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 For more than 75 years now, Uhde High Pressure Technologies GmbH has provided top performance to its customers in the area of process development, design, and fabrication of high-pressure components and plants. Given the nature of the company’s business, its sales and service processes involve extended planning and sales cycles as well as elaborate project-management work. Uhde looked to the PiSA sales CRM solution which provides a 360-degree perspective on the customer record to further enhance the support provided to its employees for the processing of business incidents.
 | Sector: Plant construction, manufacturer of high-pressure components and plants Requirements: - Administration of customer- and operator data
- Project- and assets management
- Service- and spare parts management
- ERP-integration of SAP/R3
Realised success - No double saving of contact data
- Automatic draft of customer information through CTI coupling
- Current information about equipment installed at the customer
- Quick identification and supply of spare parts
- Optimal support for problem solving through integrated FAQ- data base
- Decreased reaction times in service
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Area of application:
- Management of customer and operator data,
- Campaign management,
- Service management
Project data:
- In operation since 2007
- PiSA sales 4D
- Data base: MS SQL server 2005
Integration:
- Interface to SAP R/3 ERP system
- Integration of MS Office applications
- MS Outlook groupware
- CTI interface
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Customer & Sector
Uhde High Pressure Technologies is a ThyssenKrupp Technologies company which has systematically and successfully asserted its position in this particular market segment since 1930. Its long years in business have put a wealth of experience and competence in the development and application of components and plants in a variety of sectors (including the chemicals and pharmaceuticals, the food, the textile, and the semiconductor industries) at its disposal. Close cooperation with universities and research institutes secures a high degree of potential in the areas of engineering, fabrication, and process-development know-how. A company with a long-standing tradition, Uhde High Pressure Technologies employs a work-force of around 200 which supplies renowned licensers and customers around the world (the share of export is over 90 percent).
Initial Situation & Challenge
One of the key focuses of the support sought from a CRM system was the management of customer relations on the one hand and relations with the operator of the plants supplied by Uhde on the other. It needed to be made possible to establish relationships between companies, contacts, projects, and machines, with activities simultaneously assignable to a machine, a company, or a contract order. Additional functions were to include, among other things, campaign management, schedule management, the transference of relevant emails into the CRM system, and the easy generation of correspondence from within the system.
Uhde was also keen to have the system accommodate critical service factors such as the availability of replacement parts over years of plant operation. It was important, therefore, to converge the management of external and internal projects with complaints management. The company wanted service-relevant details pertaining to the plants and their history to be recorded in the system to enable rapid response to requirements for replacement parts, given that one of the stated goals of Uhde High Pressure Technologies was to reduce response times for the delivery of replacement parts and on-site services. It was important before this background, therefore, to take into account that machines could be subject to relocation or reconfiguration (if, for example, a company were to change hands).
The CRM system needed to integrate the SAP R/3 ERP system used to support resource planning, since master data on accounts receivable and projects are maintained in that ERP system.
Project Course & Solution
Following a brief phase of soliciting information and proposals in early 2007, Uhde High Pressure Technologies selected to introduce the PiSA sales CRM system to its operations. Subsequent to swift implementation of the company’s initial adaptation demands, the CRM system was set up for this client on a demo computer located at the offices of PiSA sales and made available to Uhde via VPN access in the 2nd quarter of that year. This enabled comprehensive testing of the system for the purpose of optimizing it for the client.
When the system went live on the Uhde premises, it featured the newly developed PiSA sales 4D system version. To enable the company to make efficient use of the new CRM features in PiSA sales and to execute customizing without any loss in performance, the data-base system used by Uhde was migrated to the SQL server 2005.
The ERP link to the CRM system via an SAP interface secured reading access from PiSA sales to data from SAP. This allows the head data contained in proposals to be composed in PiSA sales and the contract-order data to be managed in SAP Master.
Development work on PiSA sales has for years now been driven by an integrative approach – which is why the PiSA sales version 4D features a CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) interface. Uhde is one of the first clients to use this interface as a means of securing automated access to customer information during telephone contact.
For the handling of service processes, Uhde uses the PiSA sales service module adapted to the company’s specific requirements. This module enables Uhde staff members to record service information such as complaints received directly in PiSA sales. Data on all components, machines, and plants has been fed into the system to allow information on the condition of the products installed at customer sites to be reported. The staff at Uhde can refer to the PiSA sales FAQ data base to quickly locate solutions to cases of complaint. In the event that the processing of a complaint leads to a service order, this order can then be entered into the PiSA sales sales module and processed.
The productive launch of PiSA sales 4D at Uhde will be accompanied by user training for the different modules. It is also important to note that introduction of the CRM system has met with a good level of acceptance on the part of the users. The next planned phase of this cooperation with Uhde is centered on optimizing and expanding the SAP interface.
Results Achieved
The PiSA sales contact-management function provides Uhde a simple-to-use tool for the recording and management of contacts and organizational units of all kind. Automatic checking processes, such as the duplication check, ensure there is no redundancy. One of the benefits for Uhde of this contact-management feature is the CTI link-up which enables phone calls to be initiated in PiSA sales at the press of a button and incoming calls to be immediately identified based on the phone number stored in the contact-management section of the CRM system. So Uhde employees be prepared for their phone contacts with customers and thus has a positive impact on customer relations and customer retention.
The CRM system contains details of the technical basis installed at a customer or operator site. Service objects in the CRM system are the machines set up at customer sites. If they receive a complaint or notice of a disruption, Uhde employees can now retrieve product information which helps them to quickly identify the required replacement parts. The integrated PiSA sales FAQ data base is the knowledge data base for service operations. Members of the service staff now enter notes on their experiences in dealing with service incidents into the system and can then refer to this information to help them find solutions and analyze corrective measures before applying them. Customers and operators profit from the quick response times and reduced down times.
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