Selligent powers up Hansen Transmissions
Hansen Transmissions is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of gears and drives. For the past few years, the company has also played a key role in wind turbine equipment. It is supported by a worldwide network of subsidiaries and sales and service centres. In view of the growing globalisation of its business, Hansen Transmissions realised it needed to be able to create a very precise blueprint of its international customer base so as to work in a more structured, efficient way.
Gerrit De WildeMarketing Manager
“Selligent was the only solution that matched our modus operandi in terms of project management. And Selligent was the only supplier to have real experience with integrating their solution with the Baan ERP. In fact, developing the Selligent-Baan interface was faster than planned.”
“With Selligent, we are much more efficient and we can focus more on our customers. When all’s said and done, that’s the objective of a project like ours.”
Although wind power represents some 80% of Hansen Transmissions’ turnover, most of its customers are to be found in its “industry” division. “There are not too many wind turbine manufacturers in the world,” Gerrit De Wilde, Hansen Transmissions Marketing Manager, points out. “We have five customers who cover around 75% of the market. But when it comes to industrial drives, we have a good thousand customers. And that makes the situation quite different. Until now, each sales team had its own list of customers, with whom it communicated in total independence. There was no centralised system. But as our business continues to go global, we have become increasingly aware of the need for a complete overview of our customer base. Without that we were in danger of finding ourselves in the rather delicate situation where our international customers could ask for proposals from several of our subsidiaries and play one off against the other.”
Click on the headings below to read the full article
Full overview
Hansen Transmissions was also looking for a solution that could give them instantaneous access to all information concerning the customer. “We wanted to know what their issues were and what we had already done for them, plus a complete history file on the customer relationship so that our teams could prepare themselves fully when making a customer visit,” De Wilde explains. “We also wanted to understand our relative importance to a given customer, the number of bids made to them and the resulting projects. Plus, we were curious to know which industry sectors were the most profitable. In short, we wanted to be in a position to collect all this information automatically and in a structured format and make it available to everyone who needed it.” Some of the Hansen Transmissions sales facilities were already using a CRM solution, for example those in Scandinavia, South Africa and the United States. But the group was aware that it needed to centralise all its data. As De Wilde puts it, “if you don‘t have total visibility, you keep bumping into the furniture. That’s no way to run a business.” That is why a project to correct the situation started up at the beginning of 2006
Starting with a detailed analysis
However, Hansen Transmissions did not go looking for a tool at once. As De Wilde explains, “we first defined the scope of the project. Then we consulted our sales people at head office and in our international network. We looked at the kind of information we needed to answer all our questions, as well as listing the in-house IT skills and IT needs. The result was a 100-page manual, which gave birth to a document that was put together jointly with the IT, Sales and Marketing teams and an outside consultant. We also visited our subsidiaries to see how their CRM systems worked and we talked to other companies, who explained how they had solved the problem. Finally, we approached a few suppliers. Each of them gave us a demonstration, after which we filled out a completely objective assessment matrix for each solution. The question of integration with our ERP system, Baan, was also raised. Of the three short-listed suppliers, Selligent eventually came out on top.” De Wilde insists that Selligent’s Belgian roots had nothing to do with their decision. “As it happens, the different possibilities the three candidates offered were quite similar. But Selligent proposed a generic solution that was backed up by experience. We also much appreciated the very objective spirit of the visits Selligent organised with some of its existing customers, where negative as well as positive aspects were touched upon. In addition, it was the only solution that matched our modus operandi in terms of project management. And Selligent was the only supplier to have real experience with integrating their solution with the Baan ERP. In fact, developing the Selligent-Baan interface was faster than planned.”
In-depth testing
In February 2006, Hansen Transmissions launched a pilot project that lasted four months. “Even though we didn’t intend to use the full functionality of Selligent in the short term,” notes De Wilde, “our pilot group, made up of 10 or so people from across the Benelux, tested the whole application in depth. During the pilot phase, we simulated all the problems that are likely to arise anywhere in the world. The actual roll-out started in the summer of 2006 and is still on-going at a rate of one country per month on average. By the end of our financial year in March 2008, the whole organisation should be up and running. But, of course, the solution will continue to evolve.”
The importance of communications
Hansen Transmissions only called in outside consultants for initial implementation. Its own workforce handled the rest of the project. “The biggest obstacle was getting everyone to adopt the system,” De Wilde admits. “Especially the sales force. We had to show them clearly and very precisely what we planned to do and assure them that the aim of the application was not to monitor them but, on the contrary, to make their lives easier. We ran demonstrations and asked them to make constructive comments. We knew we would meet with resistance from some of them. That’s why we focused so much attention on the pilot project and on the launch event. Together, we reviewed a lot of practical concerns. Training was also a key element. We even designed a training programme tailored to our users.” The solution implemented responds fully to Gerrit De Wilde’s expectations. For him, the main advantage is that it gives a complete overview of all the regions. “Today, all sales and pre-sales activity goes through Selligent, including follow-up of current customers, with links to the quotations, opportunities, etc. Now we can collect all information in a consistent, structured way. The information is then used in sales meetings, to prepare customer contacts, or even to ensure follow-up when an account manager is absent. We can also automatically get statistics on our turnover, orders, deliveries and more with no extra effort. And the integration with Outlook and Exchange avoids having to re-input the data. And to cap it all, we can produce business reports directly via CrystalReports.”
Enhanced efficiency
For De Wilde, security is another strong point of the solution. It is standard in Selligent, in contrast to other products where configuring security is much more complex. On the other hand, he has more trouble being specific about ROI. “It’s not really measurable,” he says. “That said, we have clearly observed that our teams are more efficient. Sales management is very enthusiastic, so is general management, which has consistently given its full support to the project. They were quick to realise that Selligent would enable Hansen Transmissions to focus on its customers. When all’s said and done, that is the objective of a project like ours.” Right now, Selligent is only being used in the “industry” division. But later in the year, De Wilde wants to assess the possibility of integrating the services department. “And why not include the wind turbine business line in the project at a later date? It’s true that their needs are quite different, but now that we have full command of the process, adapting the solution to them should not be a problem,” he concludes.
