Success Story: Zehnder Group's experience with SAP Sales Cloud

The challenge

The existing system architecture could only meet the requirements of the market to a limited extent. The expectations of customers and partners for digitalized solutions have risen immensely in recent years. At the same time, the Zehnder Group's system landscape in the sales area was not uniform. The company has grown considerably in recent decades. The Zehnder Group develops and manufactures its products in 16 of its own plants, sales are made in more than 70 countries and the business areas have expanded. Company-wide transparency across all customer interactions worldwide was no longer a given.

In order to maintain an overview of customers, contacts, offers and price approvals in the increasingly global sales structure, it was necessary to create a globally standardized database based on a modern platform. A key step on the road to customer experience was therefore the introduction of a global customer management system based on standards and harmonized processes in sales.

The project

• Replacing the legacy system: With the introduction of the SAP Sales Cloud for around 600 users, all relevant customer information was bundled centrally at the beginning, ensuring transparency and control across the entire sales process.

• Customer-specific developments, for example the implementation of a complex customer classification system

• Integration of the Zehnder website into the SAP Sales Cloud for the showroom finder: end customers can use the website to find out which Zehnder products are on display in the showroom of which dealer or installer.

• Integration of the “Building Object Add-On”: The SYBIT solution “Building Object Add-On” enables the recording of all information on building objects that is important for processing by Key Account Management. This is a decisive factor, especially for sales in the construction industry. You can track the construction object or building throughout its lifecycle and thus always see the current project status and the respective contact persons.

• ERP integration: Deep integration of the Sales Cloud into the SAP ERP system for exchanging customer master data. Quotations and the ERP document flow are thus displayed in the Sales Cloud.

• Customer-specific interfaces, for example in the quotation configuration tool for transferring the opportunity and displaying the quotation printouts.

The result

• One face to the customer: cross-country and cross-segment sales process
• Mobile access to the system
• Support for sales in multiple sales channels
• Enabling key account management
• Improved sales funnel monitoring and sales forecasting
• Improved collaboration and integration between sales and marketing
• Improved day-to-day sales and service business resulting in acceptance of the new CRM in the sales and service teams
• 360° view of the customer: Improved tracking from marketing to sales via the dealer or installer
• Full transparency for Zehnder and quickly visible results thanks to the agile SYBIT project methodology

Outlook

Zehnder will also be relying on solutions from the SAP C/4 HANA suite and SYBIT as a partner in the service and e-commerce area in future. An implementation project for a B2B web store based on the SAP Commerce Cloud was launched in parallel with the SAP Sales Cloud. There are also plans to introduce SAP Field Service Management in the branches in Switzerland and Germany.