Food Manufacturing Company Implements Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Logan Consulting Leads CRM Implementation of a Food Manufacturers Company

The Client

Our client is a collection of food manufacturers owned by the Heinz Corporation, famous around the world for their brand of ketchup. They include companies who manufacture desserts, kabobs, and soups in three separate locations within the United States. When these separate manufacturers were purchased by Heinz and assembled under one umbrella, the goal was to introduce a sales force application which would operate on a single, unified database to be used by all sales and customer service personnel across the three companies.

A great deal of the product is sold through large, national food brokers. Therefore, it was essential to identify not only which brokers were involved in sales day to day, but also to understand order volumes and specific needs of these brokers. In addition, the ability to manage pipeline data across the three businesses was critical.

The Opportunity

Each of these manufacturers was using outdated, home-grown applications that in no way spoke to each other. In addition, many of the salespeople were actively using some form of a CRM application of their choice. The ability to have a single, unified view of the sales pipeline for all salespeople across the business could not be done. In addition, the sales force was seeking one single application to work from day to day, as their older, disparate applications meant repetitive data entry and consumed valuable sales time.

A priority in a new application was the ability to have records created within CRM populate onto the user’s Outlook experience. End users did not want to enter information within Outlook, only to have to re-enter those same details within a separate CRM application. The desire was to enter the information once and in doing so provide visibility to other people within the business.

Another goal was the ability to easily access data via pre-defined searches in order to gain access to information quickly and efficiently. Both salespeople as well as their managers had grown tired of gathering information from individuals within the business and then spending hours combining that information into one common format.

Finally, salespeople needed the ability to work offline as most of the salespeople traveled on a regular basis and were not always connected to the company network.

The Solution

Our client’s management team selected Microsoft Dynamics CRM to fulfill their needs and selected Logan Consulting to lead the implementation. The Outlook version of Microsoft CRM provided the ability to work within a single interface.

Logan Consulting was able to customize the CRM application to meet the unique needs of the business. Account, Contact, and Opportunity records were modified in order to meet the specific needs of the collection of food manufacturers.

Many customized views were created within Microsoft CRM to provide visibility into the day to day activities of salespeople as well as to produce a highly detailed sales pipeline report that could be run by salesperson, product line, sales team, expected close date, and more.

The Result

  • By deploying Microsoft CRM, our client gained a host of benefits including:
  • Providing a consistent and standardized opportunity record , thus providing uniform information regarding potential sales
  • Improved reporting by providing a dynamic pipeline report which could be run at the salesperson, team, or organization level
  • Improved critical customer information by allowing the ability to see the relationships between the company and the distributors sold to Improved data integrity and uniformity by having a single, unified account database across all three businesses
  • Created better customer sales information by adding the ability to create parent-child relationships with accounts to analyze total purchases across a customer’s entire organization
  • Reduced wasted time and effort by capitalizing on integration to Microsoft Outlook, thus allowing contacts, tasks, and appointments to be entered once and made visible in both Outlook as well as Microsoft CRM
  • Improved the efficiency and effectiveness of the sales team by allowing both online and offline access to information
  • Reduced redundant efforts by the sales team by allowing them to send email messages and relate them to records in Microsoft CRM such as accounts, contacts or opportunities.