Success Story: von Roll's experience with SAP & SYBIT

Initial situation

The company Eisenwerke der Handelsgesellschaft was founded in Solothurn in 1803. With the extraction and processing of pig iron, the company was already at the cutting edge in the first industrial age. Today, the company is called Von Roll and is active wherever energy is generated, used and transmitted. With the industrialization of mica, Von Roll set an important milestone for the electrification of today. The global technology leader focuses on products and systems for the generation and transmission of electrical energy and for industrial applications. One of the most important business areas is electrical insulation, which plays a central role in generators and transformers, among other things.  

Reinventing ourselves

In over 200 years of company history, the industrial company has reinvented itself time and again, as Thomas Vetterle, Head of Global Internal Sales at Von Roll, reveals: “We want to offer our customers tailor-made solutions. The buzzwords here are automation, e-mobility and renewable energies. We operate in a very price-sensitive environment, so you have to know your customers and products very well. A powerful CRM system is crucial, as it supports our sales staff in developing the value proposition and making decisions.” In 2018, the company overhauled its entire sales processes with a new CRM system in order to target new market potential.

Innovation boost

“We were missing a system that not only collects customer-related data, but also makes meaningful interactions quickly visible. Across the entire customer lifecycle, starting with the first customer contact,” recalls Thomas Vetterle. Up to this point, there were only certain detached CRM components in the company. Opportunity management, for example, was stored in a programmed Excel file. “One line stood for one opportunity. Of course, this made it difficult to maintain and analyze customer relationships,” says Vetterle. The overarching goal of the new CRM was therefore to bring transparency and structure to sales and promote internal collaboration.

Objective

Making processes more efficient is an important pillar of the industry leader's digitalization strategy. For this reason, Von Roll successfully replaced its old ERP system with the SAP ECC solution under Urs Trösch, Head of Business Application Services - the basis for further innovative steps. There was no question that the next optimization had to be made in sales. “Every company lives from the top line, and sales plays a central role in this respect. That's why we were looking for a tool for our sales department that would map all opportunities and leads and give us an overview at all times,” says Trösch.

Looking to the futur

With regard to Von Roll's transformation process, another component played a role in the decision-making process, as Vetterle adds. “Our products can be used in many different ways. We therefore need software that supports us in entering new markets quickly and agilely and replicating success stories. We could no longer cover this with our former CRM components.” The company was growing, but the processes and employees were lagging behind. “What would happen in the future was barely tangible. The new system maps the entire customer history on the one hand and generates forward-looking reports based on the sales pipeline on the other. We can better base our future decisions on this,” says Vetterle.

Managing margins

Other specific goals and improvements included faster quotation generation, the systematic mapping of price lists and the simplification and standardization of approval processes. “In the past, quotations were approved in freeflow. We had no control over this,” says Vetterle. The new CRM system was intended to bring control and transparency to the processes and limit decision-making authority, which in turn would optimize margins.