P2P

The CRM integration

Ocimum Biosolutions had deployed Salesforce’s CRM solution for integrating the processes of all its acquired companies, managing sales and marketing, enabling interface with the existing Lab Information Management System (LIMS) and its website. By Vinita Gupta

Ocimum Biosolutions is a global life sciences research and development enabling company. It is headquartered in Hyderabad, India, with operations in the US and Netherlands, and sales offices and distributors throughout the world. The company needed real-time information so that flawless operations across the world could continue. It used Salesforce tools and the AppExchange marketplace to get real-time designs.

The AppExchange is an iTunes or eBay for business applications—where customers can go to find on-demand applications from a number of partners, including companies like Business Objects. Till date there are more than 800 applications available on the AppExchange, and customers have installed more than 40,000 applications from it.

Ocimum Biosolutions has a global business model that allows the company to service customers locally while leveraging global capabilities. Before implementing salesforce.com, Ocimum was internally using Datatracker, a client server application based on Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle database. Separate applications were being used for managing sales, marketing, support and product-management processes.

“We wanted a one-click mechanism to have true insights about our top customers—who ordered and when, details about the shipment, delivery, invoice, payment, and customer’s feedback, etc.—basically a true CRM system. What we instead had was tons of data coming from disparate applications, which we then had to manually shift through to make sense,” said Anuradha Acharya, CEO of Ocimum Biosolutions.

Another challenge at Ocimum was employee mobility, the field staff had to constantly update the senior management. They had to come back to the office to enter data or log calls or mail back and forth. This lethargic process prevented them from accessing and updating vital information in a timely manner.

Standardization was also a major issue. Ocimum was acquiring companies across the world and integrating them has been a challenge. For its acquisitions in Germany, Netherlands and the US, located geographically away from the parent company, Ocimum needed a solution which could help quickly implement a standard business process across all locations.

Acharya mentioned, “It was critical to quickly integrate acquired companies into Ocimum’s style of working so that we could efficiently and effectively leverage the new offerings worldwide. Beyond the benefits of automated sales and support functions, the company wanted a common CRM platform that could address operational needs, unify processes worldwide and integrate them.”

Implementation process

Working towards the objective of 360-degree customer management, Ocimum began by using the Salesforce Team Edition, later updated to Professional Edition and finally after the acquisition of Gene Logic in December 2007, it migrated to Enterprise Edition for 50 users for its market leadership, flexibility, and feature functionality. Implementation began in end of January, 2008 and was completed by March, 2008. Business analysts of Lister Technologies helped in the data migration.

The entire sales, marketing and support processes were included. All sales processes starting from the lead generation, to customer support and services are administered by Salesforce.

Ocimum needed real-time information so that flawless operations across the world could continue. It used Salesforce tools and the AppExchange marketplace to get real-time designs. “One of the key reasons we preferred Salesforce was because of AppExchange, the world’s first Web marketplace for on-demand applications. These applications deliver the benefits of dependability, reliability, and ease of use,” said Acharya. Apps are installed into Ocimum’s salesforce.com environment and these deliver added functionalities. Ocimum has added a lot of AppExchange applications and provided the interface with the website along with the interface with other existing systems.

All sales people working for the various acquired companies are integrated together through the Salesforce solution. It is widely accepted everywhere and there are no operating system issues. It does not need IT infrastructure and can be used almost immediately. Ocimum had reaped the benefits of Salesforce such as accessibility and quick and easy deployment, customization, and integration.

The investment in the initiative was minimal—the cost of licenses for using Salesforce, and the cost of migrating existing data into Salesforce. Ocimum bought annual Enterprise Edition licenses for its sales and marketing personnel. “For the migration, Ocimum used the help of Lister Technologies, this would typically have been much higher for any other application, but since Salesforce had such great online help and utilities like the Dataloader, that internal Ocimum resources managed most of the migration themselves,” revealed Acharya.

She further said that there have been no major challenges faced. The customer support website offers a variety of support services like online issue tracking which is facilitated by Salesforce. As it is Web enabled, the communication and updating can be done from anywhere, anytime.

Increased productivity

Ocimum Biosolutions is proud to offer a full range of integrated support services to its customers. Planning process has improved drastically post salesforce.com. Processes are automated, monitored, critical paths are observed and corrective actions are taken immediately. The hands-on salesforce.com experience has helped Ocimum to develop an in-depth understanding of the CRM system to increase productivity and find new revenue opportunities for the company.

“Beyond the benefits of automated sales and marketing functions, we desired a common CRM platform that would strengthen our superb customer relationship, which Ocimum believes to be its core strength,” asserted Acharya.

She further mentioned that Salesforce has perfectly tailored the CRM to their requirements and their productivity has gone up by 10%-15%. AppExchange fills operational holes with solutions that resonate across our entire organization. It gives Ocimum a single place to find a variety of applications to meet their business needs. As real-time, accurate information is available and can be accessed anytime; the answers to critical business questions are available quickly without sifting through reams of data. With salesforce.com’s customizable analytics, Ocimum can get real-time answers and business.

Thus Salesforce CRM Enterprise Edition allows Ocimum Biosolutions to easily simplify and standardize their most complex customer operations through a single, online solution that can be rapidly deployed across multiple departments and divisions.

vinita.gupta@expressindia.com