Selligent rollout at MAN Roland Belgium exemplary for whole group
Werner MoriauxCEO
“Not only will Selligent help MAN Roland work more efficiently; it will also improve the company’s image and reputation.”
“Selligent is extremely easy to set up and customise. It allows us to react instantly as soon as our business needs change.”
“Selligent is extremely easy to set up and customise. It allows us to react instantly as soon as our business needs change.”
“Speed is probably where we see the biggest return on investment. We are not just moving much faster, we also have more pointers.”
MAN Roland Belgium is a division of MAN Roland Druckmaschinen AG, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of printing systems. This ISO 9001-certified company is based in Wemmel, near Brussels, and its 130+ staff generated some € 47 million in turnover last year. It runs three departments: Sheet-fed Presses, Web-fed Presses, and Trade and Services (which sells and supports Man Roland and other products and consumables). Paul Willems, MAN Roland Belgium’s Prepress and Pressroom Sales Director, says, “We decided to set up a CRM solution seven years ago. Before that, we did all our reporting on paper. That was really inefficient; we had salesmen and technicians dealing with the same customers without knowing what the others were doing. We realised it was time to store all that information in a central database, and to make it available to everyone who needed it. So we looked around the CRM market, ended up with a handful of vendors and, after careful consideration, went for Selligent.”
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More flexible solution needed
MAN Roland Belgium was already using SAP for its administrative work (as indeed was the rest of the group). So using SAP for CRM as well seemed natural. In Moriaux’s words, “We actually did find that we could run CRM applications on our SAP system, but Selligent’s solution was much more user-friendly, easier to implement, and more flexible. SAP is great for administrative and financial work. But we wanted a more flexible tool for our sales people.” Selligent was a small player at that time, but that did not seem to bother Moriaux. “You know, it’s not a question of whether a vendor is big or small. What matters is the quality of his products and, above all, how skilled and how committed the people who help us implement them are. And our relationship with Selligent has been nothing short of outstanding from day one!” The new system’s rollout phase went very smoothly. MAN Roland started a pilot phase with just one salesperson, to ascertain whether this solution was as user-friendly as it seemed. Just to be sure, they chose one of their older (and less computer-savvy) salespeople for that phase. And it still worked. Paul Willems explains, “Only four weeks on, he was really excited about the system. He saw the advantage of having all the information that everyone had ever entered into the system at his fingertips. A consumables sales rep, for instance, could instantly see if his machine sales rep colleague had been to see a customer, and follow up accordingly.”
From pen and paper...
Willems readily admits that he was reluctant about setting up this system at first. Selligent’s CRM solution was not just a new reporting tool; it was a massive transition from the pen-and-paper days to the notebook age. But, he later found, “To tell you the truth, we never had any internal resistance to the system at all. It was uncomplicated and easy to use. People saw everything it could do for them straight away. And every salesperson got a notebook and a PDA, which also helped, of course!” In practice, salespeople now have access to customer lists that they can analyse using variable queries. The same database is also used to analyse visit frequency and market coverage, for marketing to target groups and for campaign follow-up. The sales cycle, which is the same for every sales project, includes what they call a “salesperson enquiry profile.” This allows management to check what individual salespeople have in the pipeline, to prevent them from “running dry.” Another one of this CRM system’s much-appreciated features is that the input from sales visits and subsequent reports is often used to draw up sales forecasts and forecast breakdowns by supplier, simply because it has become such a reliable tool for them. What CRM System Administrator Bart De Gelas likes best is the system’s flexibility. “It is extremely easy to set up and customise. It allows us to react instantly as soon as our business needs change. And we can see that everyone is using it intensively on a daily basis for reporting, project follow-up and the like. It has really been a quantum leap for speed and efficiency throughout the company.” Willems agrees: “Speed is probably where we see the biggest return on investment. We are not just moving much faster, we also have more pointers. Now we can pinpoint exactly where an offer went wrong (whether it was the approach, the price, the demo or whatever). In the past, there was no way of finding out; we knew that we had won or lost a case, but we were in the dark when it came to why we had won it or lost it.”
Want CRM? Go to Belgium
Moriaux also sees proof of ROI in another realm: “You know, when we started using Selligent, we were sort of blazing new trails. The group didn’t exactly welcome it with open arms; everyone was really keen on SAP, so we faced a fair amount of criticism and remarks. But today, our Dutch, Swiss, British and Spanish colleagues have set up Selligent as well. Our French brothers and sisters are digging their heels into it, and the Italians are about to come on board. So, in a nutshell, all of MAN Roland Western Europe is using Selligent now, Korea will follow suit in the near future, and the Scandinavian branches have shown a lot of interest – even our factories in Augsburg and Offenbach have been asking a lot about it. I can’t think of any better example of how well Selligent has worked at MAN Roland!” De Gelas adds, “It has now even become a worldwide directive for the MAN Roland Group: if you have any CRM plans, go and look at the Selligent solution in our Belgian operation first. That is why we have run a huge amount of demonstrations for other countries over the past few years.”
Next phase: CRM-enable the service
Those high satisfaction levels are what prompted MAN Roland Belgium to take things a step further, stretching CRM into its services business. In Moriaux’s words, “Right now, we are using Selligent’s sales and marketing modules. The service division runs one hundred percent on SAP, but we really need a more flexible commercial tool. That’s why we’re going to set up Selligent here too in the second half of this year. The reason is obvious: we want to operate more professionally, by pooling all the information our salespeople and technicians collect into one single repository. That way, we will always be able to deal with customers in the same, structured, way, meaning: what their problem is, what we have to do about it, who’s going to do it, when they will do it, have they done it, do we need to follow up, and so on.” Moriaux is persuaded that this will do more than help MAN Roland to work more efficiently; it will also improve the company’s image and reputation, and provide a much more solid basis for administration, invoicing, and time registration. In his words, “Of course, it will bring enormous benefits for the technicians themselves, too. Before heading off to visit a customer, they will be able to go to the system and find out what has happened with a particular machine, whether there have been similar problems in the past, who’s been out to see the customer before, and so on. On the customer’s premises, technicians can use their laptops or PDAs to check up on any background information they might need, and create accurate visit reports, including the time they spent, equipment they used, problem logging, and so on – instantly. That way, the financial department will also be able to generate an invoice the very same day. The people at Credit Control will have up-to-date reports from technicians so, before chasing up overdue bills, they can see whether customers were happy with the technician’s work or whether there are any particular reasons why they have not paid their bill yet.”
And onto the Web
Apart from CRM-enabling its technicians, MAN Roland Belgium is also busy migrating to a Web environment. De Gelas explains, “We obviously need to be prepared for new challenges; that’s why we’re considering an e-commerce solution. We already know that as soon as we migrate to Selligent for Web, we will be able to use several other e-solutions from Selligent. And that’s an exciting prospect.” As far as support and cooperation with Selligent are concerned, CEO Werner Moriaux would like to keep things exactly as they are. “If we can work together on our new projects the way we used to, and enjoy the same support, we will be perfectly happy. We have no complaints whatsoever, we know that there is always someone there whenever the need arises, and that is a very reassuring feeling.”
