Budenheim, a provider of products and services for specialty chemicals, is a flagship of German medium-sized businesses. The “Hidden Champion”, headquartered in Budenheim of the same name, is active in ten locations, sells its products and services in over 100 countries and has also grown through acquisitions – which has made the company-wide overview of data and processes increasingly complex due to a heterogeneous system landscape. “The first step for us was to bring transparency to all sales and marketing processes,” reports Markus Garber, Head of Information Technology. “We took a close look at Salesforce back then and came to the conclusion that it was exactly the platform that could develop with Budenheim.” Because, as the IT boss observed, as soon as change has been initiated, it accelerates during the process process more and more. A cloud-based platform helps in its design: it relieves the company’s IT department of all operating and maintenance work and enables concentration on the essential transformation tasks.
Avoid media disruptions
Garber explains what data transparency is all about: “If I want to use data to become more efficient and – especially in view of the competitive situation – more customer-oriented, I have to avoid media disruptions. For example, sales not only needs customer information, but also all product details, at exactly the right time in the sales process and not just at the end of the quarter. Naturally, this data is distributed across a wide variety of systems and databases – which is why we will also use Mulesoft as an integration technology in the future in order to make this information available to the respective employees exactly when and where they need it at the moment of their work.
Steep learning curve
Unlike many other companies, Budenheim decided to start as a pilot with exactly one of its application areas. The chemical specialist fully planned and implemented this area (lead to cash). In another 18 months of live operation, he finally deepened the processes and rolled them out across his entire company. Especially in comparison with other integration projects for IT software solutions, which could take over a year or more after the acquisition of a company, for example, the Salesforce introduction went “pretty quickly,” says Garber.
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On the platform, the user has consistently designed all customer-related tasks from the entire innovation area to the website, marketing and sales to customer service. “This includes customer interaction from the question of which products customers and the market expect, how they are marketed and at what prices they are sold, through the actual sales process from the first contact to invoicing as well as the areas of ‘service’ and ‘reorders’.” , Garber describes the process, which is transparent in every phase. By standardizing processes and using a common data platform, global processes can now be better controlled.
Budenheim
Industry: Specialty chemicals
Head office: Budenheim
Employees: over 1,250
Sales volume: three-digit million euro range
Image source: Budenheim
2024-02-27 08:16:01
#Transparent #process #phase
