff to work independent of the central system and of all network connections, while nonetheless tapping in to full system functionality. Synchronization of the data with the enterprise system can be performed either online or offline through the issuance of a synchronization file.

The productive launch of the CRM system in the functional version of the first project phase was accompanied by regular workshops and successfully implemented in September 2007. Further cooperation on this project will see integration of the branch offices in England and Russia. PiSA sales is well prepared for this move, given that features such as the multi-language user interface, multi-language user-data maintenance, and international address management are already contained in the standard-version application. That standard version has been supplemented by a “national language window” for the Russian branch office. This window allows users to enter and update addresses using the Cyrillic alphabet, which addresses are then automatically used in correspondence.

Results Achieved
Results Achieved Although not all planned project phases have yet been executed, MENNEKES is very happy with its choice of a CRM solution. Even at the time of introduction of the contact-management module it was clear that PiSA sales, with its central data maintenance and high degree of user acceptance, provided better support for the core processes inherent in the company’s sales operations than the old system had. The CRM system now allows this customer’s employees to better define the complex corporate structures of their business partners. Thanks to the CTI interface, when a customer calls, the CRM data on that customer is immediately retrieved by the system. In project operations, which make up 20 to 30 % of sales activities at MENNEKES, employees use a clearly structured project file which provides easy access to pertinent (i.e. allocated) information. This project file contains a complete project history as well as all technical and administrative information, for example on revenue, customer budget, project priority, and prices.

Field staff likewise profit from this flexible CRM software – a software adapted to the requirements arising out of collaborations with national companies located around the world. Thus, the system provides the best possible prerequisites for successful sales operations on an international platform.